Posted by todsacerdoti 10/23/2024
But I don’t think anyone can honestly say the right amount of regulation is zero, which is what we have now. It is absolutely bonkers to me that anyone off the street should be able to gather such highly granular data about any other person as long as they can pay.
It completely bombed out because people were so freaked out about a device knowing where you were.
I also remember when Nextel came out with an enterprise tracking app for delivery companies where you could track the vehicle and make sure it was on time making its deliveries and could alert a person monitoring the software back at the office if say the van was sitting too long somewhere which indicated they had broken down or something similar.
Two companies tried to install on their vans and there was so much push back from so many people in one company, they canceled their order. The other company did install it and then they had three lawsuits from employees who claimed the software was a breach of their privacy - while in the employment of said company and on said companies time. The company voluntarily removed it after only a few months.
Its just so strange to me that we went from not wanting any of this, to just freely handing over any and all private information to these companies.
I don't think the nature of the data collection was clear and have been creeping up on us.
It took a while for me to realize. E.g. I didn't notice Google was spying on me and stalking on non Google sites until I finally realized it.
Anything can wear people down— make it seem as if it were always normal, even— if it's just persistent enough.
All the more reason it should have been nipped in the bud, I guess.
Has sir heard of the GDPR?
Right after I crossed the border from Austria, my U.S. cell phone started lighting up with spam SMS messages. At first, it was from the local cell phone carrier welcoming me to .cz. A few minutes later, a message from T-Mobile letting me know I was roaming in another new country. Then a few minutes after that, SMS spam for hotels, then restaurants, then casinos. All of this in a time before "smart" phones.
I'm not surprised to see it's gotten so much worse.
And did those political SMSs honor opt-out requests or not?
I assumed this was only based on voter registration party-spam.
That's awful.
There are very few reasons in my mind that anyone, especially law enforcement, would need this "feature" and they're all pretty dark.
Are they even? Or, can they know that? If the suspect has a gun, they'll wake up scared, confused, and with every reason to believe somebody's illegally breaking and entering.
[0]:https://jeffmorhous.com/block-ads-for-your-entire-network-wi...
Also a video for those more YT inclined: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCA24qJBG8Q
Krebs and everyone else he cites is right—it's time for Apple and Google to eliminate MAID altogether.
ETA: Do not downvote this parent! Use trustworthy ad blockers anywhere and everywhere you can!
How do you know this is the case? (I believe it to be, would like to verify)
Also worth mentioning many apps hardcode DNS servers or fallback to other DNS providers when they fail to resolve hostnames. I see this all the time on my network. (I have a PfSense box that redirects to upstream NextDNS when this happens)
I self-host DOH using blocky so my Android devices can use it via "Private DNS" that is active on both wifi and cellular.
[0] https://0xerr0r.github.io/blocky/latest/
[1] https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome
[2] https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html how to configure
Bad traffic could flow to a "good" domain, and then you need to decide whether that domain is actually "good".
You create a server and host it on IP x. You create a cert for it. You add the public key to your app.
Your app can now communicate with that IP over port 443 with that certificate. Remember that the idea that the domain must match the one in the certificate is a setting, enforced by the browsers. If you run your own code you can perfectly override that.
Now you can do whatever you like on that connection.
In fact, you don't HAVE to go that far. Many applications these days do private key pinning and use that connection to load the ads. IMDb does that on the iPhone.
MyQ and myBMW use the same to 'protect' the connection. MyQ's implementation of this, and subsequent implementation of CloudFlare's bot protection completely broke home-assistant's connection. All because they want you to use their app (and get bombarded with ads).
Doh/DoT was supposed to bring in MORE privacy for users, as it allowed users to resolve addresses without the system servicing the connection (ISP / StarBucks / McDonald's) from being able to see or modify the responses (think captive pages).
But all it brought was more spying. I am a firm believer that I should be able to inspect all traffic that an application sends out over my internet connection.
It isn't just people using DNS filtering for ads that have this problem. Network admins at companies face the same problem (see for example https://cleanbrowsing.org/help/docs/block-dns-filtering-evas...)
Some browsers, apps, or devices might let you disable DoS/DoT or might let you configure it to use your own DNS server, but none of them have to let you and even when they give you that option they can still do whatever want (https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/chromium-bypasses-pi-hole-by...)
Obviously any application or device using a hardcoded IP address will bypass DNS entirely so DNS filtering isn't going to work. See https://old.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/djacup/im_starting_...
One aspect is to use trustworthy software, not written by an advertising company.
All large corporate and governmental entities love the data. Industries (tech, finance, etc) and planned future governance (technocracy) are based on it.
So, it is baked into the plan that days will be collected. It's just whether the individual will know about it.
A look at data for how many people were aware the whole time during any scandal, and how often abuse and crime gets covered up or exploited instead of reported or opposed, will leave you with a very banal impression of malice. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
…Idk, companies are just groups of people. Maybe people also need stronger incentives to not let the "company" do antisocial things. At least the execs.
Maybe it's the companies that hide it. Maybe it's the people that lie to themselves. I'm sure they're smart enough; they can probably figure it out. At some point ignorance becomes wilful.
This in turn would lead to an industry that hunts for evidence on a contingency basis.
The reaction to that idea taught me a lot about incentives.
However no one need this amount of data, all advertiser need is : you search for a pair of shoes on Google, show you ads for shoes. That's good advertising and sometimes it can be useful for the user.
Let consumers who are searching for product information be given advertising. Contain the virus to ecosystems that want it.
If you look at old ads for random products from e.g. the turn of the (last) century, they seem to often give this slight "wall of text" impression. Image of the product, surrounded by prices and descriptions of what it was and what it (purportedly) did. The motivating belief seemed to be that if a company communicated the benefits of buying from them, they would attract customers.
It seems like at some point the focus shifted away from expressing factual information, and to creating vague associations and implications. I think that's still fine on its own, and in fact quite fun and the source of a lot of creativity, but it also created the opportunity to mislead in new ways. E.G. most famously harmfully maybe, the very mid-20th century idea that cigarettes are "cool". In modern times this seems to have gone even further towards exploiting basic quirks in human psychology— A dancing bear, chocolate man, or screaming celebrity has nothing to do with selling a product, but it's bizarre and surprising and therefore memorable, so by making an ad around it you're cluttering the viewer's brain with useless information designed to redirect mindshare to your capital-B "Brand".
So at that point it becomes dishonest and manipulative. But at least it's still broadcasted, e.g. on radio, TV, in newspapers and magazines. It's predatory, but everyone gets the same thing. You can still sorta avoid or ignore it. It doesn't single anyone out.
That's changed now with the Internet. The mass collection of location and personality data, identifiable to individual profiles and paired with tools allowing those individuals to be targetted with a combination of terrifying granularity and omnipresent scale— That adds an entire new dimension to "advertising", and it would still be wrong, because it would still comprise many violations of privacy and basic decency, even if it weren't being actively exploited for commercial gain. If any one individual knew as much about you and had as many tools for trying to influence you as Facebook and Google have built on an industrial scale, they would be either a stalker deserving of a restraining order, or some kind of a (probably malevolent TBH) supernatural spirit.
So "advertising", in terms of "informing the market of a product" and "connecting customers to businesses in mutually beneficial transactions", is fine I guess. Good, even. Stalking, lying, manipulating, and rent-seeking through dominance are wrong.
And with technology centralizing power in the hands of a few organizations, the modern practice of "advertising" seems to be less about "informing people" these days and more about dominating the information space in order to manipulate human behaviour with neither the consent nor the knowledge of your targets. No wonder it's apparently being abused by law enforcement.
...To be clear, I use the word "you" only as an indefinite pronoun here. Small businesses that use ad networks aren't the ones to blame for a large system having messy incentives and malicious central actors.
yes, take driving for instance. Some people drive responsibly, watch for bicycle and walkers, others drive like maniacs yet it's the same thing, driving a car.
It's not so much what you do with advertisement than how you do it, but advertisement in itself isn't bad.
Now if you take the worst example possible, Facebook, Google, Microsoft etc. all these companies behaving like rats trying to extract as much data as possible from you, it's going to look bad. But for instance, when we still had phonebook you would look for a plumber and some plumber who paid for advertisement would get a bigger space, in exchange the phonebook company would make money and everyone would receive phonebook for free.
That is an exemple of usefull advertisement.
We're all proud of you but this is barely related to avoiding ads. You can build your own car too, and you'd still have to look at the billboards on the highway. Or you could build your own phone and never giving anyone the number, then you'll still get to enjoy 5 spams/day during election season when someone decides to simply call every phone number in the region.
Ads are the new certainty besides death and taxes. If they aren't in your face yet, be assured that whole legions of shitheads are very busy trying to make it happen.
At a societal level we fully deserve all this because apparently we can't be fucked to care about basic rights anymore (cf. "everyone gets the government they deserve"), too lost in Huxley's dystopian future of infinite dopamine distractions.
The advertising industry is so large that it's basically private taxation, except that you get nothing in return from it.
My interests align with advertisers to an extent. I do want to know what products are out there. I'm an adult, I won't forget that their descriptions of their products are biased.
Surveillance advertising is a bad thing, but it doesn't help to take the most extremist position possible. Advertising is information, and it's not difficult to use that information to your benefit.
The big spenders are in the game for brand awareness (there's not even a product being shown sometimes) and then there's a parallel world of which I would call scams which went on top of it (less than half of the Youtube ads I see look legal)
If you remove those two, I'm not sure how long the advertising industry would survive.
The problem with online ads is mostly orthogonal to FOSS. Of course, it does help to not use an OS with ads baked into the Start menu...
Our information paradigm has changed; so should advertising. Let consumers seek out new products, if they wish to.
(If you search for “the best ways to Y” and find an article that tells you about X, congratulations—chances are, you are reading an advertisement.)
You have not provided a viable argument so far. I can’t say you failed to provide supporting evidence, because you have not even made a claim. Inventing a meaningless term like “information paradigm” and implying it has somehow changed is not one.
You either lack a point to make, or are struggling to express one.
Repeating something ad nauseam does not make it true.
Advertising is just attempted demand generation for otherwise weak product offerings, a ploy to exploit human psychology by appealing to needs to be part of an in group, desire for sexual appeal. It is exploitative and harmful to its viewers.
Hows that for a claim?
Just like money is just a vehicle for abuse and fraud.
Advertising is disseminating information about a product. The rest is you describing how advertising is abused, which I already addressed in my first comment. Yes, it is also used for malicious and abusive purposes, just like everything else is also used for malicious and abusive purposes.
If we talk about things that can be used for bad stuff, how about we start with E2EE comms and cash. The amount of evil, abuse, violence that they directly enable simply drowns out any potential downside of ads.
I guess either you want to ban it all, in which case there is no more argument to be had, or you can acknowledge that the world is not black and white and something that can be used for evil can also be a crucial part of an ecosystem.
If you've gone one step further and disabled location access for apps and disabled the global ad id, it would seem difficult to do the searches described.
The article refers to "25 percent of Apple phones". Is that just legacy phones running older versions of iOS prior to removal of IDFA?