(a discussion of ads as funding for websites, and the RTB privacy questions from above)
NewPipe's position on advertising
The NewPipe project recently had a few debates on advertising, its ethics and how Team NewPipe decides whether or not a certain form of advertising is acceptable.
In this article, we present our position on advertising in general, show the difference between ethical and unethical advertising, and explain why we do not intend to support technologies like SponsorBlock.
Why we don’t like (conventional) online advertising
Companies which engage in targeted advertising have developed an insane number of techniques to gather as much personal data as possible (or, rather, to guess about the personalities of natural persons in order to predict their actions and influence them), which is nowadays sold in real-time auctions to an indeterminably large number of companies. Users have little to no control over whether their data is sent to any of these companies, and usually have no control over their data once it has been sold. This is not a conspiracy theory; it’s the world we live in, unfortunately.
The introduction of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has helped mitigate some of these effects. At least the major websites which operate within the EU offer ways to opt out. The EU data protection agencies have published standards and guidelines, stating that tracking, for the purpose of advertising or for any another reason, is only legally possible if users provide their informed consent. Informed consent means that you must actively opt in, i.e., you must click a button, switch a slider or something like that in order to legally give your consent.
Since the GDPR came into force in 2018, and following some court decisions in the meantime, more and more websites have been trying to comply with those laws, and now offer users a choice through banners. Most of them are not very good yet. More often than not, they employ what UI designers refer to as dark patterns. For instance, they might have a large, highlighted “Accept all” button, whereas “Reject all” requires additional clicks. Also, even if the websites no longer actively insert tracking code, they often still embed data from advertising companies like Google, such as fonts, which still load data from foreign servers, and thus, allow tracking to take place. If you have ever embedded such files on a website yourself, did you read the privacy policies of these services?
Though less of a concern nowadays, another problem with online advertisements is that even if they don’t track you, because of real-time bidding and a lack of proper technological and editorial oversight, malicious (phishing, malware distribution, misinformation), distracting (such as needless animations or videos) and bandwidth-wasting (where the advertising data is significantly larger than the actual content) advertisements are the norm, not the exception.
At present, it can still be very hard to exercise your basic digital rights, such as the right of access by the data subject, the right to rectification or the right to erasure (a.k.a. right to be forgotten), against advertising companies. Given the sheer number of companies online services work with, and the fact that they just “may” have been given data (due to real-time bidding), it’s a lot of work to contact all these data processors, explain who you are, and request information, correction or deletion of your data.
Online services which employ advertising should understand one central point: advertising, per se, is not the issue. Many people realize that advertising is a convenient way to fund a service. Often, it might be the only option to provide content to the public and avoid limiting a service to subscribers only, though alternatives should be preferred if available. In the field of journalism for example, non-profit journalism is still an exception almost everywhere despite its clear advantages. But does that mean advertisements must be distracting, privacy-invasive, targeted, or not even remotely related to the content?
The answer is “No”. Online services have let tracking companies like Google, Facebook and thousands of other, smaller ones do whatever they want. They take advantage of the technical possibilities of having users visit websites, which provide them with a backchannel to collect data, instead of magazines, newspapers or TV, where they must distribute the content without such a backchannel. They sell their users.
But they didn’t have to. If only the major news companies had said “we want advertising, but these are our rules”, or created their own, privacy-respecting business instead of letting huge corporations take over their websites, companies like the ones mentioned before might never have grown this large, and would not have been handling more money than some small countries today.
Advertising funds “free” services
We’ve mentioned it before: advertising is a core component in the funding of many web services. Either there are no alternatives, or those alternatives don’t generate the same revenue and thus might not be viable for financial reasons.
As many online platforms, especially journalistic ones, realize now, online advertising doesn’t cut it anymore. The giant tech companies from the U.S. dominate the market. Newspapers’ own advertising departments have almost no chance to compete with them anymore. Hence, we see a growing dependency on the large oligopoly that online advertising has become.
It remains questionable whether services that employ advertising to finance themselves will be able to retain that model in the future. Instead, it seems like companies demand more and more data from the services’ users, but don’t increase the revenue for the service operators proportionately, and sometimes even decrease it.
For users, this is a nasty situation: their data is sold, sometimes even in real-time, to large, opaque advertising networks. They have to bear obtrusive, sometimes even malicious ads, which use up bandwidth and are often of little to no relevance to them. On the other hand, operators frivolously sell their users’ data to advertising companies, but are not able to sustain their services this way.
There must be better approaches, right?
(more)
https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/newpipe-and-online-advertising/
