How To Combat Harmful Technology: Should Ads Be Banned?

[Istelathis]

@PaulsianSecond Life's Marketplace will not load without cookies, they are kind of like Santa in that way.  I get the same result in my desktop browser if I disable cookies, I'm not sure what the redirects are due to.  

[Paulsian]

 

[Caroline Takeda]

12 hours ago, Istelathis said:

@PaulsianSecond Life's Marketplace will not load without cookies, they are kind of like Santa in that way.  I get the same result in my desktop browser if I disable cookies, I'm not sure what the redirects are due to.  

/me rolls eyes

Some cookies are technically necessary to run any online shop. We call those "session cookies", which will be deleted after you close the browser. The don't spy on you, they don't harm your computer, the don't eat your kids.

How to combat "harmful" technology: Get off the internet. Hide in your basement.

Edited February 18, 2022 by Caroline Takeda

[Istelathis]

@Caroline Takeda I dare to differ,  they are spying on me from my basement at this very moment, and they did try to eat the neighbors kids.  I thinks you are out to get me, and feed me to the cookies.

Edited February 18, 2022 by Istelathis

[Wulfie Reanimator]

On 2/16/2022 at 8:41 PM, Istelathis said:

Take for example a search for:
"Second Life"  +Ruth

The plus-operator is deprecated, as in not supported. It used to be for "exact match," but the double quotes also do that. Just search for: "second life" "ruth"

Right now, those two pages of results you get only contain the exact phrase "+ruth", which understandably just doesn't have many results.

[Istelathis]

Thank you @Wulfie Reanimator, shortly after I posted that reply I learned that it had depreciated quite a while ago.  I was surprised, because I thought it had still worked for google but apparently it hasn't for years.  I think I just got used to google providing decent results and stopped using operators.  It wasn't until two or three years ago that I started to notice my results were not as great as they used to be and more recently that I began to use operators again.  I've now moved on to using boolean to refine my search which has produced better results.  I'm going to try the exact match method that you suggested as well, now that I know it works that way.   I do wonder why they abandoned the plus operator, I think they may have also removed the minus operator as that did not work as well either.  

Edited February 18, 2022 by Istelathis

[Katherine Heartsong]

Who uses Google?

Duckduckgo gives me roughly the same results (i.e., good enough) without the privacy intrusiveness. 

And if you're really desperate, simply add a "bang" and you get Goole searches filtered through Duckduckgo so Google can't associate you with the search. For example "!gi cyberpunk" 2077 searches Google for Cyberpunk 2077 images without letting them know it's you searching. 

If it's a free service, you're the product being sold.

And don't get me started on Meta and that family of products.

Edited February 18, 2022 by Katherine Heartsong

[Istelathis]

I enjoy DDG as well, it is set as my default search engine in my browser. 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

2 hours ago, Istelathis said:

Thank you @Wulfie Reanimator, shortly after I posted that reply I learned that it had depreciated quite a while ago.  I was surprised, because I thought it had still worked for google but apparently it hasn't for years.  I think I just got used to google providing decent results and stopped using operators.  It wasn't until two or three years ago that I started to notice my results were not as great as they used to be and more recently that I began to use operators again.  I've now moved on to using boolean to refine my search which has produced better results.  I'm going to try the exact match method that you suggested as well, now that I know it works that way.   I do wonder why they abandoned the plus operator, I think they may have also removed the minus operator as that did not work as well either.  

The minus-operator still works, annoyingly well too.

I will fairly often have to search for phrases that start with dash, so I have to wrap the entire thing in quotes like "-this".

2 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

Who uses Google?

The same thing applies to all major search engines, each have similar advanced search operators and it's important to know how they work, just like you need to know how SL Marketplace search operators work if you intend to use them. (Not that SL's MP search is very useful, it doesn't even support multi-word phrases.)

Edited February 18, 2022 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Phil Deakins]

On 2/18/2022 at 2:47 PM, Katherine Heartsong said:

If it's a free service, you're the product being sold.

You can guess, imagine, or assume that, but it's not something you can actually know.

Around the turn of the century, all general purpose search engines were free to use, and none of them were making any money. Google was late to the party but it didn't make money either. Then Google did something different - Adwords, and then AdSense.

Almost immediately, Google became the biggest advertising agency in the world - and they made lots of money. That's when the other engines tried to emulate Google and were either bought up or they simply folded.

What I'm saying is that the major engines are free for us to use, not because we are the product they are selling, although they may well sell us, but because they are making their money in other much bigger ways ways. There is a limited market in the world for our data. It would make some money but it's only a drop in the ocean of what the major engines are making by other means. They don't need our data to be a product because it would only generate a very small part of their income.

Microsoft (Bing) doesn't need to sell data about us to make huge amounts of money, and neither does Google, and yet both of those major engines are free to use. I think that those are the only major search engines these days.

Edited February 20, 2022 by Phil Deakins

[Theresa Tennyson]

1 hour ago, Phil Deakins said:

They don't need our data to be a product because it would only generate a very small part of their income.

Then why do they collect it?

Because people pay them for advertisements because they have it. It would actually be foolish for them for them to sell the raw data because they'd be selling the golden goose. Technically they aren't selling it, they're monetizing it, but their business model most definitely relies on their collecting it.

[Sid Nagy]

Yup.
I visited a few sites for information about PVC floors the last few days.
Guess what kind of ads I see now on several other non related websites with advertisement.
It's because Google knows. They sell my view to the highest bidder who wants to advertise PVC floors.
 

Edited February 20, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Istelathis]

I'm just waiting for someone to capitalize off those trackers to build a profile of us that can be sold to anyone willing to pay.  Trackers can have more use than just advertising, sites like mylife.com would probably be interested in compiling our browsing habits to further build a social ranking.  They already use social media posts to build one which people can freely view, and pay to have more details, alternatively people can pay to remove themselves.

The whole thing gives me the heebie-jeebies.  I don't want people to know I go to second life forums, that could ruin me!😜  That would cost me some social cred and reflect poorly on my score.

Edited February 20, 2022 by Istelathis

[Paulsian]

I'm starting to get spammed with the one I complained about over and over again under every streaming service. On youtube i'll hit skip and the next one is exactly the same and the one I skipped. 

I'm sorry Ad AI I was wrong, your ads are not harmful and should never be banned or boycotted. 

[StarlanderGoods]

33 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

I'm starting to get spammed with the one I complained about over and over again under every streaming service. On youtube i'll hit skip and the next one is exactly the same and the one I skipped. 

I'm sorry Ad AI I was wrong, your ads are not harmful and should never be banned or boycotted. 

I guess someone in Silicon Valley knows you by name, and they are twisting every system available to them in order to.... show you the same add two times in a row.  Have you considered going off-grid ?

[Paulsian]

1 hour ago, StarlanderGoods said:

Have you considered going off-grid ?

Nah, not long term. Last year I was able to go about 2 weeks without power and internet by choice, like a technology detox. It was amazing, waking up with the sunrise and going to sleep when the sunset. Get a lot done during the day and appreciate the day light a lot more. I was really good at moving around in the dark too. I wanted to experience what life would be like without technology, if/when one day there is no power and internet. It was like having my real life avatar turned to full power mode.  Would I do it, ummm. Could I do it, yes. 

[Rowan Amore]

Pretty please?

[Silent Mistwalker]

Touche.

[Phil Deakins]

On 2/20/2022 at 11:37 AM, Theresa Tennyson said:

Then why do they collect it?

Because people pay them for advertisements because they have it. It would actually be foolish for them for them to sell the raw data because they'd be selling the golden goose. Technically they aren't selling it, they're monetizing it, but their business model most definitely relies on their collecting it.

People placed ads in search engines long before the ads became personalised. Back then, it was often the top few search results that were advertisements, but looked like genuine results (not Google). They matched the searcher's searchterm, not the person. Later the engines were forced to indicate that they were ads.

So the engines don't collect data "because people pay them for advertisements because they have it". People simply pay them for advertisements. What data collection does is allow the ads to be often tailored to the person, which, of course, is so much better for everyone. I'm all for it.

What I'd said was we are not the search engines' product. Ads are their product, with or without our data. If collecting data so that the ads can sometimes be personalised helps the engines to sell more ads, it's absolutely fine. But our data ("we") is not the product. Ads are, and would be sold with or without our data.

Edited February 21, 2022 by Phil Deakins