Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry | Hacker News Reader

Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

eff.org

166 pointsBreadmaker96 comments

I cannot understand how people accept ads. It triggers me so much when I open an article and between every paragraph is an ad and a video fixed to the top/bottom following you as you scroll and they change once the video ends. YT is crazy with their multiple ads unskippable sometimes 30 mins long wtf.

Thank you UBO

regarding tracking: I guess I don't care about that since I get these updates from Google about where I've been in the year with dots on a US map.

> between every paragraph is an ad and a video fixed to the top/bottom following you as you scroll and they change once the video ends

And of course Chrome, Firefox, and Safari don't provide a reliable way to stop those obnoxious auto-playing videos.

Part of that comes down to the ad industry engineering their way around user video playback controls. I’ve heard of them even doing things like displaying video ads as sequences of static image files swapped out with JS.

This also brings the fastest computers to their knees because it bypasses hardware acceleration.

Yes, it was the technique but many years ago, like 2015.

This. It's not that the Firefox is ignoring your video auto-play settings, it's that it isn't video, courtesy of the industry's greed and lack of any respect for people.

I want to block anything that looks like autoplaying video.

I somehow managed to do it completely and flawlessly in Firefox after a day of effort and sheer hate for the fact that checking the box to keep videos from autoplaying didn't keep any videos from autoplaying. I've now forgotten how I did it and I'm afraid to change any config settings. I think I recall some diffing utility for firefox settings that I could hopefully use to figure out what I did.

It burns me up that the fact that I blocked autoplay reliably means that Firefox could do it, they just don't want to.

edit: I might have gotten the settings from a blog, but I have a strong feeling they might have been from combing the firefox bugtracker.

Firefox is supposed to block autoplay of videos that have audio unless the user has clicked to play a video on the same page. There is definitely an arms race for ads that find holes in the autoplay heuristics.

You might try setting the about:config settings “media.autoplay.default” to 5 and/or “media.autoplay.blocking_policy” to 2:

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/e24277e20c492b4a78...

If you think there is a Firefox bug, you can file a bug report and link it to this autoplay bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1376321

> Firefox is supposed to block autoplay of videos that have audio.

I want a reliable way to block autoplay of all videos, whether or not they have audio.

Readable view in Firefox is pretty reliable and builtin.

I wish it worked on more sites.

Because they have never experienced anything better or been very slowly gotten used to it (5 second ad every 10th video, then every 9th and to whatever we have right now). That's pretty much it. That's also the reason why us, people who don't see that many ads, can't go through a single ad. Because we haven't gotten used to the other side.

> I cannot understand how people accept ads.

Advertisements have been around for thousands of years. The concept predates industry, democracy, and (depending on who you ask) capitalism itself.

Widespread and significant use of advertising dates to the latter half of the 19th century, most especially as a principle revenue basis for periodical publications.

There's an excellent, short, readable, and information-dense source on this, by Hamilton Holt (a magazine publisher himself) published in 1909, describing roughly the prior half-century's remarkable development of an advertising-funded publishing industry, and the absolutely corrosive effects visible even then, Commercialism and Journalism. Quoted in the first pages an observation from the 1880s, already nearly three decades prior:

There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

<https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...>

Holt doesn't name his source, I've since learnt it was John Swinton, himself a journalist (chief editorial writer of the New York Times in the 1860s):

<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Swinton>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Swinton_(journalist)>

In the past, an advertisement would be more like something printed in a newspaper or magazine next to the articles.

Nowadays, it is more like the people running the airport security line, who record down their observations.

Yes, but now the ads watch us.

I cannot understand why most of "ads" are even legal. It has to be the case of whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

The violations that the average human has been unknowingly a victim of, courtesy of the advertising industry, are in my estimation so insurmountably numerous that I automatically consider someone working in advertising ontologically evil. More so than, say, someone working on face recognition at Lockheed Martin.

"You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather."

"It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness."

You remind me of the bill hicks bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY

Alas, all he wanted was to rid the world of all these fevered egos, tainting our collective unconscious and making us pay a higher psychic price than we imagine.

Frankly, advertising as a business sounds evil on the face of it. It's fundamentally a way to turn money into ideas in people's heads. The fact that in order to accomplish this dubious task some of the world's best-paid professionals are pioneering privacy violations and psychological manipulation tactics only adds to the shit pile.

To be clear: creating media for the purposes of spreading an idea is not inherently bad. What's bad is having an industry built around planting ideas in human minds, regardless of the validity or broad utility of those ideas.

And to head off "but then how will people learn about <PRODUCT>?" People buy marketing material, coupon books, attend conferences for the things they care about, and if necessary research options when they need something. A market does not need the feature of shoving information about available products and services in everyone's face to function well. And if you're someone who likes seeing ads, great, open up the yellow pages or digital equivalent and look at all the ads you want. How will ad-supported services like mass social-media sites fund themselves? Not my problem, maybe they don't and they shit down. What a shame.

If you put it that way software as a business sounds evil on the face of it (and probably mostly is) - I guess it’s so intertwined because most software companies are just advertising companies with extra steps.

But at least Ads i can avoid - the fucking software eating everything I can’t avoid unless I become a hermit.

This extends to the mainstream social networks. Bytedance, Meta, X. Google is barely better, since they're an ad company, working for them is working for the ad industry. I'm sure many a reader here working at the named places will scream "But I'm only working on the Meta Quest/Gmail/something I consider unharmful!". Now think about how you feel about that argument when someone working for the defense industry claims the same. Those don't claim it as often though; IME, unlike those at the above companies, people in defense tech are more likely to be honest, open and aware of the ethical trade-off involved.

This is nonsense. We all have no choice but to patron many businesses in our lives. We're adults and we understand the information coming from the first party about how great it is is biased. It is still helpful to hear certain facts. Like, a new pizza place happens to exist in town now. The commercial isn't hypnotizing me into going there, I have free will and can form an opinion with information from different sources, weighting them appropriately.

Commercials are often annoying, sure. I like cable with a DVR because I can skip 100% of commercials and the stream can't make them unskippable. But there's no sense in overreacting to the general concept of advertising.

When I go on a date and a woman tells me about herself I understand she may be emphasizing the good and downplaying the bad. It does not make her evil. It's normal for anyone to do.

I can only speak for myself, but... It's not the concept of advertising I'm against. It's the data collection that could easily be used for nefarious purposes. We can look at history in the last 100 years to find many examples how data like this can be abused. And for those of us in the US, the politics are getting pretty spicy, so the threat is worth taking seriously.

I believe you are falling prey to ambiguity purposefully crafted to hide what's really going on. "advertising" is sort of like "privacy" mentioned in a privacy policy (meaning everything but)

It is more like you go on your date, but the woman you go on a date with has no interest in you whatsoever. But she carefully documents your interests, your behavioral habits and shortcomings, along with information about your education, race, religion, age and salary. Then this person sells this to people who you don't want to date, but want to meet and exploit you.

This is why you get ads for timeshares, water filters or casinos that you don't want - but these people have money to put an ad in front of you.

When is the last time you've seen an ad and been excited about it?

Essentially nobody is against a local pizza shop putting up a flyer. But most (almost all) ads are by companies like Coca-Cola, who simply want to beat you into submission to associate whatever it they want with their product.

Beach Summer Fun == Coca-Cola.

Childhood Wonder == Disney Resorts.

etc. etc.

You can form an opinion based on facts, but almost all advertising is not about presenting you facts to consider. Its about forming an impression for you.

To me the most sad part is that it's all worthless. If Pepsi does better than Coke, I DONT CARE. And yet, tens of thousands of our fellow citizens toil away hours every day to try to convince us one way or another. And in the process make the world uglier and more hostile.

> To me the most sad part is that it's all worthless. If Pepsi does better than Coke, I DONT CARE. And yet, tens of thousands of our fellow citizens toil away hours every day to try to convince us one way or another. And in the process make the world uglier and more hostile.

To summarize this: advertising is a zero sum game. (In the few instances where it isn't, it's also a good thing).

I disagree, since the feelings it can cause are still real. If making people excited through marketing makes them more motivated to work (increasing their "utility" in dry econ terms), that's the same kind of value creation as any physical product. I'd rather summarize the ill effects as "Nobody is immune to propaganda."

I also disagree, but for the opposite reason :p (though imo. it was an excellent summary of a rambly diatribe)

Advertising does not make people excited, or happy, in general. The type that does (movie trailers, mostly) can stay.

In general, advertising makes people unhappy.

Think of the teenagers who see photoshoped, paper-thin fashion models and wish they were them. And then spend their money fruitlessly trying to be something that is impossible.

Think of the people convinced by advertising to invest in scams, or to gamble their money away.

This one gets me personally - I can't see a twix ad without wanting to buy a twix. And yet the world would be better if I didn't! They aren't healthy and I was perfectly happy before I saw the ad and then realized I needed one.

And in general they are UGLY. They demand your attention. There's a reason most people here use uBlock.

For me at least - it feels like I am now living in a Black Mirror episode and eventually personalized ads are going to be playing inside bathroom stalls when you are taking a dump.

90% of people are probably on their phones consuming adverts while taking a dump. We’re already there.

Even if you were to outlaw the selling of all this sort of data, you're not preventing major players like Google and Microsoft from collecting that data and using it internally. Not sure what the solution is here, but I think most people would like stronger privacy protections.

Preventing the ad bidding data leakage channel from Google to everyone else in the world would be a start at least.

Doesn't googletagmanager deliver data as an exchange for putting javascript all over your site? sort of like surveillance stone soup...

> you're not preventing major players like Google and Microsoft from collecting that data

And every few minutes some data leaves my MBP to Apple databases hosted on Amazon cloud. I do not suspect Apple nor Amazon of anything but there are too many hands dealing with it - breach is just about 'when' not 'if'.

Which data? And how much of it would be readable by 1) Amazon and 2) Apple?

We don't know which data! It's encrypted and generated by closed source software on a closed hardware platform.

I’m not sure if that future would be worse if laws were badly implemented.

Big players with a moat get to pull the ladder up and enjoy an obscene data advantage nobody else can even get a start on.(AI has a similar problem)

I think any right to privacy has to include non essential internal use with some very careful wording on what “essential” means.

I've been experimenting with behavioral tracking on a bunch of platforms for a while now, but it's very difficult research - if you come across something interesting, replication is very difficult if not impossible, or sometimes the underlying paradigm will change entirely and force you to start from square 1.

My motivation is that I would love, and personally pay a ridiculous amount of money for, a service that obfuscates the upstream data that ends up in stuff like bidstreams and other behavioral tracking data sources in a way that makes the data essentially worthless (or even better, extremely expensive) to them. Have had almost no success, at least from means that wouldn't get you in hot water- it feels a lot like pissing into a forest fire expecting to put it out.

Just mentioning AdNauseam, which clicks on all ads in the background to poison the data.

https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam

I like the spirit of stuff like this a lot and have entertained similar ideas, but the issue with specifically this is that depending on where you live, this may be illegal (which is effing ridiculous - I’ve had to build defense against click fraud, in my opinion if a website or company is vulnerable to this it’s their own lack of diligence, but whatever). So to me, stuff like this is a fun gray area middle finger but ultimately does not do anything to solve my problem, which is I want to completely opt out of behavioral tracking in any way shape or form, and if I cannot, I want the data truly anonymous as was promised/implied by these same people over the last two decades every time privacy conerns were raised. I know it’s a much wider problem than stuff like this is meant to solve, just wanted to throw it out there that (hilariously) stuff like this is illegal depending on local statutes.

It's illegal to auto-click on ads that are automatically delivered? That's good example of a law I don't care about.

If enough of us piss into the fire would it make a difference?

That’s the idea, and I’ve seen speak of it in comments in places like these, but I’m not aware of there being a specific term for it. I call it privacy by obfuscation but that’s kind of boring. It’s easy to start experimenting with to see how invasive it is. Try changing your birthday to under 18 or over 35 if you’re under 35 and see how drastic your ad experience changes across anything you interact with on the web, and how fast it can happen. It’s creepy, but doing an experiment like this has essentially cost someone money, as I am not the person they are targeting. A problem though with this approach is creating any realistic technology that could employ tactics like this without changing the user experience in a way people immediately reject it, and the answer to me is, it’s probably not feasible. But, I keep trying to think about the problem because there probably is some happy middleground. I still believe privacy is possible today.

I've thought about this, and I'm almost certain I've seen some basic tools to do similar. Call it "semantic chaffing". Maybe one example could be for every search query you make three random queries are generated. Random results are followed through their tracking links. Now it's much less clear to a dumb algorithm what your interests might be. Maybe a human or well-trained LLM could pick up the thread, but now it takes considerably more resources. It's a form of asymmetric warfare.

Probably need something that periodically adds and removes fonts as well, at least once per day, probably more often. That's one element of fingerprinting.

Fooling device fingerprinting would be wonderful, but could never provide 100% cover against tracking, since any site you log into has has a user identity that can be tracked using your email or phone number.

Maybe we could break this into categories of knowledge:

* A user identity on any particular site, and the personally identifying information (PII) attached to it (email, phone, IP addresses used)

* A wider identity profile that can be stitched together via site user identities and browser fingerprinting

* The topical interests of an identity

It'd posit that to break tracking you'd have to disguise the first two by randomizing PII and browser fingerprint. Randomizing the third is more about making the collected data on personal interests useless regardless of identity, thus decreasing the value proposition of invasive advertising.

Yea, this is why I think it's an intractable problem that cannot be approached from the device level, and needs to be more of a user-driven movement and more about spreading awareness. However, that doesn't make for sexy privacy selling service products, who mostly sell products that delete your data every couple of months and then it re-appears because the upstream sources just keep pumping the data into the well. It isn't a thing anyone really would usually care about either, until they are impacted by it, and as much as I care about this I can attest to it - I have got ads that led me to some really good products or creators I still enjoy. Just as many if not more times though I've gotten scammed or manipulated, and that's the part of the awareness that I think needs to be spread.

Tackling this from a technical level, to me, at this point seems infeasible. Feel free to inbox my email if you have any more thoughts about this, this is something that is difficult to discuss in such public forums.

I will just leave this - to me, people place undue faith in adblockers and extensions. That fixes only a part of the problem. You're also placing a lot of trust in your browser (not to mention the extension). If I really, truly want to determine who you are - from the perspective of a data miner - I can trivially hide all backend requests behind a proxy that you will never know about, and your adblocker will never know about. It provides a false sense of security that a lot of otherwise technical people hide behind.

I agree in a world of data surveillance, techniques that obfuscate, like you have mentioned are ideal. The problem with this form of obfuscation is it also impacts other industries (legitimate functions) including areas of national security. Therefore I imagine it will be met with resistance, if any useful tools become widespread in use.

For example, faking traffic jam data for google maps with phones. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-04/man-creates-fake-traf...

Faking wifi and location data to unlock airpods pro in India. https://www.reddit.com/r/AirpodsPro/comments/1gqscig/two_guy...

DataPools is a Wi-Fi geolocation spoofing project that virtually relocates your phone to the latitudes and longitudes of Silicon Valley’s elite pools. https://adam.harvey.studio/datapools/

These are just a couple of fun examples, obviously you could augment these with LLM/DL tools and other anti-censorship (mixer, DCnets etc ), bot(nets) tools to create multiple identities that post in other languages, create fake photos of your in various countries, to make it hard to follow.

> The problem with this form of obfuscation is it also impacts other industries (legitimate functions) including areas of national security.

I'm aware that "national security" is often invoked in these types of discussions, and a little aware more than I think the general populace at how valuable some of this data is to intelligence operations. However, I would counter that by saying perhaps someone should consider whether it's a problem that such "critical" national security functions belong in the hands of companies that control the flow of such data for profit to anyone with a pocketbook, and ponder whether this is actually working to cause net help or harm for national security. I would argue strongly the latter, to the profitability of the people that control such data and contribute a lot of money to the elections of people that put forth their agendas, but this isn't the place to do so.

I agree with your conclusion. There have been similar discussions around backdoors and “lawful intercept” systems in the past. The intelligent argument didn't win there either. Then you get Salt Typhoon, and maybe people will rethink them.

Some areas you might want to consider looking into.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/06/15/using_snarks.htm...

Obviously this requires companies to embrace said technologies.

>DataPools is a Wi-Fi geolocation spoofing project that virtually relocates your phone to the latitudes and longitudes of Silicon Valley’s elite pools. https://adam.harvey.studio/datapools/

That is hilarious and should be expanded.

I think most of the data they collect is pretty bad so it’s more like pissing in an ocean of piss.

I like the idea of a legislative/regulatory solution, but it would be very challenging to implement successfully, because 1) it would be hard to enforce, 2) advertising companies would do everything in their power to create and exploit loopholes, and 3) it would be aggressively opposed by very deep-pocketed companies that operate huge surveillance advertising businesses.

Nonetheless, it might be wise for advertising companies to prepare a contextual advertising business model that could survive possible potential legislative action and regulatory scrutiny.

Any business that shows ads implicitly consents that you can steal from them. It's morally justified to do so.

Why? If you lie are listeners justified to hack your phone and take your private nudes?

It is not only eminently possible to do high-quality display advertising in a way that respects the viewer’s privacy: it’s easier and cheaper and more reliable.

Intrusive targeting just doesn’t create that much lift. Fairly course demographic n-grams actually optimize better than arbitrary sparsity.

Knowing that this viewer is in such a zip code? Yeah, that can matter. Knowing their address? Those are bits I need to throw away before feeding them to the recommender anyways.

If I’m trying to target ads I want neither the computational burden of the granular data nor the scope for getting hacked.

But how can the poor websites sustain themselves

Quoting myself from a previous post, I think we can solve several problem at once; including funding the sites you visit. Now I just have to get off my lazy ass and build it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677216

“ I’d like to see more work put into finding ways to utilize the work from PoW. For example I have an idea to use Monero’s CPU-favoring PoW for PoW based DDoS protection as seen in Tor [0]. When a user accesses a website they are given a PoW challenge to complete. This challenge is actually for a share of mining rewards as in P2Pool. The mining reward share would go to the website operator. This would harmoniously improve several things about the web. First, it would help protect websites against layer-7 DDoS attacks. Second, this L7 DDoS protection reduces the webs dependence on companies such as Cloudflare, the internets biggest man-in-the-middle. Third, it provides a way to pay website owners costing the users a small amount of their computers time and energy in much the same way as ads do currently. Fourth, it reduces the webs dependence on advertising as the way to fund your website. Fifth and finally, it helps secure the web-native currency in which website operators would be paid and which others can use for whatever they want.

I think such a solution would be truly beautiful.

0: https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-proof-of-work-defens... “

You joke but it’s actually shocking how often you’ll hear the refrain repeated that without ubiquitous advertising we could not possibly have a free public internet.

And no one stops to ask how the internet sustained itself from the years 1995 to 2005. Or big search engines, for that matter. The answer is that they were smaller and their revenue was based on selling real things, not constant hassle and attention-grabbing. The internet was not an ad hellscape back then simply because every single market and every single sector was smaller. It's big now because tech giants are supercharged growth-addicted behemoths.

It was better when it was smaller. Pretty much everything is in some stage of enshittification.

The internet sustained itself during those times with Ads. Doubleclick was started in 95. Do you not remember pop ups, pop unders, banner ads on every site?

Ads have always been part of the commercial internet and I'd argue they were far worse back then.

Punch the monkey.

The reason Google started off so well was because adverts were non existent, then just relevant text on the side. Compare to altavista, excite, hit it etc it was a beacon of calm.

Why is it shocking? It seems to be true - I for one am not ready to pay for most of the online services I use

If advertising were to disappear overnight, I'd argue the internet would go on.

First, there was an internet before there were ads. When there's a need there's a way and BitTorrent and Napster taught us that P2P is feasible when the users care about it.

Then there's the issue of competitive advantage. If the newspaper from the next town over has a website then my local newspaper has to have a website too. So the incentives would switch from "I'll finance this service with ads" to "this website costs money but that's another cost of doing business".

And finally, people do pay for services. Patreon and Wikipedia are examples where a bunch of users provide the funds for those who can't/won't pay for a service.

Would all services survive? No. And it would certainly be a different experience. But I believe an internet driven by a mixture of fans and sensible economic strategy wouldn't be a bad thing.

There wasn't really an internet before ads though.

p2p is feasible but you still need someone to produce the content that you're trading between yourselves.

> There wasn't really an internet before ads though.

You must be very young, or have forgotten?

The Internet (and the Web also) existed well before ads. Advertising (all commercial use) was forbidden.

The Internet existed and was much better. All content was from people who cared about it, not because they were exploiting you for ads. The glory days of the Internet was before ads were legal.

I don't know how old you are so I may be very young but I'm in my 40s and was on the internet in the early 90s and it was covered in ads then. It was about as early as you could get on the internet and not be part of a university or government contractor. You believe the glory days of the internet were the 70s and 80s?

Microtransactions would solve this.

If you’re on a mobile and have metered traffic, chances are you are wasting more money downloading ads than the website owner would make. If you could pay directly instead, both you and the owner would be better off. Zero tracking, zero ads.

I don’t think anybody had any success yet, but we can dream.

I keep hearing this for the last 20 years but I have never once seen a successful implementation of this. So in theory micro transactions are the cure - in reality it’s never been tried

Yeah, I mean, it sounds doable, but it could be a tarpit idea of course. Or maybe adtech is too powerful and we need to let it crash before something like this can be implemented.

It doesn't seem true to me. Pretty much everything worthwhile on the web is gratis (nonprofits, academia, governments, hobbyists, etc.) or paid. The ad supported stuff is basically mainstream news, social media, youtube, and SEO spam sites. The overwhelming majority is less than worthless.

I think YouTube and maybe online banking are the only things I would actually miss.

Online banking is a service you pay for, not ad funded. I suspect if youtube disappeared tomorrow, peertube might become more popular for hobbies. Maybe the more entertainment focused professionals would find a way to make money, or maybe people would realize that if they're going to pay for entertainment, they expect something more like netflix.

The linked page proposes to switch from behavioral ads to contextual ads:

> Ads could still be targeted contextually—based on the content of the page you’re currently viewing—without collecting or exposing sensitive information about you. This shift would not only protect individual privacy but also reduce the power of the surveillance industry.

Organized P2P networks can/should be used enable hosting

> Organized P2P networks can/should be used enable hosting

This is financial engineering. Someone still needs to pay for the metal and electricity.

Yeah? People do that for fun. A $160 minipc is capable of serving 1Gb/s of web traffic without breaking a sweat (limited by far by the NIC, and for most people, their Internet connection). At a 20W TDP even at 20¢/kWh you're looking at ~$3/month to drive it full tilt.

If I'm reading it right, the wikimedia grafana indicates they're usually under 20 Gb/s for reference.

I suspect there is substantial overlap between those of us who lament at consumers being unwilling to pay trivial sums for ad-free services and those of us who think people will spend even a hundred dollars on web-connected minipcs.

Consumers do pay for services (c.f. Netflix, Spotify, Steam. All are trivial to pirate but do billions in revenue). Some ad-supported services price dump onto the market, distorting it. Others are actually worthless. In any case, my point was these days computers are so absurdly powerful that the resource cost for a distributed web would be trivial. Even bargain bin low-power computers can handle millions of users.

Let them die.

I support the immediate end of all advertising,

but honestly, yeah, there's a lot of business models that wouldn't work without them, and some of those businesses make useful things.

Behavioural surveillance fuels the online ads industry.

It's possible to have ads without the current levels of surveillance. Many of us grew up in such a world.

The ads still work just as well without the Trojan Horse surveillance. Commerce does not suffer.

Of course so-called "tech" companies are terrified of a world where this computer-based surveillance to fuel online ads is competitive or tightly regulated. For them it is "unthinkable". For some of us subjected to this nonsense, it is easily thinkable. It is fresh in the memory.

EFF has been nowhere on these issues for the past two decades, and it is disingenuous to pretend they oppose it.

EFF have done good work vis-a-vis government surveillance, but EFF has always been a libertarian project to promote and protect tech power by weakening government oversight of the net.

There are multiple falsehoods in your comment.

EFF have been putting some significant distance between themselves and their (admittedly, true) Libertarian origins. Cory Doctorow (long-time public-face, current special advisor) has distinctly non-Libertarian leanings.

<https://www.eff.org/about/special-counsel#main-content>

The more-libertarian John Gilmore and Brad Templeton are both emeriti:

<https://www.eff.org/about/emeritus#main-content>

I've raised the question with Cory previously, response was, effectively, that there's a considerable overlap between viewpoints, regardless of ideology. And I'd personally heard Templeton express concerns over Google over two decades ago (Q&A at a Stanford event).

My read is that viewpoints at EFF are diverse, and that concerns over commercial surviellance are also longstanding. E.g., Privacy Badger, aimed directly at same, was released over a decade ago, 14 July 2014:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.eff....>

Cory is a nominal figurehead who isn’t in charge of anything. Many EFF staffers have been unhappy with the direction for a long time. Cindy’s leadership is wildly out of touch with the state of the world.

Privacy Badger is at best an also-ran privacy tool that’s had little impact in general, and no impact on big tech bottom line. It’s a joke in the grand scheme of things.

Also, “concern over Google” is utterly immaterial to the fact that EFF takes millions from Google. They’re not too “concerned” to cash the checks. Neither was Mozilla.

>EFF takes millions from Google

???

“Over the past years, EFF has taken millions in funds from Google and Facebook via straight donations and controversial court payouts that many see as under-the-radar contributions. Hell, Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s foundation gave EFF at least $1.2 million.”

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine

It seems to hurt a lot of people’s feelings in SV, but no, you wearing an EFF tshirt and making yearly corporate-matches donations doesn’t remove your culpability for working for big tech. Likewise, the EFF knows how many of the “small” donation come from SV tech employees.

It’s a sham organization that was premised on a faulty understanding of regulatory frameworks that does very, very little of value in the past 15 years.

This article is a manipulative hit piece from 2018. Employee donations with employer match are still individual donations. "Controversial" court payouts? Come on.

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