First, the obvious lesson: everyone install an ad blocker.
Secondly, my own anecdote: at work I cannot install an ad blocker, nor manage other aspects of being tracked online.
As part of that employment, I recently had to do some research on equity-release products/reverse mortgages. These are products targeted at the elderly.
I am not elderly, despite what my 20 year old sister in-law might say :p
My workplace online advertising experience has now become an endless omnipresent stream of older couples looking wistfully out into the sunset, perhaps on a boat or over an ocean, or smiling lovingly into each others faces in that aspirational retirement way, always with the message: sell us the equity in your home so your life can be like this.
And it's not just instagram. It's following me everywhere.
Anecdote 2:my mother before she died, was basically a paranoid schizophrenic. Imagine, for a second, the subjective experience the internet advertising system has on these people and their families.
I had an eye opening conversation with her a few years ago, where she proclaimed that "they" were watching her through the computer, and she knew because of the coincidences in how the content changed across the internet to target her specifically.
I had the failed experience of trying to explain what was going on, and the observation that, dismally, she was essentially, on some level, right. The ability to make a mentally ill person's ramblings essentially correct is a sobering dystopian realization...
Blocking ads within mobile apps is almost impossible. Try blocking the pre-rolls in Facebook videos on mobile. And you’d need to mitm instagram’s mobile api and modify the api responses to filter out the sponsored ads.
I personally am fine with the inconvenience of using the web browser on mobile, instead of using apps. That way, I have more control (not complete control though) on what information these companies get. I don't think that would work easily with Instagram (which famously doesn't provide a web interface for uploading content and interacting within the platform, AFAIK). But it works with FB (which I reluctantly use for certain purposes to reach certain "for the greater good" audiences), Google products and such. Firefox Focus, private windows and tabs, content blockers — they all help to a good extent in preventing more information from being collected and mined. For all we know, mobile apps that interact with photos on the device are mining metadata even from photos that are not uploaded (from EXIF information) to "provide a better experience for users". When I use a browser, I know for sure that I'm giving the site access only to the photos of my choice and only during the span of time I actually do the act of uploading photos, and not to everything and not at all times while using that platform.
Apps are a lot more convenient, and most users wouldn't do what I do. So this is a compromise of sorts.
Well, indeed. If you can't find a way to go one-level-up, that is to say, blocking at a router/network, hardware, or OS whitelist/blacklist type situation, i'd respond that the responsible thing to do is to blacklist the app.
I realise of course that not everyone will like that response, but i'd also say as non-flippantly as possible, that mature responsibility is, almost by definition, not participating in things you might otherwise wish to because of higher-order principal-based concerns.
Secondly, my own anecdote: at work I cannot install an ad blocker, nor manage other aspects of being tracked online.
As part of that employment, I recently had to do some research on equity-release products/reverse mortgages. These are products targeted at the elderly.
I am not elderly, despite what my 20 year old sister in-law might say :p
My workplace online advertising experience has now become an endless omnipresent stream of older couples looking wistfully out into the sunset, perhaps on a boat or over an ocean, or smiling lovingly into each others faces in that aspirational retirement way, always with the message: sell us the equity in your home so your life can be like this.
And it's not just instagram. It's following me everywhere.
Anecdote 2:my mother before she died, was basically a paranoid schizophrenic. Imagine, for a second, the subjective experience the internet advertising system has on these people and their families.
I had an eye opening conversation with her a few years ago, where she proclaimed that "they" were watching her through the computer, and she knew because of the coincidences in how the content changed across the internet to target her specifically.
I had the failed experience of trying to explain what was going on, and the observation that, dismally, she was essentially, on some level, right. The ability to make a mentally ill person's ramblings essentially correct is a sobering dystopian realization...