
A growing disconnect between consumers and businesses over use of customer data - pmoriarty
https://www.rsa.com/en-us/company/news/the-dark-side-of-customer-data
======
goldcd
"Do you want to be forced to watch an advert you have no interest in?"

"Do you want to pay to have your advert shown to somebody who has no interest
in your product?"

The same answer to both these questions is why why ad-personalization is
"good" \- and why TV, printing and all the rest are having their collective
arse handed to them by on-line.

Now we can move onto discussions around fraud, ethics, leaking, micro-
transactions and a million other things - but that study is clearly stupid.

~~~
bad_user
Interest can be inferred from context instead of your history and contextual
targeting is in fact more efficient and doesn’t violate anyone’s privacy.

For example most ads shown by Google Search are based on the search keywords,
since that’s what most advertisers bid on and not a user profile. Google’s
great advantage in this space is that a search shows clear intent, clear need.

I once worked on a platform for serving ads in mobile apps. The apps
themselves can be pretty clear signals of intent. A weight loss app for
example can serve ads for gym or diet-friendly restaurants with great success.
Similarly for publications. I can imagine articles on politics don’t have
valuable context, unless the elections are coming, however howto articles or
articles on home and garden or various hobbies have great context.

Btw, I never click on ads. If personalization was meant to save costs you’d
think these ads companies would have learned to not serve me any ads.

Truth of the matter is that personalization has less to do with cost savings
and more to do with optimizing the message for better conversions. And that’s
what I find unethical ... the use of personal data to personalize a message in
order to make me buy a product that I normally don’t want to buy.

~~~
pnw_hazor
Even if you don't interact with an ad they still deliver their payload right
to your brainbox.

~~~
bad_user
Indeed, that’s how TV advertising works, however we’re talking about brand
advertising right now, as in ads made to make you remember the brand the next
time you’re presented with a choice, like in a supermarket.

Thing is you don’t need personalization for this to work and it can be
counterproductive. Because these ads are designed to make the customers
remember the brand in the future, when they’ll need it and not to fulfill an
immediate need.

Ads companies doing personalization try to paint their algorithms as having
better conversions, however measuring the impact of brand advertising is
really difficult due to the deferred effect and all you can do is to make
educated guesses. And for the labels in a supermarket for example, which is
the vast majority of brand advertising, you don’t need any personalization.

Personalization is meant for the long tail. Like those shitty commercials on
FB trying to sell you indestructible iPhone cases or shitty apps that help you
exercise your brain. Or miracle cures to diabetes, if you were uninspired
enough to join an FB group on such topics.

Such ads do not benefit just from being seen. If you don’t click on them, the
opportunity for the advertiser is gone.

------
robbrown451
I suspect that this is a bit skewed by the fact that targeted ads, as they are
typically done, are a horrible experience that has little transparency and
that the user has very little control over.

Some people are just going to hate all ads no matter what. I'd guess a much
larger number (including me) would see them as a reasonable way to support web
sites and services that they like, if those ads were to give them much better
experience, and that mostly means more control. For one, I suggest that ads
have a way you can express, with a couple clicks (and without leaving the
page) one of the following:

\- I already purchased this

\- I already purchased a competing product

\- I am not interested in this anymore

\- I was never interested in this

\- This ad is too creepy or personal or otherwise makes me uncomfortable

\- this ad is obnoxious / distracting / ugly / disturbing

\- I don't want this displayed because it might reveal something private to an
onlooker (example: gift purchase for spouse)

\- I'm not interested in this product but I might be interested in competing
products

\- I'm in the market for ______________ and I don't mind getting ads for them

\- Thanks for the reminder, not now but maybe later

\- Ads that track me really annoy me

Of course, in addition to collecting this information, it should act on it in
a reasonable way. It would also be nice if it was accompanied by an option to
pay a small, reasonable amount to remove ads.

For whatever reason, ad companies don't seem to want to do this sort of thing.
It may take legislation, which I would certainly get behind.

~~~
lapnitnelav
It makes a lot of sense and I'm sure advertisers would very much like it as
much as you do (in this specific context that is).

I mean, there's a reason this infamous quote is still relevant today: “Half
the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which
half.”

The real issue is the ad-ecosystem is afraid (and rightly so if I may) that
people might try to game the system and would rather not bother.

That and realising that out of your X thousands / millions monthly unique
visitors, only a small percentage are an adequate audience will pelase neither
the publisher nor the ad exchanges. Sure you could fall back to branding
adverts but those are usually of lesser value.

~~~
robbrown451
Just curious, how would you imagine it being gamed? I could certainly imagine
advertisers or competitors gaming it one way or another (which is true today),
but what about regular people? Do you think there is a rational reason someone
would not want to express what they really think?

~~~
lapnitnelav
Well, the main thing I can think off would be people constantly rejecting ads
up until you only get the untargeted ads which means :

1) Less valuable and therefore bad for publishers. 2) Remove users from the
pool available to those ad-tech providers and therefore is a big nono for
them.

I could very well be wrong, so take it for what is worth.

This being said I'd like to highlight that there are 2 main concerns I have
with completely killing the targeted ad industry, namely :

1) The big players will probably find workarounds and be able to sustain
themselves, whereas the smaller players ( local news, niche website etc..)
will probably get decimated or at the very least severely diminished.

2) A shift towards more sneaky advertising, something that isn't clearly
identified as such. For all their issues, display advertising as it stands
today tends to be pretty obvious. If you kill this segment, something else
will fill the gap. It has already started and it might need to be heavily
regulated (as the FTC did for those Instagram / Youtube folks promoting
things).

I honestly believe that there's some room for improvements and it is in the
best interest of the industry to get a grip and rein itself in. But the greed
will prevail I'm afraid and therefore all those scandals might bring in (much
needed tbh) regulations.

~~~
robbrown451
Thanks for the response, and yeah I share your concerns and personally am not
against targeted ads if done well. Many ads I see kind of make me smile,
because they are for things that I actually want I they are "happy things".
(typically amazon or ebay ads: skateboard parts, digital pianos, etc)

I'll bet that the sort of people who just keep insisting on untargeted ads
probably aren't ones to bother with too much. So my hope is that if a system
like I proposed gets adopted (possibly due to regulation) that the great
majority of people would accept targeted ads as long as they "play nice" and
are pretty transparent.

------
politician
If a group is allowed to have sufficient knowledge of an individual through
pervasive surveillance, then they can weaponize that by shifting the
individual's Overton window through micro-messaging.

An altered perspective is the objective of propaganda and targeted advertising
and radicalization. Their methods and objectives are the same: make someone
believe what we want them to believe without their awareness of the effort.

This activity is underhanded and deceptive. It's neither persuasion nor
debate, intentionally so.

~~~
tantalor
> individual's Overton window

Overton window is by definition a property of a group, not an individual.

~~~
politician
Agreed; hence the qualification.

The Overton window is the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse;
restricting to an individual, it may be considered the range of ideas
tolerated in one's private thoughts.

------
throw2016
Behavioral targeting which requires stalking people 24/7 and building invasive
profiles is not only unethical but creepy, deeply dehumanizing and
democratically problematic.

As usual many are too blinded by greed to realize this simple fact, focused on
'innovation' and profit but once you dehumanize your fellow citizens its the
beginning of the end.

The tone of discussion on HN itself on these issues betrays the dehumanization
and alienation from the general concerns of privacy, democracy and ethics.

~~~
lapnitnelav
Would being able to create various anonymous profiles with interests that are
only loosely tied to you be considered less creepy?

I'm an industry insider and while yes, it's how I make money, I can't deny
there are some creepy bits which should be a concern for all.

But unless someone comes up with a better revenue model, most of Internet is
supported by the Ad money. Be it the big players such as Google or Facebook,
or the many modest operations out there.

So we have to figure out a way to make it work, something that shouldn't be
creepy but can still support the ecosystem.

~~~
pnw_hazor
Select ads based on the content/copy, not the individual user.

No need to track me across the internet and planet.

~~~
lapnitnelav
Ideally yeah, that would be the best but the supply and demand might not
always match up. Maybe no advertiser is willing to spend some money on the
content you're being served because it's very irrelevant to them or because
there's simply no advertiser with enough budget to pick up the slack.

So you end up with highly valuable spots and then the rest which is at best
barely enough to cover the costs of the publisher.

I'm not trying to blindly advocate for user targeted ads as the be all end all
of online ads but the reality is that a huge swath of the publishers would
probably disappear, consolidating the web even more.

------
tomlock
Excuse me, everyone saying that we should enjoy ad targeting because we want
to watch "relevant" ads - please consider your own thought process here. I
worked in ad tech for a couple years on the targeting tech side specifically,
and I can emphatically say that what people buying ads are optimizing for is
not relevance, it is reach!

Organizations should exclude people that have already purchased products from
seeing ads for those products - but they almost unanimously do not.

If relevance is what people want, given the data google has about my transport
habits, shouldn't I see zero car ads? Or, is perhaps that too creepy? Or
maybe, google has no incentive to make advertisers pay less money on useless,
irrelevant ads. Or, maybe the marketing manager who paid for the ads doesn't
care to optimize their spend because the CMO doesn't care to - both of them
want to say they're responsible for the largest budgets and BIGGEST audiences
ever (which by the way is the reason TV ad campaigns are still so prevalent,
they look good on resumes).

Do marketers have time to understand complex ML models with hundreds of
variables? No. Biggest audience possible, please and thank you.

------
crushcrashcrush
Completely un-scientific analysis; people don’t mind ad targeting if it’s
relevant to them. Example - don’t show me ads for swim suits and beach
umbrellas if I live in Montana.

What people object to is the detailed, strange and onerous collection and
dissemination of this data - eg, the location data controversy...

~~~
BucketSort
Actually, from my experience, the people that get creeped out by this get
creeped out the most when an ad is extremely relevant to them. I would also
like to see a baseline of how many people think ads in general are immoral. We
find it normal, having grown up with it, but I personally detest the constant
psychological manipulation waged by ads in general. It gets even worse when
those ads are personalized.

~~~
PavlovsCat
I'm actively reading ads since puberty or so, that is, I look at what they're
saying, what they're trying to imply, compare with the reality, and what they
generally are doing to language and communication. I used to consider it just
being a smartass prick, a hairsplitting, literally-taking party pooper... but
without knowing it, since I can think I tried all I could to innoculate myself
against this:

> Because we are lied to all the time, in ways so routine they are beneath
> conscious notice, even the most direct lies are losing their power to shock
> us.

\-- Charles Eisenstein, [https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-ubiquitous-
matrix-o...](https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-ubiquitous-matrix-of-
lies/)

I take many things into account, but the judgement of those who aren't that
active and hostile in their interaction, who just soak in it, is not one of
those things. That many people do see a problem makes me think better of them,
but it doesn't influence my opinion of the ad landscape, that's something
between me and the ads.

------
spinach
Targeted ads can become creepy and offensive in lots of circumstances, such as
when a woman who was pregnant has a miscarriage and still receives ads about
baby items.

------
pnw_hazor
100% of online advertisers and publishers that use online ad networks believe
ad-blockers and tracker blockers are immoral.

Online ads are cross-site attacks directed against viewers/users. They are
visual or textual hacks that strive to cause targeted users to take actions
they might not otherwise take.

edit: speaking generally about online ad networks, real-time bidding
providers, campaign aggregators, and so on.

~~~
omarchowdhury
> to take actions they might not otherwise take.

This assumes all advertising is coercive.

~~~
pnw_hazor
Okay only some advertising may be coercive, such as, ads that try to change my
mind, ads that try to convince me to buy something I might not have bought
otherwise, or ads that try to encourage me to continue to act or feel in
certain way.

~~~
omarchowdhury
If you don't want to participate in the marketplace then block the ads.

~~~
pnw_hazor
I do. And, some sites do their best to remind how immoral I am for doing so.

If the site is an ad-block denier, I just add them to my blacklist and move on
with my life.

------
pnw_hazor
Weird how fast this story is falling off the front page of HN.

I wonder how many HN readers, patrons, or sponsors earn big dollars inventing,
implementing, or promoting the technology that makes people feel that online
advertising as we know it is immoral.

------
Cyclone_
17% believe it's moral..but what were the options, e.g. was it something like
moral vs. Immoral or was not sure an option? People might have very different
impressions of what constitutes ad-targeting, e.g. technically going to a
bikes website and showing a bike ad would be a form of targeting, not as
invasive as tracking a person around the web. I would like to see a question
asked like, should companies keep track of what sites you've visited so they
can better advertise to you? IMO that would give a clearer picture of the
situation.

------
mruts
I’m sure if you rephrased the question you would get much different results.
It’s pretty easy to prime people to answer a certain way, especially by
mentioning the word “immoral.”

“Do you want to see relevant ads?”

“Would you like to see ads for products you would never buy?”

~~~
pnw_hazor
I have a couple:

Would you like to see ads deliberately selected to trigger an emotional
response in you to help overcome your rational resistance to buying a product?

Do you think designing ads that take advantage of your emotions to sell
garbage you don't need is moral?

~~~
mruts
I mean, those are certainly questions you could ask. I'm just pointing out
that you can get people to answer any which way by the phrasing. My wife is a
research psychologist who designs studies and comes up with various questions
to test a certain hypothesis. It's very difficult to neutralize priming by how
questions are phrased. You often need to ask the question in a variety of ways
to get unbiased results.

------
gammateam
And this is why we have a represenative democracy instead of direct ones

Let represenatives and legislative assistants do the real research before
passing some emotion based law so often

------
darawk
Why exactly is ad customization immoral?

~~~
345gxsagdf
Ah, an ad person. I'm sure you can see this from the inside, the advertising
industry has built a large surveillance apparatus in order to sell us thing we
don't need. The whole selling things we don't need is already immoral -- but
that's a general criticism against advertising and marketing; In this case we
have something already dubious turned into a panopticon nightmare. As we grow
closer to our technology, this technology is constantly spying on us to order
to optimize selling us things we don't need.

You can't build trust in technology when that same technology is grassing you
out to every huckster who wants to pour junk into your eyeballs.

~~~
darawk
> Ah, an ad person.

I don't work in advertising.

> the advertising industry has built a large surveillance apparatus in order
> to sell us thing we don't need. The whole selling things we don't need is
> already immoral -- but that's a general criticism against advertising and
> marketing; In this case we have something already dubious turned into a
> panopticon nightmare. As we grow closer to our technology, this technology
> is constantly spying on us to order to optimize selling us things we don't
> need.

That's all a bunch of cute stuff to say, but where's the nightmare? Thinks
seem pretty good to me. Do you want to go back 50 years? 100? Which point in
history was _not_ a nightmare, to which you'd like to return?

