#Advertising on TikTok

[funkle420]

no talk me i angy cant stop thinking about my girlfriend who's been kidnapped by a crazy powerful ancient magician

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Privacy first

The internet is embroiled in a vicious polycrisis: child safety, surveillance, discrimination, disinformation, polarization, monopoly, journalism collapse – not only have we failed to agree on what to do about these, there's not even a consensus that all of these are problems.

But in a new whitepaper, my EFF colleagues Corynne McSherry, Mario Trujillo, Cindy Cohn and Thorin Klosowski advance an exciting proposal that slices cleanly through this Gordian knot, which they call "Privacy First":

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms

Here's the "Privacy First" pitch: whatever is going on with all of the problems of the internet, all of these problems are made worse by commercial surveillance.

Worried your kid is being made miserable through targeted ads? No surveillance, no targeting.

Worried your uncle was turned into a Qanon by targeted disinformation? No surveillance, no targeting. Worried that racialized people are being targeted for discriminatory hiring or lending by algorithms? No surveillance, no targeting.

Worried that nation-state actors are exploiting surveillance data to attack elections, politicians, or civil servants? No surveillance, no surveillance data.

Worried that AI is being trained on your personal data? No surveillance, no training data.

Worried that the news is being killed by monopolists who exploit the advantage conferred by surveillance ads to cream 51% off every ad-dollar? No surveillance, no surveillance ads.

Worried that social media giants maintain their monopolies by filling up commercial moats with surveillance data? No surveillance, no surveillance moat.

The fact that commercial surveillance hurts so many groups of people in so many ways is terrible, of course, but it's also an amazing opportunity. Thus far, the individual constituencies for, say, saving the news or protecting kids have not been sufficient to change the way these big platforms work. But when you add up all the groups whose most urgent cause would be significantly improved by comprehensive federal privacy law, vigorously enforced, you get an unstoppable coalition.

America is decades behind on privacy. The last really big, broadly applicable privacy law we passed was a law banning video-store clerks from leaking your porn-rental habits to the press (Congress was worried about their own rental histories after a Supreme Court nominee's movie habits were published in the Washington City Paper):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

In the decades since, we've gotten laws that poke around the edges of privacy, like HIPAA (for health) and COPPA (data on under-13s). Both laws are riddled with loopholes and neither is vigorously enforced:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/09/how-to-make-a-child-safe-tiktok/

Privacy First starts with the idea of passing a fit-for-purpose, 21st century privacy law with real enforcement teeth (a private right of action, which lets contingency lawyers sue on your behalf for a share of the winnings):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/americans-deserve-more-current-american-data-privacy-protection-act

Here's what should be in that law:

A ban on surveillance advertising:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/ban-online-behavioral-advertising

Data minimization: a prohibition on collecting or processing your data beyond what is strictly necessary to deliver the service you're seeking.

Strong opt-in: None of the consent theater click-throughs we suffer through today. If you don't give informed, voluntary, specific opt-in consent, the service can't collect your data. Ignoring a cookie click-through is not consent, so you can just bypass popups and know you won't be spied on.

No preemption. The commercial surveillance industry hates strong state privacy laws like the Illinois biometrics law, and they are hoping that a federal law will pre-empt all those state laws. Federal privacy law should be the floor on privacy nationwide – not the ceiling:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/federal-preemption-state-privacy-law-hurts-everyone

No arbitration. Your right to sue for violations of your privacy shouldn't be waivable in a clickthrough agreement:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/stop-forced-arbitration-data-privacy-legislation

No "pay for privacy." Privacy is not a luxury good. Everyone deserves privacy, and the people who can least afford to buy private alternatives are most vulnerable to privacy abuses:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/why-getting-paid-your-data-bad-deal

No tricks. Getting "consent" with confusing UIs and tiny fine print doesn't count:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/designing-welcome-mats-invite-user-privacy-0

A Privacy First approach doesn't merely help all the people harmed by surveillance, it also prevents the collateral damage that today's leading proposals create. For example, laws requiring services to force their users to prove their age ("to protect the kids") are a privacy nightmare. They're also unconstitutional and keep getting struck down.

A better way to improve the kid safety of the internet is to ban surveillance. A surveillance ban doesn't have the foreseeable abuses of a law like KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act), like bans on information about trans healthcare, medication abortions, or banned books:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/kids-online-safety-act-still-huge-danger-our-rights-online

When it comes to the news, banning surveillance advertising would pave the way for a shift to contextual ads (ads based on what you're looking at, not who you are). That switch would change the balance of power between news organizations and tech platforms – no media company will ever know as much about their readers as Google or Facebook do, but no tech company will ever know as much about a news outlet's content as the publisher does:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

This is a much better approach than the profit-sharing arrangements that are being trialed in Australia, Canada and France (these are sometimes called "News Bargaining Codes" or "Link Taxes"). Funding the news by guaranteeing it a share of Big Tech's profits makes the news into partisans for that profit – not the Big Tech watchdogs we need them to be. When Torstar, Canada's largest news publisher, struck a profit-sharing deal with Google, they killed their longrunning, excellent investigative "Defanging Big Tech" series.

A privacy law would also protect access to healthcare, especially in the post-Roe era, when Big Tech surveillance data is being used to target people who visit abortion clinics or secure medication abortions. It would end the practice of employers forcing workers to wear health-monitoring gadget. This is characterized as a "voluntary" way to get a "discount" on health insurance – but in practice, it's a way of punishing workers who refuse to let their bosses know about their sleep, fertility, and movements.

A privacy law would protect marginalized people from all kinds of digital discrimination, from unfair hiring to unfair lending to unfair renting. The commercial surveillance industry shovels endless quantities of our personal information into the furnaces that fuel these practices. A privacy law shuts off the fuel supply:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/digital-privacy-legislation-civil-rights-legislation

There are plenty of ways that AI will make our lives worse, but copyright won't fix it. For issues of labor exploitation (especially by creative workers), the answer lies in labor law:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

And for many of AI's other harms, a muscular privacy law would starve AI of some of its most potentially toxic training data:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-updated-terms-to-use-customer-data-to-train-ai-2023-9

Meanwhile, if you're worried about foreign governments targeting Americans – officials, military, or just plain folks – a privacy law would cut off one of their most prolific and damaging source of information. All those lawmakers trying to ban Tiktok because it's a surveillance tool? What about banning surveillance, instead?

Monopolies and surveillance go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Some of the biggest tech empires were built on mountains of nonconsensually harvested private data – and they use that data to defend their monopolies. Legal privacy guarantees are a necessary precursor to data portability and interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

Once we are guaranteed a right to privacy, lawmakers and regulators can order tech giants to tear down their walled gardens, rather than relying on tech companies to (selectively) defend our privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The point here isn't that privacy fixes all the internet's woes. The policy is "privacy first," not "just privacy." When it comes to making a new, good internet, there's plenty of room for labor law, civil rights legislation, antitrust, and other legal regimes. But privacy has the biggest constituency, gets us the most bang for the buck, and has the fewest harmful side-effects. It's a policy we can all agree on, even if we don't agree on much else. It's a coalition in potentia that would be unstoppable in reality. Privacy first! Then – everything else!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[gaylenin]

general dprk discourse is genuinely insane when you've stepped out of the whole western brain rot that views the country as fucking mordor. its genuinely depressing too because the dprk's history isn't hard to learn or understand, i learned about how millions of civilians were bombed and killed in my conservative history class age 15

but its still so easy to find videos or tiktoks with millions of views saying how the dprk has this scheme to lure people into the country for vaguely nefarious means, or whatever insane diatribe yeonmi park went on in a conservative podcast - that's not just cycled round by people who are just not political, but leftists who are fully educated in all of this but still refuse to re-evaluate their understanding of a foreign country

its such a terrifying and annoying testament to capitalist brainwashing that a lot of conceptions of north korea that can easily be explained by logical facts of its readily available history (sanctions, after effects of the korean war, foreign relations) are ignored for instead the most fantastical explanation like kim jong un's the grinch or something

[tarantula-hawk-wasp]

At a certain point blaming the school system for failing to teach you every fact becomes an excuse to absolve yourself from learning on your own time as an adult. Maybe you had bad teachers and curricula, maybe you never did the assigned reading, maybe you were taught propaganda, but it’s okay to start now. It’s okay to learn geography from online games. It’s okay to get entry level books from the library on a subject. It’s okay to explore Wikipedia and other reputable websites as a start. You can learn as an adult. You should continue learning as an adult.

[mogoce-nocoj]

leave it to Joker Out to spend months promoting an English single and getting nothing out of it only to have an unreleased demo of a song in Serbian blow up on tiktok of all places

[batvilletv]

Smallville 3x2

[gatoburr0]

[jeres-red-g-string]

I really do miss him, so here are some pics I took on his berlin gig in october :(

[kasaru-chan]

Interest check

[newbiz]

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[oceanwithouthermoon]

ive been unhealthily fixated on kubosai for the past few weeks, i just have no idea how to put it into words. kuboyasu aren and saiki kusuo are in love btw

[figofswords]

thinking about taking a little bit of a step back from social media for a bit for mental/physical health reasons (as in: chronic severe anxiety is causing chronic health issues and I need to remove stress Somehow). I will still post art but I’m probably gonna make an effort to engage with my dash only minimally, if at all. (that being said I have very poor discipline so if you see me suddenly reblogging stuff out of nowhere just. roll with it)

[twilight-deviant]

Telling content creators it's wrong to explore artistic freedom and be independently funded by fans, and they should instead continue taking advertisement revenue from google* is

NOT

the anti-capitalism stance actually.

*(Yes, google owns youtube.)

[thoughtportal]

undefined

Corporate takeover of the US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.

[spicyrottingbrains]

One thing I am very proud of is that I always believed in my boy wylan. When I read that chapter I knew that there was no way that was happening and I had full trust that it was all part of the plan. And I turned out to be right.

[youareinlovetv]

you wake up. you get out of bed to your alarm set on your phone, and go downstairs to eat breakfast. you decide to go on tumblr for your morning scroll while eating, and find that the ads have gotten more frequent now. they’re all for mobile games. and you can’t mute them because there’s no mute button. you decide to go to youtube to watch a video instead but remember that you have to skip 2 15 second ads just it watch, with 10 ad breaks in an 8 minute video.

you get up and finish getting ready, and go drive to work. on your way, you see dozens of billboards advertising medicine, restaurants, and other things. you turn on the radio to be bombarded with an ad break that feels longer and longer each time you turn on the radio. you open spotify instead and find out your premium subscription expired because you forgot to pay it. no worries, you don’t need it! you shuffle your playlist and after the first song plays, 3 30 second ads play back to back, with the most annoying sounds possible. after your ad break is over, spotify teases you and gives you a 10 second ad saying how you should buy premium.

you arrive to work and open your email inbox to find that half of it is spam, filled with ads and offers for services, dumb skin care products, fake deals on stores. you close your email and decide to listen to a podcast while you work. 5 minutes into the podcast, without warning, the hosts go into an ad break and talk about their new sponsor. this goes on for 5 minutes more. you turn off the podcast and decide to work in silence until you go home.

on your way home, you see the same billboards teasing you like they did in the morning. you don’t get tempted.

you decide to go to the store to get a sweet treat for yourself for all the work you did today. as you’re checking out, the cashier asks if you want to join their rewards program. you say no. they insist. they describe all the “offers” and “benefits” of the program. after saying no 6 times, and waiting 5 minutes, they stop trying. you leave the store.

you go home and decide to watch a show. you open your streaming service to find that they demoted you down to an “ad-supported” tier, and to get no ads again, you have to pay a higher price. but it shouldn’t be that bad. you start playing the show, but 5 minutes in an ad break comes on. it lasts 5 minutes. there’s 6 ad breaks throughout the 44 minute episode. you quit watching after the 2nd break.

you decide instead that maybe you can watch some tiktok to unwind, but that was a bad decision. half of your for you page is cluttered with sponsorships, temu-grade products, and livestreams of people baiting for money.

you close tiktok and think about how boring your life is, so you google “things you can do to make your life less boring”. the first 10 results are all ads for amusement parks that cost too much money and games that also cost too much money. after scrolling through the ads, you find articles with lists of ideas, but by #100 they start repeating the same ideas, but with different wording. you closed the tab after seeing the 6th pop up asking you to subscribe to their email list.

maybe you can read a book! you’ve already read all your physical books, so maybe you can read one of the books you got for your kindle. you pick up your kindle and see an ad on the screen for some dumb product. you put the kindle down and decide to go to bed early.

laying down in bed awake, you wonder how we got this way. how riddled our society is with marketing, corporations, and ads. why everyone wants to sell you something. why instead of making something you love and sharing it with the world, you ruin it with greedy marketing schemes and tactics.

but you can’t do anything about it, can you?

you close your eyes and try to sleep.

you dream about a world without greed, and realize that it’s never going to become a reality.