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This thread perfectly captures the argument of modern ad tech that says capital is more important than humane practices. If privacy is a human right, then it's more important to establish fair, safe, operation of these systems then it is to support endless growth. eric_seufert/1399505062741909506
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Humans first, businesses' ability to growth hack 2nd. That may not be how the system works now, but that doesn't mean it can't work that way.
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It shouldn't be a shocking stance to say that we should build ad tech systems to prioritize avoiding discrimination, dark patterns, manipulative ways of acquiring consent, and invasive tracking without user permission, but it apparently is...
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And that's because many of us have had our brains poisoned by the ultra wealthy leaders of the market to believe that anything that makes capital generation harder is inherently bad. But for 99.99% if humans, we're better off without vast mechanism of commercialized surveillance.
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Modern capitalism says that the best way to organize our society is to prioritize and privilege any process that accelerates the creation of more money, even over people's lives, so it isn't shocking that is how ad tech has organized... But that doesn't mean it is just or right.
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I'm not saying contextual works as well as behavioral advertising for every company. Maybe it does, maybe not. But that's not really relevant to the majority of critiques against behavioral individualized ad targeting. They are not capitalist-based critiques, they are ethical.
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Ad tech is a failure as a capitalist structure too mind you. It is riddled with fake users, fake sites, fake ads, fake verification, scams to steal user data and potentially as much as 90% of ads shown fraudulently in one form or another, depending on whose ruler you use...
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But problems most of us have w/individualized cross site behavioral tracking are not problems of marketplace structure, flow of capital, or viability... They're problems w/ how it enables discrimination, invades privacy w/out consent and fails to operate w/any ethical constraints
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Therefore improvements to ad tech need to be on that basis, improvements to how it treats people & the ethical constraints that now must be baked in because the market has failed to materialize them willingly. Let's not confuse that with questions of money generation efficiency.