Let's say someone wants to sell fishing equipment. The traditional way of doing this is to buy ads on fishing sites. So now my fishing equipment purchases make there be more writing about fishing; yay!

Then one of the fishing websites decides to put a tracking pixel on their site to drop "fishing website visitor" cookies (or, in a future without third-party cookies, a turtledove interest group). They make a deal with a third party provider and get paid a small amount per visitor. Then fishing retailers have a new choice: instead of buying ads on fishing sites they can instead buy ads on any site for users who have one of the "fishing website visitor" cookies. If there were a monopoly fishing site, then this would increase their earnings: while the ad space on their site isn't as valuable, they will set the pixel price high enough that they come out ahead. It's not a monopoly, though, so the price of the pixel gets driven down through competition, and money that would go to fishing sites instead goes to the publishers that people who spend money on fishing equipment visit.

In this case I see how it's worse for fishing sites, but not how it's bad for consumers: their willingness to buy fishing equipment translates into support for all the sites they visit, and not just the fishing sites.

But there are also many niches that don't have economic tie-ins, or have ones that are far weaker than "writing about fishing" and "buying fishing equipment". In a world with targeted advertising, these niches do better, because of overlap between audiences. A "let's have better housing policy" blog can show ads for fishing equipment, vacations, HVAC supplies, or whatever else visitors have shown interest in on other sites.

Additionally, targeted advertising increases the total amount of funding available for online content, because people with niche interests are available to be advertised to in more places. Seeing ten fishing ads once a week when you visit a fishing site vs seeing twenty fishing ads spread over the course of the week, etc.

So while niche publishers in lucrative niches would likely make more money if we only had context-based advertising, I don't think niche publishers overall, publishers overall, or consumers would be better off.

(This is modified from a comment I originally posted on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620763)

You seem to be deliberately focusing on the beneficial parts of advertising, at the exclusion of the harmful bits. If you want to maintain your credibility -- let alone give the impression of someone striving to live ethically -- you'll need to give that second part its due attention.

Addendum:

If I were offered a generous salary to work on Google ad technology, I might accept. I'm not 100% sure, but the temptation would very real. As such, I want to make it clear that my criticism does not stem from any feeling of moral superiority, but rather from deep-seated respect and sympathy for someone engaged in an ethical dilemma.

I believe the comments would be much more charitable had your position been something along the lines of "I do it because it's good money, and I sometimes struggle with the dilemma. Here is the nature of the issue as I see it." As a general rule, people respect earnest introspection. Not so with playing ostrich.

Maybe I'm just terribly dense, but I seriously can't think of any reasonable objection to what google does. The best I personally can come up with is that most people don't understand what google is doing and if they did know some of them might object.

When I google "the individual and collective consequences of mass data collection" I get results that talk about the NSA and human rights -- this doesn't seem to have much to do with what google is doing though. When I add "google" to that search I get a rambling article on "How surveillance changes people's behavior".

Please help me out here -- how am I or anyone else being harmed by google knowing what sites I visit?

I don't think the author is being disingenuous. I do think there is a sizable subset of privacy advocates who have become so stringently ideological about this issue they would downvote even thoughtful replies and are so caught up in their bubble that they seemingly can't have a conversation with anyone outside of it.

Yes, let's. I'm not an expert, so I don't have any insight. Do you?

Still, this question seems like an essential part of essay about the ethics of working in the ad industry.

Perhaps you meant to direct your sarcasm towards the author?

to me it seems really bad to mine and centralize PII (note: this PII is also arbitrarily being shared with third-parties, usually without explicit or informed consent from user).

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ie: this is data which is mined in a way, depth and scope of any implication is usually abstracted away from the user or hand-waved away in legalese or presented in such an annoying way users have become conditioned to unconditionally accept that which they do not understand, and therefore they likewise usually remain uninformed/ignorant/naive of any implication, security or otherwise, in order to get to the service asap. and this is something absolutely exploited by these companies.

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do we really want companies, companies who have demonstrated they are not immune to simple mistakes leading to vulnerabilities, or leaked PII, mind you, to be in a position where we the user have no choice, but to trust it won't leak PII to nefarious persons (persons who can then do meaningfully harmful things with even basic PII)?

we are already bleeding enough PII as it is -- when should we truly be concerned with stopping it? if never, and there is no concern as you seem to indicate, then let us arbitrarily share medical information, too.

on that subject, there are also so many instances of arbitrarily collected and shared PII, for the sake of ads, that would almost unequivocally be a HIPA violation in other contexts -- to me it seems asinine to have such well-defined understandings of PII for the protection of the person in some contexts, but yet in the context of ads, suddenly <i>anything</i> goes, and the spiel we always get from the ads advocates is: but it is good for the user and the content creators cannot exist without it, so it must exist as is, unchained.

(un)ironically this is also a psychology presented by abusive relationships where the abuser keeps the abused thinking they need them, and the abuser establishes itself as a (survival) dependency in the abused's mind.

idk, i'm pretty skeptical of the claim that ad tech and the ad industry has good intentions, and i am becoming increasingly of the opinion that most of the advertising models advocates are trying so hard to convince users to enable, are just fucking profit-driven-at-all-costs cancer.

Targeted advertising hasn't been a blessing just for small businesses selling fishing equipment and organic combucha, but also -- actually, especially, for companies that sell things like:

* Potentially addictive subscriptions (for e.g. online casinos or other gambling games) -- thus specifically targeting people who are at risk for addiction, unless your targeting settings are crap.

* Snake oil skincare products for teenagers, or potentially dangerous weight loss tablets -- thus compounding peer pressure against young people with poor self esteem.

* Bullshit therapy "options" like German New Medicine, specifically targeting people who are terminally ill, or researching things like cancer treatment for a relative or a friend.

Boy am I glad we're increasing the total amount of funding available for online content!

You make cars? You focus on good things like driving to a vacation, but what about all the cars used in drive by shootings?

You sell cloud services? You talk about the great websites, but what about all the people who host scam sites on the cloud?

You write monitoring software? What about all the people who monitor ad services?

You cannot be in good-faith with these kinds of arguments.

Advertising expands markets for goods.

Word of mouth and aggregators (like yelp) can help people find solutions when they know of a problem, but ads inform/manipulate (depending on how you see it) people to know they have a problem in the first place.

Also if you've ever written ad copy it's all pretty structurally similar: hook, problem statement, solution, testimonials, etc.

2) New challenger SaaS brands can get in front of customers to compete with mammoth corporate brands with worse software (I see this all the time on my job).

3) Without good ad targeting, only bottom hanging fruit advertisers that appeal to the lowest common denominator can afford to spend. Weight loss, teeth whitening, etc. Good ad targeting means a better user experience with ads.

  *  HIV meds
  *  LGBT*A forums
  *  politically charged sites
  *  cancer/heart disease/diabetes pages

Before digital advertising or Google reading emails to find out you're going on a fishing trip, how did people buy fishing equipment?

Whatever we did then, we can probably go back to and be much better off.

Like why do I need "relevant ads" on a blog about urban planning? What problem does that solve for me?

I.e if I send you an email talking about finding a vacation deal to go to Egypt, we will get ads to that effect (obviously it'll vary somewhat).

Official documentation:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en#:~:text=Th....

Appreciate it

Ad blockers are a godsend though. I either get to opt-out of ads, or I get to opt-out of sites that rely on ads (for the most part, caveats aside).

We can use the web to bring those in the fishing community into wider contact with each other.

Or use it to create communities vulnerable to ads. I know which one I prefer.

I have an example loosely inspired by real life.

Let's say I visit a fishing forum using the shared computer of my very, very vegan family. That website has now dropped the "fishing website visitor" cookie, and suddenly all my computer shows are ads for lure and fishing rods. My father is now furious, asking everyone in the house who has been visiting "those" websites.

I want the association between me and fishing gone. But who do I talk to? The website says they had nothing to do with this, the ad network won't even give me the time of day, and if the cookie is a supercookie then clearing history and cache may not be enough. And heavens help me if I get targeted mail, like Target used to do with pregnant women...

That, I believe, is the problem with targeted advertising: that my privacy is taken away in the name of helping somebody's website, it's leaked everywhere, and I have no real way to say "I don't want this".

Fishing retailers have a choice. They can rely on the strength and quality of their products and organic interest in fishing as a recreational activity. Or they can contract out their marketing to a commercial version of a spy agency that invents a silent, invisible device that follows their customers around when they're otherwise alone, recording everything they ever do to learn how to better predict their future spending preferences.

Surely, even if this resulted in better sales for the fishing industry, lower prices for the consumer, and the ability of niche publications to exist by predicting that their readers also like fishing and charging the fishing industry to sell them this information, you would not find this okay.

You've convinced yourself that this kind of surveillance and profiling is totally okay and different when it takes place on network connected computing devices and that people have even consented to it, but the actual people being monitored do not feel this way.

It's bad for the consumer because their privacy is being violated and their metadata is being sold, in order for advertisers to track them everywhere they go online, so businesses can try and extract all of their spending money as efficiently as possible.

It also is bad for the consumer because it's bad for the collective whole: instead of quality content online everything is being driven by outrage and clickbait in order to serve as many targeted ads as possible.

Personally I don't even want to support that ecosystem or those sites.

It's also bad for the fishing site because now their niche targeted ad slots that used to pay decently in order to target people with an interest in fishing are pushed into the same race to the bottom low return ads that are being automatically targeted. So they lose too.

Only winners are huge publishers that don't have any niche audience to target because now they effectively target every niche. And Google of course. Basically the two groups who I want to win the least.

This is exactly what I'm working on changing; have a look at the second half of the post?

(Or read https://github.com/WICG/turtledove)