They use underhanded, arguably immoral, technological tricks that most general internet users might not even be aware of, much less understand how to defend themselves. It has nothing to do with the fact they never experienced the ‘old’ internet, they just don’t understand how or why they are being taken advantage of.

The HN crowd isn’t mad about obscene privacy practices because of nostalgia. They’re mad about it because they understand the actual technological mechanisms behind it, and how they work. And why the way big advertising exploits those mechanisms is so f’ed up.

Edit: Sorry, maybe I’m getting too angry. I think I see what you were going for, about many HN frequenters pining for the days of old. But I don’t agree with the idea that general internet users who weren’t online back then are okay with the current state of big advertising tracking technology. I think they just have no idea how or why it works.

I think many people are confused and frustrated that seemingly every random site or social media app they use seems to be aware of everything they do and look at online.

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.

Kudos to you for your recovery and sobriety!

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

TLDR: The ad industry promotes shit content, finances fake news, and wastes my resources.

And perhaps the terrifying privacy implications of such a system.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220098

Yeah, my original post is not very clear about this. I'm not trying to argue that general modern internet users like the targeted advertising ecosystem. Instead, reading through some of the discussions here -- and past discussions of similar topics -- many of them at some point feature one user saying "tbh, i think it's fine if getting rid of targeted ads means losing a lot of revenue, because the old internet did just fine without all that revenue". But "how appealing is the old internet to modern internet users?" is a different question. And it's one where, I think, HN users overestimate the number of people that agree with them. My overall suggestion is that it's good to check whether or not this assumption is getting made somewhere along the way in these kinds of arguments, because I think for a lot of HN users, it is getting made.

I suspect you might be right. Modern internet users probably do prefer the ‘new’ web to the ‘old’ web.

As someone who experienced the ‘old’ web and the ‘new’ web I wouldn’t disagree. The old web mostly sucked. Everything looked like shit, and I certainly much prefer the more advanced, more pleasing looking websites of modern times.

But we don’t all have nostalgia for the old web because it looked good. It’s because it was new, and exciting, and we were all using dial-up modems. It was the ‘wild west’.

But that’s all unrelated to the topic at hand, general internet users being target and exploited, against their will. I need to look into FLoC more, as the concept is still new to me. On the surface it at least sounds marginally better. But only if it is easy to deny sites access to my local sandboxed data. If every website presents me with a pop up to ‘allow’ or ‘deny’ access to my FLoC data, similar to the GDPR cookie pop ups we’ve become accustomed to, I’d probably accept that as a small ‘win’.

But as it stands now, most of my friends and family when I ask them, are frightened and confused as to how every freaking place they go on the web, somehow knows about the stuff they searched on Google last week. The feeling of some obscure, all knowing power, tracking their every move online is stressful.

I try to instruct them on ways they can protect themselves. They are mostly easy, and have negligible downsides, but they are not immediately obvious to people outside the HN crowd.

The main things I recommend are A) Use Firefox B) Use 1.1.1.1 (free) or similar VPN service C) Do most of your search’s in DuckDuckGo.

That’s not a foolproof strategy, but it’s one that is super easy, and only takes the effort of downloading a few new apps. These steps alone will cause any user to very quickly to regain a huge amount of privacy, stop seeing targeted ads, and their overall internet experience will be virtually indistinguishable.

Do you remember how f'in hard it was to find stuff online back when a) there was less stuff online and b) you had to use a metasearch engine like Metafind or Dogpile to aggregate the terrible results from multiple engines into something remotely useful? Remember surfing because actively searching fog data was next to impossible? Remember 300ms-per-hop latency and being impressed by 6KB/sec downloads, taking a week to download a Linux distro and rarely upgrading your packages because it took forever? Remember that day in 1998 when the world changed because some Stanford project called 'Google' appeared? I do. I won't go back. I have a few PDP-8s and a PDP-11/03 and various 8-bit micros and some Teletypes and 80s-90s UNIX systems and Winboxen if I want to go back to the old days. They're not dead, they're still here and they still do exactly what little they did in the past. I don't love how dystopian tech has become, but it's a ton more useful to me and most other people than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago.

My approach here is just stay off the internet. Go outside. Play board games. Imagine there was a world before computers and people entertained themselves just fine

To abuse a metaphor, we're not advocating throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but that bathwater still _has to go._

You may want to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008...

None of this would be possible without ads. No one is going to pay for all that.

All of the listed services will still be there, they just won't be making excess profits for their owners.

Which is exactly what FLoC is a step towards fixing. It may not be as perfect as not having any targeted ads at all, but it's a much better than the current status quo

As for targeted ads, I would argue that most advertising would be non-viable without it. Yes, something like Coca-Cola won't care, but your average small business owner who needs to target a specific niche will basically be unable to advertise it.

Imagine I build an app specifically for people into biking, or into animal crossing, or into some other small niche that's less than 0.1% of the population. How do you propose I grow my audience without any sort of targeting at all?

The cases you state can easily be marketed to using contextual targeting, e.g. displaying ads on biking websites or communities or individual pages that contain the keyword "Animal Crossing". All of that is already possible and doesn't require any data on the user.

Recipes and guides would not be possible without ads???

YouTube, TikTok, Twitter is mostly user generated content. You really can't imagine a world were hosting for user-generated content is not funded with ads???

Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit were all magical. Digg was also magical but it died out when tried to scoop returns in inelegant way.

Rich people did not become rich and don't stay rich by giving money away. When Youtube was advertiser unfriendly it was magical but it was also burning a billion $ a quarter, the same goes for all those "evil" companies. It all was a scheme to create and grow a market up until they run out of people. When they run out of people, it's time to make the money back out of it. Hmm, maybe I should remove the " " of "evil" but I am not sure. What was the alternative? The French "internet" maybe, but it died if in the face of capital fuelled frenzy of the American internet.

BTW, that's why I am an Apple fanboy, I like the idea of directly paid services. The relationship is simpler.

Web service should be nationalized, and so should Chrome.

Those "rich people" are in the position they are due to consumer ignorance and apathy, but above all, they are our guests at the trough.

Show me someone complaining about over-regulation, and I'll show you someone whos being a hog.

Except you don't really own your hardware :(

As far as I am free to do whatever I want with the hardware I purchased, no matter how hard it is to do it, I do own it.

Let me put it this way, I can't put diesel in my petrol car in the sense that it wouldn't work because the manufacturer did not develop their engine to run on any fuel. They also made the refuelling hole in different size. This doesn\t mean that I do not own the car, if I feel so I can modify it to work with the fuel I like. Actually, it's widespread to install kits to make the car work with Propane but if I really want to I can convert it to electric or diesel too.

The same goes with any Apple product. Want to make the hardware do something that is not designed to do or actively prevented doing it? Hack your device. You own it. As long as the police doesn't knock on the door due to me fiddling with Apple made device, I do own it.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

https://github.com/WICG/floc describes something open source and running on the client. Will that be sufficient, or is there additional disclosure you'd like to see?

It enhances the ability to fingerprint me, effectively exposing my browsing history.

If Google offered it as an "opt in", giving me some reward for sharing my personal information that Google sells to advertisers, then that is a fair deal. In return for some form of sharing the revenue, Google gets to sell my information.

But that's not the model. It's still the "you're a product" model where Google not only gets to sell my search history, but now also continues to sell my browsing history.

I can see how it benefits Google and how it gives them/you something to sell to advertisers, but what's in it for me?

What you get in return is that ad-supported sites you visit are better funded because they can show better-targeted advertising.

The devil is in the detail. So if FLoC and new third party tools to subvert FLoC became too mainstream, then I would expect Google to act in its own interest and provide value-added back-end services. Just as has happened with Android AOSP and Play Services.

Until then though, I feel FLoC being both client-side and open-source would be an improvement on the status quo

.. unaccountable to them storing their personal information. Period.

It's okay to say that you personally don't believe in a right to privacy or don't believe that it's an issue to vacuum up the data of own's own citizens, etc, but what I don't understand is saying that other people are paranoid elitists if they hold the view that they think it's wrong to spy on citizens. It seems incredibly uncharitable.

Furthermore your comment reads like you're addressing an argument the GP never made. What's the relevance of this section:

> Does the average voter care enough to vote one way or other for it? I would suspect not.. they have bigger problems to deal with and they seem ok with government knowing something about them.

The GP never insinuated that the average voter cares about such things (indeed by mentioning that the HN userbase does that implies that the general population does not otherwise it would not be worth mentioning)

Her response was "No thank you. I like the ads. Sometimes I see things I like".

On a more positive note, I bought my 81 year-old Dad 'Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World' for his birthday in January. He's so knocked out by it that he sends me PDF scans of certain pages. So probably the way to go is starting with a little covert education.

Ask her if she would give up on the ads that she sometimes likes if she learned that ad tech makes us addicted to our computers, more socially isolated, less likely to connect to our family and community, etc. IOW, ask her if she would trade the ads on Youtube for better quality time with her children and (potential?) grandchildren.

Giving in to ads because "some ads are nice" is no different to think that a diet based only on heavily processed foods are nice because "some of it taste good".

"The ads are annoying" is the last of the problem with the ad-based economy. People do become ad-blind after a while. The problem is all the tracking, profiling and the "eyeball-based website funding model".

Anyway, back to the topic... Why are you assuming the user is not intelligent/capable of making an informed choice ? Most people by now (we are talking about Internet users after all here) already know the implications of these ads towards their privacy. Yet 9/10 times they will choose convenience over it.

You are also assuming that time spent on YouTube is eating on time they would (rather??) spend on their families. What if the user watches Youtube at night when the family is asleep?

On to advertising. Some ads are indeed useful, despite of their tracking-based nature. Some are informational. Some are non-intrusive at all. I can't tell you how many times I've taken up a promo (on products I already use) because of a simple ad.

Putting all ads on the same bandwagon hurts the players who just care about serving marketing info and nothing more.

Foregoing ad-funded products or even ads themselves is not a binary decision. We need to get away from this mentality.

Do you want to have ads without tracking to fund the development of your service? Fine. Is that the case with Youtube?

Perhaps it’s because the net of the past used to be a “wild frontier” not owned by a couple companies is why people have nostalgia. Those companies can make major decisions for the web based on solely on securing their own profit.

A tech-unsavvy user often dislikes "targeted advertising", as much as I could observe. For one, for the weird cross-media targeting effects, when a person sees the same ads, or ads about the same thing, like a fridge, following the user on many unrelated sites. It's most annoying when this keeps happening after the user has bought a fridge, and is unlikely to buy another just yet.

A less recognized but more annoying effect of ads is that they consume as much CPU and network latency as possible without making some sites outright unusable. The user says: see, I have this new and powerful computer, and this new and fast network thingie — why is the internet so slow? This is when installing even a simple ad-blocking extension shows the difference very vividly.

BTW I think that truly targeted ads can be useful — such laser-precision ads in Facebook showed me a few niche communities that interested me, e.g. dedicated to chiptune music creation. But most ads I see when I browse without ad-blocking are pretty lame, maybe 2% are well-targeted (and then I click on them). I keep a separate browser profile without ad-blocking to see what the internet is like for a vanilla user. OTOH the amount of tracking normally present on innocuous sites is surprisingly large, and slows things down rather unpleasantly, even if the ads are served instantly.

So yes, the internet full of ads is the norm for last 20+ years, and no, "normal users" do notice the impact of it.

On the contrary, the most likely moment any random person online is to buy a fridge is just after they bought one: we know they had a need + awareness of the desired specs + intent to buy, so it's really just a question of convincing them that fridge B is better than the one they bought.

Buyer's Remorse is basically free in many countries, ex 14 days to return item in the EU.

The hatred of targeted advertising comes more out of what it systemically enables, and incentivizes. The mapping and realtime exploitation of UUID like-metadata collected through ubiquitous surveillance. Dossiers were the things of novels and intelligence agencies, nowadays marketers have sold people (even those like you) that somehow this gratuitous invasion of your privacy is normal, desirable, acceptable, and even more insidiously, always was.

Nothing could be further from the truth. You now have multiple dossier's that will follow you around the world. Some governments will deny you entry unless you surrender access to any social media accounts.

None of what is normal about the web today was ever at all what made the early web magical. You weren't monetized. You were reaching out and leaving something of yourself out there, and finding that there were like minded individuals to you the world over!

You also had the cloak of anonymity. Anything on the net was a non-issue. Controversial viewpoint? Whatever. Really need some insight on XYZ? Trawl the BBS's or a chat room.

Nothing was as centralized as it is now. People didn't do daft things like trying to put things you shouldn't on a fundamentally insecure network. People weren't so dependent on things that the ne net was more... Relaxed. Not a full time deal.

I have no illusions the magic has faded not just due to age and familiarity, but to what it has become, and what it has enabled the world to become.

They're stuck in the mid 2000s, in all the best ways.

Technologically they're ancient (usually HTML tables), the amount of users grow slowly (if at all) and are limited to maximum a few thousand (usually just a few hundred actively using the forums though). Users won't risk their treasured accounts by acting badly, and since very few join private trackers for the forums you get a wide specter of different people participating, in their different ways.

Some users are silly and post memes, others post long and thought through replies, often in the same thread. Everything is discussed, from politics to the latest movie. There's no "karma" to earn.

After a while you start recognizing the same people. I'm really glad I still have access to it, otherwise I would feel kinda lost in today's internet, where you need to find a new site/subreddit for every topic. No tracking either for that matter.

In other words, you can track the normies all you want as long as your app doesn't do something "creepy" that reveals how much it really does know about them

It strikes me that, as you say, even "normies" don't like tracking.

I think the problem is when sleek services obfuscate how they work and users don't understand what happens.

The average "normie" doesn't realise that, by default, a cloud service provider sees all their data in the clear. They assume it's somehow private, but haven't seen behind the veil to understand how services work. And the increasing complexity of the tech stack means understanding it becomes harder and harder every day that goes by.

It sounds pseudo-englightening without any substance. Ok, you've observed this meta aspect of HN. So, what?

I agree that it's not a very deep observation, or maybe even not true. But it 1) seems to explain several different reactions I see on Hacker News, and 2) it illustrates a trap that I, as a Hacker News user, find myself falling into without realizing: the belief that the thing I want is the thing that other people want. To me, it's good to be aware of that.

Isn't that tautological? "The average person" knows nothing (or almost nothing) about the Internet of 20 years ago.

This may be the case, but i don't think we can draw the conclusion from that that they like the new internet, only that we dont know if they do. Which is a very different conclusion

That said, i think the real reason is that the internet sold out and went corporate. I think its pretty similar to what happens when an indie band makes it mainstream - all the original fans tend to hate the change.

I feel nostalgia for lower gini coefficients and less widespread surveillance.

Even if my point of view is in the minority on this issue, I do not regret it at all.

Most of the web tech are open source so it's just a matter of forking an existing tech and convincing others to use your thing instead. If your thing breaks half the existing workflows that's your problem, not others'

I've learned that the mainstream sees these and thinks "bot" or "fake" websites.

It took me quite a while to understand what they were saying, which was that my designs, ones that I'd considered minimalist, just plain sucked.