 So the CEO of online ads giant IAB made a pretty… remarkable speech, saying: "These extremists (referring to privacy advocates) are political opportunists who’ve made it their mission to cripple the advertising industry and eliminate it from the American economy and culture." And this, friends, is our mission statement RIGHT THERE. 155 comments
   @nemobis "Bots hadn’t been invented yet" in 1994? GEEZE THE IGNORANCE OF THIS ASSHOLE. ELIZA was invented in 1966. RFC 439: PARRY encounters the DOCTOR was 1973. So-called "bots" have been online longer than HTTP. The advertising industry is a leech. Bill Hicks was too kind IMHO, people were still laughing at him. @jdp23 @byterhymer In #AdTech, it's always hard to tell ignorance from pure corruption. @byterhymer @Shufei a friend in high school used to have a "game" wherein the goal was to collect shells in as many countries as possible. What to do with the shells? Create private hidden directories. Potentially patch df and du to report disk space differently to root users? ;) Set up (X)DCC bots. Serve warez. Good sort of friend to have for all sorts of reasons. ;) @byterhymer Haha, that sounds like a fun contest game, really. But indeed even better to have the shell accounts in pocket for rainy days. Did your friend ever figure out the disk space hack? Of course our ambition shouldn’t be limited to the US. Burning the online advertising industry to the ground needs to be a global undertaking.  @slothrop there is nothing extreme about abolishing online for-profit voyeurism at a global scale.
@BernieWonIowa With no reference to commercial products, it would be the best way to recycle the resource already put into placing them @slothrop @BernieWonIowa Billboard Liberation Front has attempted this approach. Some others have as well. It is an uphill battle.   @slothrop ahem, "burning the advertising industry to the ground..." Advertising doesn't suddenly become evil because it's online. @slothrop @tillianisafox Me to Manufacturers: unless your product is notably differentiated from other products and also provides highest utility for the population’s needs… go make something that does. Stop wasting effort that could see us all housed, fed, clothed, without pollution, with distributed energy and other utility networks… The medical / tech / infrastructure / welfare / exploration advances we could achieve if wealth / resource hoarders weren’t in charge.  @slothrop Disappointed that he forgot to mention that we eat cats and babies, too.   @slothrop dear lord. > Takeaway 1: Extremists are winning the battle for hearts and minds in Washington D.C. and beyond. We cannot let that happen. > So let’s take each of these one by one. We can start with The Political extremists focused on making “Big Tech'' their sworn enemy. Wow. Just wow.   @slothrop Maybe not a welcome reply but: Apple's competitors are advertising-driven, but Apple uniquely because of their market positioning does not have to rely on advertising revenue to do business. Therefore they have an incentive to make advertising as universally unprofitable as possible, to deny competitors of funds that could be used to compete with them. So Apple *is* in fact strongly anti-advertising. This happens to align with consumer well-being, but that is basically a coincidence. @almaember @slothrop this was not a public speech. It was a "rally the troops" internal kinda thing. And yes, they do believe this. And they believe they do good in the world. And all they ask in return is our data. @almaember @slothrop it's scary what material conditions can do to people. Their material conditions are such that they benefit from surveillance capitalism. So they will defend it to the death, while twisting themselves in knots to "prove" they are the good guys.  @slothrop @rysiek This bit made me eye roll so hard: “It’s never buyer vs. seller, us vs. them - it’s all of us working together. To grow the digital economy.” Which I interpret to mean: “It’s never ad buyer vs. ad seller, us vs. them - it’s all of us working together against the common enemy, the consumers. To grow the digital economy at their expense.”  @slothrop monetization at any cost has lead to commercialization of everything. Clawing back a non commercialized experience is just better for our mental health so of course they are against it.  @slothrop Funny how that is pretty much exactly Big Oil’s complaint about those pesky tree-hugging enviromentalists, who would dare to deny them the freedom to profitably destroy the world. 1) link to source of that statement, please? 2) hell yeah, that's my mission too. Where do I sign?  @slothrop The funny thing is that even among people working in the ad industry, that IAB speech is considered bizarre. As the head of the North American & European ad lobby going on stage and openly ranting about privacy activism/legislation and calling to disrupt privacy protections is _not_ what you are supposed to do. It‘s a clear sign that they dropped the ball and are no longer in control. @slothrop "what you people [finger wag] need to understand is that privacy is a speedbump to innovation on the information superhighway": FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director David Vladeck to me at a conference in 2012 (yes, he said information superhighway in 20 freaking 12)  #Privacy isn't extremism, it's one of our #humanRights. "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks." -- UDHR Article 12 https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights Imagine that - a CEO opposed to a basic human right because it interferes with his business plan. Eat. the. Rich.  These are the recordings of #privacycamp 2023 Brussels The videos are about 7:30 hours, each. @edri The recordings are not clipped, basically they start at about 30 minutes …  @slothrop I don't even care about the advertising industry. Advertise good stuff to me. I'm fine with that. I'm just against the unnecessary tracking of my life, the data collection, and the annoying obstacles between me and the content I want to see that popups present. The car- and bike-mounted billboards taking up parking space in the city. If the advertising industry actually did what its name implies, advertise to me things I don't know about, I'd probably be their biggest fan. Parasites.  @uliwitness @slothrop the auto load videos that slow down whatever I wanted to read/do are super annoying.   @slothrop *nodds in agreement... #Advertising is a nuisance and most #ads are just bad and I want to bill those shitty sites for the traffic they wasted. @slothrop @slothrop There's entitlement, and then there is on-line ad "it is our FUNDAMENTAL MORAL RIGHT TO TRACK PEOPLE" entitlement. @slothrop I attended a talk by @Catthekin on the black box of adtech last night in Vancouver - timely to read this and no real surprise I guess @slothrop okay, but like some advertising is fine? Which one would survive your crusade? @slothrop The internet needs to be dumb again. I remember when double click before they were bought by Google got caught tracking people across multiple sites and it was a huge scandal for about two weeks. Internet advertising was a billion dollar industry before ad exchanges. There is no reason we can't go back to that, and it will have the added benefit of making local news a viable business model again. "There is no reason we can't go back to that" Absolutely there is reason we can't, and it's people who make shitloads of money keeping things the way they are combined with the political environment post Citizen's United. It's not insurmountable, we just have to vote with our attention and wallets for things that truly support our ideals. Get a local newspaper subscription. Buy local. Stop watching youtube. Run Linux. Do what you can, don't stress on what you can't.  @slothrop Yep. My goal is to cripple the ad industry and put the people running it out of work.  MISSION: Cripple the advertising industry and eliminate it from the American economy and culture. CHECK. @slothrop I have a plan how we can do that honestly. Not by fighting it but by creating a free alternative that serves people instead of corporations directly. Imagine a federated opt in target-by-choice system. Basically a search engine for relevant things nearby to you. @slothrop cry me a river, IAB- the advertising industry should never have existed and I do not welcome its invasive nature into my mind or senses.  @slothrop Why stop at crippling it? The ad industry has transformed into a mass surveillance and mass hypnosis service, sold to the highest bidder. @slothrop Oh, finally a topic where I can officially call myself “An Extremist”. Lovely, thank you!  @slothrop@chaos.social Not just the American one, the entire world would be better off without the advertising industry.  Well, no, it's not. Their characterization of privacy advocates is obviously wrong, but so is the idea that we should live up to it.  I might be willing to let marketers continue to make catalogues or information packets that people can request. But death to advertisers jumping in front of people and yelling at them all the effing time.   @slothrop advertising *can* be done ethically. It's just that hacking culture, conditioning pleasure responses, getting people addicted to unhealthy habits, distracting people from staying safe on the road or just reading what they actually need to know, etc etc… is not ethical. It's not the industry I have a problem with, it's every company in it. @slothrop I’m not against advertising per se, but it’s become so tied to pervasive and consent-less tracking that you might as well lump me in with the “extremists”. Reducing dependence on ads is definitely a good thing. @slothrop winning back our privacy is going to be an uphill battle without our privacy. @slothrop political opportunists? nah people with a spine I for one am happy to be considered an extremist in the eyes of evil itself, that's very validating :3   @slothrop it is utterly mind boggling that anybody would think that is a bad thing. capitalist brain worms at work here.  @slothrop *I'm assuming in this case. @slothrop I recollect similar silly comments when GDPR was being debated. When it was passed, the on-line advertising markets slumped for a little while... and then went back to normal. Vendors still wanted to advertise to prospective customers, and eventually ignored the doomsayers. And surprise: no doom! @slothrop That would be a dream, honestly. Though I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I'm not opposed to ads *per se*. I'll gladly take a reasonable amount of self-hosted ads with ZERO data collection just fine. What I abhor is what ads have become, and what ad agencies REALLY do, which is personal data dredging operations they can resell *ad nauseam*. Those can GTFO and burn in a fire.  @slothrop@chaos.social @xenosaga > made it their mission to cripple the advertising industry and eliminate it from the American economy and culture. Uhh based. :terry_dance:@slothrop They really are overconfident, aren’t they. I’ll do my part and learn how to mass-produce pi-holes or the equivalent. @slothrop I mean, I'd strike political opportunists and replace it with privacy advocates, bit otherwise... yeap! Accurate! |
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@slothrop It really was a remarkable speech! Like they say, tirst they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they make ridiculously over-the-top-speeches at industry confabs, and then you win.
The only place I've found it so far is LinkedIn (bletch) ... do you know if it's anywere else?
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rubenschreurs_it-starts-hereceo-speechfinalfinaldocx-activity-7023694974361759744-t-6C/