And perhaps the terrifying privacy implications of such a system.
When I saw one on Facebook I was insulted, because Facebook thinks I am the kind of person who is so stupid they believe in them. You can write this of as not actual harm because it is only emotions, but it had a negative impact on me, which I consider actual harm.
The other issue is information leakage. If you want to show an article on your phone to a buddy you don't want the ads to be for adult diapers.
Advertisers and publishers don't really want tracking and data collection. It carries huge costs (technical as well as social) with very little benefit for advertising. Advertisers want statistically significant and unbiased population samples, and that's not something you can arrive at by blindly throwing more data at it.
Data collection by Google et al., is really because they eventually want to pivot from adtech to govtech - think "social credit" or "Minority Report". From their vantage point of course it's a much more lucrative and advantageous place to be than a mere seller of internet clickbait.
Think about the “filter bubble” effect that we experience on platforms like YouTube where we are always being “recommended” content that confirms our pre-existing beliefs.
Targeted advertising is no different except that it follows you across multiple devices and multiple online platforms in order to sell your attention to the highest bidder.
This might be fine if you are a capable, healthy and intelligent individual seeing ads for computer parts or shoes. What about the recovering alcoholic who is being “targeted” by alcohol advertising? Or the homeless schizophrenic girl I worked with a while ago who couldn’t escape a constant barrage of ads for highly addictive online gambling products?
Our brains are all wired differently and not everyone has the same level of “free will” as you do. The entire purpose of the advertising industry is to push you away from reasoned decision making and towards compulsive consumption.
As adtech becomes better at exploiting our psychological weaknesses and influencing human behaviour, I worry that we will not only see an increase in negative outcomes for the most vulnerable among us - but also an increase in mental illness among the general population as our borderline, compulsive and narcissistic traits are enabled and encouraged by soulless algorithms.
The Cambridge analyticas and the Russian bots happened because the average internet user was not paying attention to ad tech.
We need better education around ad tech, we need more people to understand what these ad companies are enabling so more average internet users can stay better protected, and make better and more informed choices.
Kudos to you for your recovery and sobriety!
TLDR: The ad industry promotes shit content, finances fake news, and wastes my resources.
For myself, I enjoy their failures. It's better to be wrongly identified.
And that ad for adult diapers alongside another for a plausibly deniable grape de-seeding utensil... More entropy FTW!
> As described above, FLoC cohorts shouldn’t work as identifiers by themselves. However, any company able to identify a user in other ways—say, by offering “log in with Google” services to sites around the Internet—will be able to tie the information it learns from FLoC to the user’s profile.
I don't see why the existence of alcohol should mean SaaS software companies shouldn't be able to reach their target market with ads.
It sounds like from your experience, the concept of FLoC from the main article is exactly where Google and other want to be? They want legit population samples versus the ‘noise’ of huge amounts of random individual use data?
But when they are trying to market it to us as users, as a ‘privacy win’, that’s hard to swallow when you’re saying their end goal is some sort of ‘govtech’ or ‘social credit’ system.
Yes, if it can be made into some objective standard, and not just another "trust me, I'm Google".
> But when they are trying to market it to us as users, as a ‘privacy win’, that’s hard to swallow when you’re saying their end goal is some sort of ‘govtech’ or ‘social credit’ system.
Yes, because Google is not just an adtech company. Obviously they are more than that. (Or at least they want to be.)