
Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising? - marban
https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-advertising/
======
Doctor_Fegg
I'd add nuance to this:

Ban _involuntarily_ targeted advertising.

I am 100% ok with Google, Facebook etc. knowing that I live in Oxfordshire,
UK; that I love cycling; that I play the church organ. That's who I am. If
they want to target cycling, classical music, and local ads at me based on
this information, that's great. I would happily log onto these sites and click
checkboxes based on this (or do it via browser settings).

I am not ok with them building up a detailed personal profile of my anxieties,
day-to-day worries and preoccupations. Nor with them selling my information to
other sites to which I haven't explicitly volunteered the information.

~~~
woodrowbarlow
these questions are in earnest, not meant as a put-down of your position.

how would you draw a line between what's okay to collect and what isn't?

do you think a line could be drawn that would work for most people?

would sites offer different levels of invasive tracking, and the user opts-in
as far as they want?

what incentive would users have to opt-in at all?

~~~
rcxdude
I think the line drawn would be easy: they cannot collect the data themselves,
they can only use what you fill in on a form they present. Then the line is
basically whatever you feel comfortable telling them, knowing it will be used
for advertising. The incentive would be the standard reason ad companies give
for targeted ads: given there are going to be ads, people would generally
prefer they be relevant.

~~~
nkoren
This is fine on the surface, but still has the potential for problems. Eg., if
I were Muslim, I might be quite happy to declare that I'm interested in Halal
food and would like to see advertising relevant to my interests. Win/win,
right?

Now, let's say I own an apartment block and want to advertise for tenants, but
I don't want any of them dirty muslims in my building. I can target my
advertising to exclude people whose interests include Halal food.

Or, let's say I'm the propaganda department of an adversarial nation state,
and I want to stir up communal tension. All I have to do is find people with
an interest in Halal food, and target them with ads exhorting them to join
other Christians in the next Crusade against the Moors. Or whatever. This was
actually a common technique in the 2016 election: identify voters who, via
their social connections and profile interests, are likely on the fence about
Clinton vs. Trump, and also are a bit homophobic -- then target them with
"Queers for Hillary" advertisments.

It's shocking how easy it is to weaponize this stuff.

------
bryanlarsen
The argument for massive Pigouvian taxes on advertising seems much clearer.
Advertising imposes massive costs on society and the viewers. These costs
aren't borne by the advertiser, so they should be captured through massive
taxes and put to good use.

And many brands wouldn't feel much of an impact: what matters to Coke is that
it spends more than Pepsi. If their $6B on advertising only buys 1/10th as
many ads as it used to it still has the same impact because they still have
twice as many ads as Pepsi does.

~~~
avalys
What’s the cost that advertising imposes exactly?

~~~
abdullahkhalids
People have finite attention tokens to spend per day. Attention tokens are
consumed when you make a conscious and deliberate decision to invest time in
something, but they are also consumed when someone approaches you and talks to
you.

Of course, people close to us usually are mindful of not consuming too many of
our attention tokens. And some interruptions are useful to you, so they are
welcome. Advertisements, on the other hand, consume the attention tokens of
everyone who views them, and because they are optimizing for the revenue to
the company, and not the benefit to the person, the expected benefit of each
advertisement to the person is extremely low, if not downright negative.

~~~
avalys
Ok. So we ban advertising. Now you have to spend your “attention tokens”
earning money to purchase the content you were previously getting for free. Is
that better?

How about we let people make this choice themselves, just as we do now?

~~~
ben_w
> Is that better?

“Better” by what metric?

If the cost of showing 1000 ads is $5 [0], each advert is at worst replaced
with needing 0.5¢ for a micro-transaction. It doesn’t take much time to earn
that: Even if someone only earns $5/hour, it is 3.6 seconds. There are people
on this site earning 30 times as much, for whom the delay between a new
pattern of light hitting their retina and their conscious mind having the
subjective experience of seeing a thing is longer than the time it takes to
earn the money to cover the cost of the advert.

> How about we let people make this choice themselves, just as we do now?

What choice? We have ad blockers, we don’t have “I reject your ad, but here is
some money” plugins.

[0] Numbers from ancient memory, treat with caution.

~~~
dev_tty01
Assuming these numbers are in the ballpark, it seems we could easily get rid
of all ads.

I tell my browser my max default micro-payment for a website view. If the site
asks for that or less, I view the page. If the site wants more I can approve a
larger payment or not view the site. Market dynamics will set the price levels
for individual sites over time. The browser keeps track of my payment levels
for different sites.

I get to set whether I want to do micro-payments or look at ads. It should
then be illegal for web sites to violate that global preference set in the
browser.

Bandwidth needs drop, my web viewing isn't cluttered with crap, and info
providers still get rewarded for their efforts.

This seems simple, so I'm guessing it must have been discussed before. What
happened? Was micro-payment security the issue? Is it just too expensive in
typical scenarios?

~~~
Eridrus
Google tried this twice with Google Contributor, Brave already exists. Outside
of the privacy/hand-wringing about tech bubble, people don't actually want
this.

Maybe you could drive a wedge around bandwidth, particularly on mobile where
people pay for data, but despite all the articles written about this, most
people are clearly not concerned enough about this to do anything.

------
libertine
I'm a suspect because I worked in digital media in a media agency some time
ago, and let me tell you that this is quite a broad request.

Why? Let's start by asking: what is targeted advertising?

Is it based on interests? Behavior? Demographic? Psychographic? Contextual?
Placement? Geolocation? Search queries? The list goes on.

Even if they want to narrow it down to collected data from users, this still
has a lot of broad aspects to it.

What about what Kantar and GFK, and many other market research companies do,
where they track people who consent to be tracked and share their opinions and
behavior, to generate statistical inferences? Because that's one of the ways
you target on TV for example.

So, I understand where they are coming from, but this is such a broad request
that's naive.

A company that sells vegan supplements that places advertising in the POS
(Point of Sale) is targeted advertising - why should we ban something that has
the consent of everyone involved?

Or the solution is to randomize ad placement? The amount of wastage and the
play field would destroy anyone who tried to compete with companies who could
afford mass media platforms with budgets in the orders of millions+.

~~~
jka
What is targeted advertising needed for?

~~~
dx034
To get information to those that are interested in it. While some dislike any
kind of advertisment, many (me included) don't mind having ads, as long as
they're not too intrusive and actually useful.

~~~
dfxm12
But, you can't have targeted ads without some database out there tracking
everything you do. A database that is ostensibly used to get information to
you that you might find interesting, but in reality has been used for much
worse, according to the article: proliferation of hateful and false content on
social media & political manipulation, among others. This data is also an
valuable target for ID thieves.

The ads themselves aren't the problem here, nor is it really what's being
discussed.

~~~
libertine
You had targeted advertising before the internet, it's simply less targeted
and less granular, with more wastage.

A quick example: if you wanted to reach health care works, or more precisely
doctors, you'd advertising on magazines for health care professionals. Most of
which were subscribed (name, birthday, profession, address, etc) - so you had
already some data for some targeting.

> in reality has been used for much worse, according to the article:
> proliferation of hateful and false content on social media & political
> manipulation, among others.

This is where advertising is getting mixed with propaganda - those are very
different things and the only cross section is that they are messages that use
text, audio, images, video - in others words - they are distributed with
audiovisual media. They have different legal obligations (depending on the
country).

What is lacking is regulation and fines for abuse of propaganda. The problem
is that the sheer volume of content being produced is hard to regulate.

------
spodek
The images of Sao Paolo before and after banning billboards
[https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-
secret...](https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-
paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban) illustrate the difference in a
different space.

Personally, I found the difference greater and more lovely than I expected and
support reducing advertising. Other cities are doing it.

The parties that would suffer most are shareholders of companies that
advertise products most people probably wouldn't want without all the
advertising -- Coca-Cola, Gatorade, McDonald's, fast fashion, etc, generally
multinationals. I imagine ones that would benefit: local businesses, vegetable
and fruit farmers, manufacturers of lasting goods instead of fast fashion.

~~~
helsinkiandrew
Online, without personalization it's the other way around

Local and niche businesses can only advertise on Facebook/Google Ads because
their clientele can be defined and targeted. Without targeting we'll be
watching ads for Coca-Cola and McDonalds and other brands that have 'mass'
appeal.

~~~
vthriller
Why can't they target content instead of visitors? i.e. articles and videos
about X instead of people that showed even minimal interest in X in the past
month or so.

~~~
haste410
How would that work for site like Facebook or Instagram or other sites where
there is no clear relevant content to target?

~~~
Tarq0n
There's been a lot of work in this area over the last few years, clustering
and tagging text and video. Facebook even has an open source library for it
called Starspace.

~~~
helsinkiandrew
But the point is that Facebook is showing you ads based on your surfing
behaviour outside Facebook - not the content you view on Facebook.

If you use facebook purely for posting and viewing family baby photos, but
view websites about tractors, you'll probably see ads on facebook from tractor
related companies.

Starspace is used by FB to tag the sites that report that you've visited them
to facebook. So they can target ads

~~~
Quanttek
I think the point is that FB could change to a contextual model. E.g. after
seeing a post of a news article by _Tractor Daily_ you would see an ad for a
new John Deere.

------
helsinkiandrew
A few years ago I created an online business for serious cyclists and runners.
Targeted Facebook ads enabled me to find customers for a few pennies each - I
don't think I could have found customers any other way (apart from the trying
to get 'free' ads via blogs/news/viral tweets etc).

Targeted ads are the only way that small, new, local, or just poor companies
can do advertising.

It's a bit scary seeing what sites show facebook you've been to:
[https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/](https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/)
But if this is the price to pay to see quality ads within FB then so be it.

What I think is wrong, is then for facebook (or other apps) to sell, or leak
that data in enough detail to match to our identity where it can be used for
other purposes.

~~~
stoev
You don’t need targeted advertising to achieve that. You don’t need FB,
Google, and a thousand other lesser-known companies tracking every step you
make in order to know that you might be interested in cycling. Instead you, as
a small advertiser, would target the right context and would only show your
ads in articles specifically-dedicated to cycling or whatever other niche you
are after.

~~~
helsinkiandrew
But there aren't sites/publications that are niche enough. Female runners over
50? Interested in Italian food in Denver?

Targeted ads are a response to the poor results from site/content specific ads

~~~
stoev
Sure, there are niche categories that would be hard to get. But for your two
specific examples you could use those simple sets of criteria:

1\. Target specific articles with advice for older runners in running
publications. 2\. Target Italian recipes in cooking websites only for users
located in Denver.

You don’t need to do those things manually, it can be automated. Sure, it
might not deliver the scale that FB and Google are promising, but to say that
it’s impossible to do contextually is not accurate.

Use Google Search ads to capture all direct intent.

~~~
RestlessMind
> 1\. Target specific articles with advice for older runners in running
> publications.

Who reads running publications these days? Unless you meant online blogs etc,
in which case:

> 2\. Target Italian recipes in cooking websites only for users located in
> Denver.

That is targeted advertising, IIUC. You are targeting users based on their
geolocation, which should be banned as per the article.

~~~
bryan_w
Also this would be more expensive in both time and cost

------
MulliMulli
I'm all for it. Remember that days when a fishing website hat a ad banner for
a fishing related website - that's still targetet enough on my watch.

~~~
coldpie
Yeah our societies functioned for centuries without targeted ads, and we can
do it again. It's only the past decade or two that we've had targeted ads. I
think you could compare targeted ads to selling drugs: there's clearly a
market for it and it will sustain many peoples' livelihoods, but as a society
we've seen the ill effects of letting them run rampant and decided we're
better off highly regulating them. It's time to reign in this massively
detrimental business model. The businesses will adapt just fine.

~~~
jstanley
We also functioned for centuries without electricity, hot and cold running
water, or good sanitation.

The fact that we _functioned_ without something doesn't imply that we're
better off without it.

~~~
Razengan
The fact that we functioned without something doesn't imply that we're better
off with it.

~~~
jstanley
Agreed. The fact that we functioned without it before is of zero information
content when deciding whether we should function without it again.

~~~
Razengan
No, the fact that we functioned without it is a fact that we can function
without it.

And literally billions of people do function without targeted advertising,
right now.

~~~
jstanley
Nobody is saying we can't function without advertising!

But we can function without lots of things. The fact that we can function
without something isn't a strong argument in favour of getting rid of it.

I don't even like advertising. I'm not trying to support advertising. I'm just
addressing the logical fallacy.

------
captainmuon
Small distinction, but I wouldn't ban targeted advertising, but _profiling_
instead.

So a site could absolutely show you ads according to the content you view or
create, and companies can go to a site and ask them to show an ad to certain
users. But it would be banned to pass on any kind of usage data that is not
explicitly destined as public (profile page data, posts), and it would be
forbidden for third parties to create profiles on you.

I think tracking is also not bad per se, I still want to be able to identify
recurring visiters to my site uniquely. It's the centralized advertising
brokerage and profiling that should go away.

~~~
IanSanders
It's fairly easy to forbid, but very challenging to regulate. Yes, it would be
better to do it properly, rather than ban altogether, however chances of that
succeeding are not great. For the end user it's not worth the effort and
resources (and that's who would end up paying for any introduced processes
around this).

------
oxymoran
I wish we could ban all advertising, it all puts money over people no matter
how benign it appears. It’s never going to happen but I can dream.

------
icedchai
I'd argue that targeted advertising is actually a benefit to consumers and
businesses a like. Consumers get ads for things they might actually buy,
businesses waste less advertising spend.

~~~
Retric
Consumers don’t magically get more money to spend so as long as everyone has
access it’s equally effective at scale. The only real difference is it’s
ability to shift where advertising dollars are spent.

~~~
Mirioron
But consumers could get better services and products, because they'll know
that there's a choice to be had. I always go to the same place to have my hair
cut, because it's the only one I know. Maybe there are better options for me
-cheaper, closer, faster, better. But I don't know about them and I'll
probably never know about them as I don't really care enough about it to go
out of my way to look into it. If someone threw alternatives in my face then I
might consider them.

~~~
mLuby
> consumers could get better services and products

Those services and products are not necessarily better, they're just better
advertised. (In fact, they're likely worse.)

~~~
Mirioron
I'm saying better because the consumer now knows of more alternatives. They
have to obviously make their own choice on the matter.

------
moomin
We can’t even get Mickey Mouse out of copyright...

------
trelonid
I think the answer is simple: the Advertising Business has very deep pocket
and can interfere with such laws.

------
morgengold
Targeted advertising should be banned.

There is absolutely no NEED for it. The advertisement industry will tell you
that you want to be targeted so that you get the products you need/want. It's
a twisted argument. I rarely/never got targeted with something useful. If
consumers could freely choose, they always want ad-free stuff.

Massive societal costs come with targeted advertising. Especially
psychological, political and social costs. I see no reason why we should take
these risks collectively for the profit of few.

If "they" want it, they should show the evidence that it has no harmful
effects. The burden of evidence should be on them.

~~~
Nasrudith
Having no need for something is a very dangerous mentality or rationale for
banning anything. You have no need to speak.

Likewise keep in mind the risks of a permission culture and burden of proof.
The Tautology of Schedule 1 drugs set back research over half a century and
indirectly killed many people. Prompted by cynically manipulated hysteria no
less.

------
onion2k
Would banning the ads change much?

Ads are the just visible forefront of surveillance capitalism. They're not the
problem in themselves. In fact, nor is the 'targeted' bit. If I like a page
about 'cars' on Facebook there's no reason whatsoever why Facebook should be
stopped from showing me more adverts for cars. That makes sense. If anything,
I've deliberately informed Facebook that I want more content about cars, and
that includes adverts.

The problem is when Facebook goes further than the information I've directly
given to them for the purpose of them targeting content and start using
everything else I upload in order to target ads at me, like object recognition
in photos I upload, or background conversations while I have the app open
(allegedly). More than that though, the problem I have is when Facebook share
the data the have about me with companies I didn't choose to share it with.
That's what needs to be controlled.

To stop invasions of privacy it makes a lot more sense to ban invading
people's privacy.

------
jccalhoun
I hate obtrusive ads but targeted ads? They are terrible at targeting me. For
every story about Target knowing a woman was pregnant before her family did
there are a ton of stories about irrelevant ads. Lost of people have talked
about getting ads for things they have already bought. Last fall Facebook
suggested I join a group for liberal Asian Christians. I am not Asian or
Christian.

------
eivarv
I think this is another example of wanting to ban a concrete outcome of
problematic behavior. It's the tracking and targeting that should be illegal,
in my opinion.

I've always found it weird that we don't explicitly recognize information
about / profiles on people as property of the subject.

------
ddevault
Why don't we just ban advertising?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Why don 't we just ban advertising?_

Newspapers would need to be subscription-only or patronage-based.

Distributors become kingmakers. If the incumbent's product is in the grocery
stores and the upstart can't advertise, there's no path to entry apart from
winning over a distributor.

Niche products become nonviable. If you can't reach out to your customers,
they have to reach out to you. That requires they know (a) they have the
problem you solve, (b) you exist and (c) you solve the problem they have. That
only happens organically for problems with scale.

~~~
indigochill
>Newspapers would need to be subscription-only or patronage-based.

In my eyes, this would be a win. Journalism ideally should serve the readers.
Aligning the business model (patronage/subscription-only) with the ideal seems
like a good thing in the long run.

Journalism (including but not limited to print) is filled with essentially
noise that wouldn't be economically viable if the publishers had to justify
the value of their content to their audience.

~~~
Mirioron
It also means that people would have a lot less access to information about
what's going on. I wouldn't subscribe to a single newspaper or magazine if it
cost me money. I would guess that a lot of the people I know would do the
same.

Knowing more about the world has been interesting and it probably has
benefited my view of the world, but it hasn't given me anything tangible or
anything I could point to. If anything it has occupied a lot of my time
instead.

~~~
throwaway5466
We're already saturated with information. Even if 99% less filtered through
paywalls that'd be more than enough to satiate anyone's needs.

------
stoev
There is a very important point made in this article that is unfortunately
lost in-between all the other arguments:

“Meanwhile, the ability to track users wherever they go tends to shift ad
revenue from higher quality sites to less reputable ones. “The way the adtech
system works is, it follows the reader from Wired.com all the way down to the
cheapest possible place, the basement bottom-feeders on the internet, and will
serve you the ads there.””

Many people don’t like seeing ads. But they do like receiving the free content
that those ads pay for. And would find it far more annoying if all the content
was locked behind paywalls. Whether we like it or not, digital advertising is
a powerful equaliser that gave free access to vast amounts of information to
anyone from any country and from any income bracket.

But the shift towards audience targeting has stripped high-quality content
creators of their share of the value they create and has instead spread it out
to countless click-baity websites and apps designed entirely to profit of off
targeted advertising.

So diminishing our reliance on targeted advertising is not only great for the
user, it would be truly game-changing for high-quality content providers as
well. For some reason, this mutually beneficial outcome is often forgotten and
I’m glad that Wired pointed it out.

~~~
Nasrudith
The claim about quality sounds incredibly dubious and really gives away the
game is about felony interference with a business model. "High quality" is
downright narcissistic witg delusions of grandeur.

High production value can and is absolute shit. Gell-Mann amnesia effect says
hi. The problem isn't the competition but that the old guard sucked at their
job.

I am no fan of targetted advertising but I despise attempts to control the
internet for the sake of dinosaur propagandists. They need to just die already
and stop crapping out bullshit.

------
lioeters
Obligatory Banksy quote:

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take
a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings
and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply
you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They
are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most
sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it.
They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property
rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they
like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you
see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do
whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock
someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe
them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put
themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even
start asking for theirs.

------
JumpCrisscross
How would such a law define targeted advertising? (Serious question.)

~~~
antris
Any advertisement that is displayed/not displayed based on personal
information of the potential viewer perhaps?

~~~
jasonlotito
And here is the rabbit hole. What is the personal information?

That you personally visited this site? Or is that not personal enough because
we don't know who actually visited this site? Only that a browser visited this
site. And if that's the case, couldn't any profile built out of a browser
browsing many sites fall into the same bucket?

What is personal information?

~~~
antris
Yeah I could see that the knowledge that you have visited the site before and
showing an ad based on that is a form of targeted ad. Personal information
doesn't have to be accurate or complete to fit that definition. I think any
information that falls into the bucket of profiling (answering "who is
watching this ad?"), despite whether an actual real person can be identified
just with that information could still be considered personal information.

To put it in shorter terms, showing ads based on personal information should
be banned, no matter if the information is identifying or not.

------
otabdeveloper2
> Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?

Because then only untargeted advertising will be left, and that's _definitely_
not what you want.

------
marban
Anyone remember ad networks like The Deck? I still find the idea appealing to
try and relaunch on their original premise & values.

------
monadic2
Why stop there, why not ban commercial ads?

------
jkingsbery
As I read the article, these are some ads that I see:

* Cascade - Useful

* Some IBM Power and Storage Webinar - not so useful

* Used Cars - not so useful (I anticipate doing less driving than normal the next few weeks)

* Constant Contact - not so useful

* Nike - not so useful

* Auto insurance - not so useful

There is something funny about an article arguing against targeted advertising
surrounded by ads that do a pretty bad job of targeting.

------
throwaway4787
Why don't we just ban advertising?

------
hrstjrjmrt6smw
I'm a believe in "advertising leads to deadweight economic loss" theory but
admittedly I've benefited greatly in my career working for ad tech
companies...

~~~
coldpie
I'm a believer in "heroine leads to economic loss" theory, but admittedly I've
benefited greatly in my career by selling heroine.

