I'm assuming by your concurrence with the comment above you and your association of that comment with "blindspots of morality" that you believe advertising is immoral. Forgive me if this is mistaken, but hopefully it's clear at least how I came by this impression. I am here to tell you that a person can be a reader of Orwell, or Mieville, or whoever, and still not agree with you on a position like the one you've implicitly espoused. You can have similar base principles as someone and come to very different moral conclusions based on a number of things, like access to different data or relatively subtle nuances in you take on some of those principles.
Nope. With the possible exception of moral philosophy. And even then, you get most "points" for making sound arguments for (what most people would consider to be) morally dubious standpoints, which is precisely the dynamic in play at all of these ethically bankrupt tech companies.
I have never heard anyone claim the first (Mind you, I don't go out of my way to ask people to say incredibly stupid things), but I have frequently heard the second statement getting misrepresented as the first. [1][2]
And there's also an entire canyon of statements on the spectrum[3] between the two, many of which I have heard.
[1] Mostly by engineers on, ah, this website.
[2] It's rather easy to make such a misrepresentation, just do a direct quote that drops everything after the word 'ads'.
[3] 'People prefer looking at ads[2] over paying', 'People prefer looking at X ads[2] over Y ads', etc, etc, etc.
This is a good distinction, if it also contains the nub of the problem - "with commercial intent". FAANG have very little (no, they have no) way of telling if my intent is commercial or just day to day existence.
I spend most of my life not wanting to buy stuff, and yet most of my online interaction assumes that I am wallet out ready to buy ... something.
(I assume (as a straight man) this is what most women feel like on a night out.)
this is also why I think duckduckgo has the right approach - for all FAANGs targeting based in behaviour etc, they are trying 99% of the time not to present the best match given commercial intent but they are trying to convert non-commercial behaviour into commercial behaviour. No wonder the ad conversion rates are poor. And we could get pretty much same response rates with context-only ads ala duckduckgo - or even a tag in google like "shopping: men's trainers"
In short FAANG are like those guys trying to "neg" women into sex. All the effort is in the wrong place.
You can’t boil a frog like that.
Trees? Isn't the traditional myth they jump off cliffs to drown in the ocean, as exemplified by the old Disney documentary where they filmed it, but in reality it was a river they were crossing, and the species depicted isn't even known to migrate?[1]
Not trying to be pedantic, it's just interesting how these things shift and mutate over time and culture.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wilderness_(film)#Contro...
What practices do you have in mind?
