
Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism” - rbii
http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2016/05/eben-moglen-gpl-online-advertising-is-becoming-a-perfect-despotism/?
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FussyZeus
> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary
> explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy,"
> she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable
> prison for the human race."

I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working.
People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every
ad they see, the pervasiveness of ad-blocking technology has never been
higher, it seems like every item from the ad company's lately is highlighting
that viewership and engagement is plummeting at a record pace.

I'm not saying this isn't a fight we need to win, but it seems we're winning
it pretty well. We still need to work on the privacy end of things (I think
that will be coming in a big way fairly soon) but in terms of advertisements
controlling people? With such a high amount of said people blocking and
ignoring, I find it very hard to believe. Even if their targeting is better,
the fact that people can so effectively ignore ads that are targeted to their
exact behaviors makes it seem unlikely.

~~~
logn
Does it matter if people ignore ads? These are not broadcast ads like radio or
television. They analyze behavior and encourage an architecture that exactly
suits the needs of government surveillance.

And I'm not confident users will win the ad blocking war. There are easy ways
to permanently defeat ad blockers, but the industry hasn't embraced them yet
because the current system works well enough. E.g., ad code can be served from
the same server with no identifying CSS classes or ids. Or with WebAssembly
the web could turn into black box binaries.

Further, there's fundamentally no way to defeat behavioral tracking, because
it can be done when people merely use a website.

~~~
FussyZeus
That's true but (the way I read it anyway) the author is contending that
advertisements themselves would be used to shape public opinion which, while
true, I think the effects are dwindling because people are becoming more aware
of that.

Additionally, I wouldn't say behavioral tracking is implicitly always
nefarious. Speaking as an app developer the analytics we get from users is
100% anonymous and not used for anything more evil than just helping us design
and improve software. Usage data like that is gold to us because most people
don't leave/send feedback, especially the ones we really want to hear from,
i.e. the ones who stopped using it.

I think we need more regulation in the web industry in terms of how we're
allowed to collect data, how we must store it, and have serious penalties for
those who break those laws.

~~~
logn
I think the idea is that a small number of corporations will have a complete
knowledge of the lives and psychology of their users, be able to influence
their behavior even without display ads, and be able to predict all of their
behavior. Additionally, the government will piggyback on all of this
technology too.

I don't think any of this is inherently nefarious. Hopefully with policy
reforms and additional privacy preserving technologies, we will avert the
future Moglen warns of.

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ddebernardy
This unfortunately doesn't seem realistic:

> Moglen proposed deploying "freedom boxes" at every street corner—cheap
> hardware running free software, deployed everywhere, that encrypt
> everything, anonymise everything, and blind the service providers to our
> activity.

b/c the last mile is the priciest part of a telco's network. Unless the telcos
are forced to do it, it has zero odds of happening.

Also, let's not forget privacy as we know it is a distinctly modern idea. The
"right to privacy" was coined with the advent of cameras in the 1890s:

[https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/the-birth-and-
death-o...](https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/the-birth-and-death-of-
privacy-3-000-years-of-history-in-50-images-614c26059e)

The main new thing today is the ubiquity of the public sphere owing to IT.
Inadvertently ending up on a picture in the late 19th century was a rather
trivial intrusion of privacy; the same picture posted on FB today instantly
makes it available to anyone with an internet connection. Not saying privacy
has little to no merit, but nothing short of a full-blown societal rethink is
going to make taking and sharing those pictures stop - a piece of hardware
just won't help.

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joesmo
If privacy is a distinctly modern idea invented in the 1890's what was the
purpose of window curtains before then? Certainly they couldn't have been
there to protect an idea that's probably older than language and likely has
actual biological basis. I assume also that humans only started to have sex in
private in the 1890s according to your theory as it wouldn't have been even
possible to conceive of privacy before the idea of privacy existed?

The idea that privacy is something new is absolutely absurd and laughable.

~~~
ddebernardy
Consider reading the post I linked to. And let's not forget Window taxes from
the 19th century:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax)

In earlier ages, there were few windows owing to architectural and building
technique related constraints. If anything the window taxes reeked of "oh
shoot, these guys are rich and can afford modern construction techniques."
Your home with plenty of light flowing in is in fact quite modern.

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ams6110
I'm not so sure things are as dire as he thinks.

Most of the people I know are growing more and more irritated by Facebook and
other social media. Many have stopped using it and deleted their profiles. And
these are not "tech" people but ordinary adults and teens.

I think people are quite perceptive when a service changes from being truly
useful, as Facebook was in its early days, to being an intrusive pain in the
ass as it is now. They may not all jump ship right away because people have
different tolerances for this stuff. But from what I see, people are more
aware of what's going on than Mr. Moglen is giving them credit for.

~~~
abakker
I always wonder when I see this anecdote that people are leaving Facebook,
closing profiles etc. I've never been a very active Facebook user, but I also
don't see myself ever closing my account. On the whole, I don't use much of
the feature set but it is still useful every now and then.

is there a reason to close the account, rather than just log off when you're
not using it? I feel like AB+ and Ghostery do a fine job keeping the tracking
down, and the service itself is pretty benign when used casually. Am I missing
something?

~~~
toomuchtodo
> is there a reason to close the account, rather than just log off when you're
> not using it?

Probably not. Treat it like LinkedIn: Log in on those occasional times you
need to use it.

~~~
stcredzero
Facebook: The less you use it, the mentally healthier you tend to be. I guess
my parents were right after all back in the 80's: computer interaction is a
vice.

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daveloyall
He's totally right, and it's scary.

The hive creature(s) will be cool, though. Little gods.

Maybe, behind his proposed barricades, little enclaves of individuals will
survive, for a while.

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Aelinsaar
More and more people will adopt ad blocking, script controls, and of course,
use a proxy, VPN, or otherwise anonymize their traffic. More and more people
are (and are going to be) encrypting their traffic.

This is not a one-way street.

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ashitlerferad
> Guardian of the GPL

Heh

