mdhardeman

I think one of the great signals of good ethical behavior is the person who'll refuse to build a thing that they know should not exist, even when offered a great reward if they'll do so.

One thing I've noticed about far too many people in tech is that they all seem to believe that those not in tech are stupid.

Many of them are not stupid. On average, half of them are above average. They're just uninformed and busy with their own lives.

I'm convinced the parents of the US, and in turn broad bipartisan support, could get behind some sane legislation on this stuff if a massive dump like the New York Times one were deanonymized and focused on kids.

It's not their fault they're exploiting a system that allows what they are doing.

They're not good people, but if it weren't this set of people, another would take their place. The world is rife with opportunity for people of low morals.

It is society's fault that we have not explicitly codified what will not be allowed and constructed the right laws and enforcement to ensure that violators are ruinously punished.

Doesn't help at all.

Privacy of varying levels is and has been a functional requirement for smooth working of free society.

Economic disparities make the impact of lower levels of overall societal privacy have a disproportionate negative impact to those on the lower end of the scale.

This is a non-starter for achieving the end result.

There's enough of a delta in both the money paid for online advertising of a target nature and in the better results that yields for the advertisers for them to fund a very rapid turn-over.

There's enough money in it that if they must, they'll be able and willing to buy their way past any unionization issues.

Precisely. And then extend it further. Make advertisers responsible for the behavior of the ad marketplaces, ad tech, ad venues they're paying.

Make their only defense be cooperation in prosecuting the offending party.

The way to criminalize it properly is to create a presumption of criminal activity when an advertiser benefits from ad targeting. Literally anything more than the advertiser choosing what sites to appear on should be made criminal. No other criteria allowed.

They don't care. Until you can show them you know how often they're on Grindr and where their tricks live.

Or that they got a prescription filled. For Valtrex.

What would be helpful -- but that I am adamantly against -- would be tons of data drops, in communities across the nation, of local church leaders and local community leaders.

Civilized societies don't tolerate "vampires" and cannibals walking among them (or lording from on high). They eliminate them. Eventually the people will wake up.

I have been a Wacom customer for years.

I'm not a graphic artist, but I hate mouse cords and hate having to recharge mice or deal with batteries.

So a series of Wacom "puck" mice on one (over the years, several) of their digitizer tablets has been my mouse substitute at my desktop. I bought the high end ones. On an average of every 3 to 4 years.

They stopped making the puck several years ago. Mine was starting to wear out, so I finally made the leap to Logitech's G703 and the Logitech G PowerPlay inductive mat. So same benefit -- the mouse is just magically always charged.

If I hadn't already switched, I would have anyway after the Wacom selling data thing...

The Work Number's entire sales pitch is... "We'll accept the data from you for free. You can give our our number and website to anyone who calls into your HR looking for employment reference, employment verification, etc. We'll field those calls for you."

They don't pay for the paystub data. The employers give it to them.

Although it's an invasion of privacy, to be sure, it actually does have some benefits for the employee.

In places outside San Fran, where people actually get conforming mortgages, having your data in The Work Number's database automates and cuts out the employment & income verification so that you don't have to track down records and submit manually and can potentially skip multiple must-connect phone calls between the lender and employer.

What we actually need in a practical sense is Kindle Unlimited but for web content.

And furthermore it could be a plurality of those kinds of providers aggregating content.

Deploy single-sign-on schemes, and websites might participate in a plurality of programs from different vendors.

But at the end of the day, you'd pay one or two "providers" a monthly sub, they pool the funds, take their cut, and do prorata distribution of the pool based on views, eyeball time, popularity of content, lots of ways.

No need to perform microtransactions from a banking perspective. You're going to eat $20 of web content this month, and so will lots of others. And then those views can participate in the pool and get paid monthly or something.

There are two troubles:

1. The uplift of targeted advertising is unbelievable until you see the actual statistics. It's like slowly sipping a cup of coffee to wake up versus waking up to snort a line of crack.

2. Advertisers were abused and defrauded by adtech. Which has inspired all kinds of surveillance hellscape because the advertisers finally caught wise and have renegotiated to pay for actual performance only -- not clicks -- actually closed sales. But adtech wants paid if you do your research online, respond to an ad online, and then buy in store. And a whole lot of adtech now allows for that. Attributing an in-store purchase with no customer interaction to a prior web session by that same party.

The benefit of those two factors to the advertisers is such that we can't have a serious discussion about this shit going away without a law which assigns criminal penalties for being a beneficiary of the scheme.

The entire targeted ad model has to die.

As in, being a beneficent party of a targeted ad campaign becomes a presumption of criminal activity.

We have to make the advertisers culpable for the behavior of the companies serving up their ads.