The Current System of Online Advertising has Been Ruled Illegal by The Belgian Court of Appeal. Advertising itself is Still Allowed, but not in a Way That Secretly Tracks Everyone’s Behavior.
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Random side note: how is Belgium to live in and what would it look like to live there right now? Asking for a friend.
Edit: thanks for al the information. I'll move onto learning more about the country and it's people's history.
Expensive and gray.
Going down with the rest of Europe economically -
Someone from a developing nation told me that hating advertising is absolutely a luxury of only wealthy nations. Without ad supported formats LATAM, EMEA, and APAC would have far less access to entertainment and information. It made me reexamine how much of my thoughts on this are privileged.
It's not about advertising. It's about spying on our online lives. Not the same thing.
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Cookies are old news. What about browser fingerprinting which can track you across websites? https://www.amiunique.org/
There's basically no easy way to safeguard against it without making browsing nearly unusable.
You will have your tor-connected 1024x768 anonymous window and you will like it!
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Cookies are old news. What about browser fingerprinting which can track you across websites? https://www.amiunique.org/
There's basically no easy way to safeguard against it without making browsing nearly unusable.
Yes! You are unique among the 3874720 fingerprints in our entire dataset.
If the website says that I’m unique in green font, it’s actually bad and should be red, isn’t it ?
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Random side note: how is Belgium to live in and what would it look like to live there right now? Asking for a friend.
Edit: thanks for al the information. I'll move onto learning more about the country and it's people's history.
We have better access to healthcare than France, generally good work-life balance, access to education is cheap (1000 eur for one year at a good university ). People are welcoming but also reserved. It’s raining a lot and we spend a lot of time complaining about it.
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- Please. Need this. Thanks
- Would this work in any court of law?
- I’ve learned recently while the CEO has a lot of control, they are not ultimately in control. The executive board is. Everyone on the board should be jailed and barred from starting a business for 25 years or the length of the sentence, whichever is greater
- Yes, a law can define whatever fine you want and timeframe to pay.
- Fine, not the CEO but the executive board members, it does not matter. The point is that who has the control and the benefit should also carry the risk. You get big buck from the company ? Fine, if your company do something illegal you pay the price.
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I know the human tendency is to think in extremes, but I would prefer to have a system that is as balanced as possible, or at least one that affords adecuate protections to all parties involved.
The issue I have with the "just don't do anything illegal" argument is that depending on how the illegality is defined, it can be used as a tool for bad actors. Take for instance something like the afformentioned 50% penalty with mandatory jail time for repeat offenders, if I decided that jim's furniture store shouldn't exist anymore, I would only need to find some tiny thing wrong with their data handling, like for instance, assuming this specific hole exists, that they asked for contact info before it's needed for purchase verification. Now they may lose on this minor infraction, and pretty much any small business will die a horrible death without half their revenue. Meanwhile the mega corps will likely find some workaround do to their high priced lawyers, but even assuming we make a rock solid definition, they still just cycle the ceo immediately, because no one will want to be an active ceo when they are one court case from jail.
The issue I have with the “just don’t do anything illegal” argument is that depending on how the illegality is defined, it can be used as a tool for bad actors. Take for instance something like the afformentioned 50% penalty with mandatory jail time for repeat offenders, if I decided that jim’s furniture store shouldn’t exist anymore, I would only need to find some tiny thing wrong with their data handling, like for instance, assuming this specific hole exists, that they asked for contact info before it’s needed for purchase verification. Now they may lose on this minor infraction, and pretty much any small business will die a horrible death without half their revenue.
Got your point, unluckyly every law can be abused if not based on hard evidences (and even in this case it is not bulletproof). And of course it is not automatic so a due process is obviously necessary where you need to prove that Jim is in the wrong.
But we already have similar laws here and they seems to work pretty well.Meanwhile the mega corps will likely find some workaround do to their high priced lawyers, but even assuming we make a rock solid definition, they still just cycle the ceo immediately,
For the mega corps the real threat is the fine, the mandatory jail time for the CEO (or the board members or whoever is in real control) is only a way to have the people who need to control to make their work. A company, big as you want, is not some abstract entity where things where done by some abstract figure. In the end there is always someone who approve everything and the CEO (or the board)
is the ultimately responsible.Just imagine how much control the shareholdes would make on Zuckemberg if they know they are one lost court case from losing half their money.
And no, rotating the CEO is useless, criminal charges are personal so if you as CEO make something illegal and then quit, your charges do not trasfer to the new CEO.
because no one will want to be an active ceo when they are one court case from jail.
Then he will check what the company do. He want the big buck, it is right it also has the accountabilty.
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I agree with the sentiment, but that harsh of an enforcement method is overkill, the penalty should be a fine, not jail time, because otherwise it could be abused to an insane extent, and 50% will immediately bankrupt pretty much any company immediately, most well structured businesses could probably sustain fines on the order of 40%, I do like your inclusion of percentage based penalties, but realistically with 2-5% fines, any ceo will be removed from their company after the first or second offense, and the company will bankrupt if they sustain more than a couple fines in a year.
Edit: after doing the math on some actual companies, I believe 2-5% is too low, realistically 5% is the lowest that would actually change business dealings, and 25% will make a company just barely dip into the red. For this reason I think 5-15% should be the goal post.
Which is the whole point of the enormous fine and jail time.
If the penalty could be treated as a simple "cost of doing busineess" there is no incentive to stay in the right because if you ever got caught it is not that big problem.And I don't see a problem if a company doing illegal things to survive will bankrupt once they get caught while doing it.
but realistically with 2-5% fines, any ceo will be removed from their company after the first or second offense, and the company will bankrupt if they sustain more than a couple fines in a year.
I don't think so. It's not that the massive fines committed to Apple and Google make them change the CEO.
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You will have your tor-connected 1024x768 anonymous window and you will like it!
I keep hearing tor is compromised. Might be safe enough for a porn browser
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Simple:
- make "no" the default answer when asking
- massive fine, in the order of 50% of total revenue, the first time you get caught to be paid before the eventual appeal, which if lost raise the fine by 50%. If not paid in 90 days, the CEO goes to jail until it is paid. From now on for 2 years the company must show that it follow the law.
- mandatory jail time for the CEO the second time you get caught with no option for parole or any other alternative sentence like a fine or whatever.
Or any other solution where the eventual punishment cannot be considered just business cost.
I know, almost impossible...
- 'No' is already the default, that's why you get the banners, to trick you into opting in. There are a couple of filters that you can enable in uBlock Origin to get rid of (most of) the banners.
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- 'No' is already the default, that's why you get the banners, to trick you into opting in. There are a couple of filters that you can enable in uBlock Origin to get rid of (most of) the banners.
Also install consent-o-matic, it handles the popup of most popular websites by default without tweaking ubo.
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IIRC there were hospitals in the US that violated HIPAA by accident because they used the Meta Pixel to aggregate useful information on their website, but which was also sending more information than they knew to Meta. So, it does “just happen”.
Meta is doing it knowingly though so….
And a few fines to popular websites and news reports about it and people will start to learn what the law is and don't implement meta haphazardly.
"just happen" will quickly turn to "rarely happens" once it becomes enforced. -
Someone from a developing nation told me that hating advertising is absolutely a luxury of only wealthy nations. Without ad supported formats LATAM, EMEA, and APAC would have far less access to entertainment and information. It made me reexamine how much of my thoughts on this are privileged.
As if there's no other way.
This sounds like a far-fetched excuse, advertising is ugly, obnoxious and poisonous.
It has zero qualities. -
Cookies are old news. What about browser fingerprinting which can track you across websites? https://www.amiunique.org/
There's basically no easy way to safeguard against it without making browsing nearly unusable.
But why unusable, why does a browser have to leak language, window size, time, extensions? Can't those be spoofed?
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But why unusable, why does a browser have to leak language, window size, time, extensions? Can't those be spoofed?
A lot of those things are also required to render a webpage correctly.
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You will have your tor-connected 1024x768 anonymous window and you will like it!
tor-connected
You are unique!
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I disagree. The online advertising industry needs to shrink, and we should probably break up the monopolies.
Look at this chart:
Growth of advertising correlates with enshittification.
I 100% agree and totally get why I am being downvoted, but just disabling advertising or banning tracking cookies are not a magic fix to save the internet from the perspective of the companies that now show these ads. But I am definitely I favour of changes, the enshittication went way to far already. But there is more than big social media platforms is what I mean to say.
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Advertising should be illegal.
The world would be a better place without it.
A lot of advertising is annoying and misleading, even good advertising can lead to people buying stuff they don't need. I am definitely not pro-advertising but it does serve more than monopolistic capitalism, especially on a more local level.
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We have better access to healthcare than France, generally good work-life balance, access to education is cheap (1000 eur for one year at a good university ). People are welcoming but also reserved. It’s raining a lot and we spend a lot of time complaining about it.
I have friends who live there, and they report the same. They visited us for the first time here in London recently, and were quite shocked by the stark differences.
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A lot of those things are also required to render a webpage correctly.
But isn't most of that client-side processing? Can't I request a vanilla generic page and once it is in my browser to process it to shape it into the window size and extensions I want? Even if it is an adblocker: serve me the ad, I'll block it internally. But I suppose that for dynamic pages with js requests this would become hard to do.
