- Zurich's parliament voted 58–57 last year to place limits on outdoor advertising (have 2027 to come up with implementation)
- Bern fully instituted the ban but reversed course over revenue concerns
- Vernier & Lancy have banned billboards
They certainly seem to have the appetite to reduce the size of the industrial advertising complex... but there's clearly some successful industry pushback (like in the case of Bern). Curious to see how this profiling shakes out. Hard to make a revenue loss argument so I'm guessing it'll pass.
For example: https://monocle.com/design/how-zurichs-poster-culture-has-tu...
Our culture is pretty permissive of businesses inflicting indirect harms on adults. I think a lot of that goes back to lobbying from the cigarette and alcohol industries.
If this works for kids, and then adults want it, it can then be considered.
If the actions of these advertising companies are harmful, then everyone should be protected from them, not just one demographic that is considered to be more vulnerable.
And if they're not harmful, then in what sense are kids "vulnerable" to them and need protecting?
"Article 12
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."
Ad tech Data fusion violates that right
The adtech of today feels very opaque to me; I often have no clue why I see what I do. If platforms had to disclose why you're seeing what you are, you could plug the holes in your privacy. (Fully aware this will never happen, but it's the type of regulation I wish we were proactive about.)
IMO the regulation needs to be at the data collection side: advertisers should only be able to collect data on a defined set of dimensions and each dimension should have a defined maximum specificity. Then beyond those, advertising platforms need to compete on making their actual products more compelling rather than making them better at sucking up data.
I don't think attaching a disclaimer like this to every ad will be impactful at all.
"We're showing you ads for diapers because we find it highly likely that you are pregnant. Oh, you didn't know that?"
- "chasetravel wants to reach people like you" (clicking through reveals that this is because I am 18 years of age or older and based in the US) - "Your activity" which includes interacting with "ads about travel, fine arts and music" and "posts, stories, reels and pages about food & drinks, fine arts and cameras"
So, basically, the button reveals nothing. But with regulation maybe it would. I don't see how this would make things worse (for users - of course Meta would fight it).
EDIT: As another commenter has noted, I have also turned off every possible bit of tracking. Maybe if I hadn't I'd see more here. But I'm sure Meta is doing all sorts of fingerprinting along with tracking pixels across websites that's informing the auction, but they're not telling me about that.
Because they want you to buy their stuff or their worldview. It's one of the least ambiguous motives in the modern world.
This would of course have been easy to ban anyway-- it's not like we can't have rules on foreign internet firms, for example, but historically the politicians were unwilling to make a useful law.
I think the Swiss could take one step further and add a general ban on ads targeting young children in addition to this; and then we Swedes should imitate the package.
There's no way to implement this without (1) usage-based profiling (what's being banned in the first place) or (2) ID verification.
I'm against both of those.
For me, the only acceptable solutions are: (1) ban all profiling-based ads (2) require respecting DO_NOT_TRACK (so that people/minors/their parents can individually decide what to do, but websites are then legally forced to respect that)
If there's no profile already, then they can serve the ad, since it's not a profiling-based ad and they don't need to know if the viewer is a minor.
If there is a profile then they have the knowledge to avoid advertising based on that if it's a minor.
I don't see why ID verification needs to come into play?
I would love to see a ban on _all_ profiling-based ads, but this seems like a step in the right direction to me.
(3) zero knowledge age verification hosted by the gov which already has all the data anyways
There are technical ways to implement this correctly, it's a political problem, not a technical one.
> We're talking about age, not about your foot fetish, the government definitely knows about your age.
well, yeah, they also know how much i earn, where i live etc. but that's not really my point. my point is what online-stuff they can additionally link to me. you responding with the fetish stuff as a counter-argument is kinda weird, and doesn't really seem to take what i wrote seriously.
i hope if we ever have such a solution its one of those hypothetical zero-knowledge "all we do is check your age and give back a single boolean flag and we also don't record from where and why these requests come", just not that optimistic about it. ban online ads and you got a way easier solution without having to build such a system in the first place.
> it's a political problem, not a technical one
i'd say it's both, so i at least half-agree on that point :)
Edit: non-snarky response: what's the default "fall-back" if government's signature is missing? IMO any option ("tracking/no tracking/invalid request") will be exploitable in bad ways.
Sometimes I wonder in what kind of alternative reality some people live...
I mean, who cares about the developing minds of the next generation when there’s money to be made involved?
i'm all for it if we expand it to banning ads in all virtual and physical spaces of Switzerland :D (or at least inside of public transport, i hate how distracting and useless these freaking ad-panels in buses, trains, trams etc. are).
EDIT: okay per a different article[0], social media platforms and search providers have to analyze if their service enhances risks for minors, and do something against it if so. and "big platforms" shouldn't be allowed to serve personalized ads to kids. so they'll just serve unpersonalized ads to kids then? bwoah...
[0]https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/kommunikationsplattformen-bu...
Realistically, lawmakers know that ad companies know which age cohort a user is in. For companies like Google/Facebook/etc. this shouldn't be too much of an issue, they already know your age when you make an account.
And if they cannot determine what vulnerable groups they're not allowed to show profiled ads, maybe they should disable profiled ads by default until you sign in. Everybody wins!
in a couple of years we'll have to get through 5 different banners just to access a website, which you can bypass by logging in with your eID which then acts as kind of an SSO for every website.
You can also not build marketing campaigns based on profiling technologies.
So an advertiser would not be able to advertise a toy with a marketing strategy based on bidding on users that watch MrBeast and Minecraft videos
> based on bidding on users that watch MrBeast and Minecraft videos
but then what is the cutoff for "childish" topics? i mean firstly i'm sure there are people who aren't minors who watch MrBeast and Minecraft, but that's the lesser problem. but if i take myself as an example, i did also watch content as a kid which wasn't targeted to kids. not talking about NSFW stuff either, just stuff you wouldn't think as kids being the target audience.
You’re not wrong, but content made for kids is intended for kids, and vice versa. If someone wants crossover appeal, they intentionally do it —-hence the jokes in Pixar movies with cultural references the parents recognize.
if the goal is to protect kids and you determine who's a kid by looking at what they're watching instead of who they are, then it seems like political flag-waving or a half-baked approach, as you'll guesstimate who's how old.
which means you have to profile everyone and not serve statistical kids ads, or require ID checks, both solutions being clunky and weird as well.
you could just not profile or serve personalized ads to anyone, no matter who they are, how about that? easiest solution. but of course that would mess with ad-sales profits or whoever feels disadvantaged by that approach.
and in the end, kids don't have Interessensvertreter in the Bundeshaus.
EDIT: also, this whole idea is literally a "won't somebody think of the kids?", not sure why you point that gun towards me instead of Monsieur Rösti.
This is pretty much Law 101, a written law sets the rules, and the courts evaluate the cases, effectively finding that cutoff in practice.
I'd love a world without advertising, but it's never going to happen. But a world without profile-targeted advertising could.
There was 75 or more years of media ads that had no feedback except when very explicitly asking (Nielsen). Everyone was making money and doing just fine.
i think the sentiment against ads from the educated bubble really completely takes a working democracy for granted. spoiler: its not and look whats happening in the US... and the budget shift from openweb/newspapers towards video (mainly google) in the advertising industry is massive...
disclaimer: i work in adtech but we do not profile users and do not track them.
The advertising industry at large is at fault for our degradation in journalism.
Advertising needs clicks and eyes, the providers produce highly targeted profile algorithms to ensure maximum clicks and eyes, which degrades the information conveyed into the smallest, most enraging snippets possible. Those rise to the top as the most profitable ways to convey information, and continues the cycle, further destroying news that doesn't profit in this ecosystem.
Killing most forms of advertising across the board would of course basically destroy these large tech companies that rely on them. But the same companies have completely derailed society with their "services". We'd be better off without them.
Of course this would likely hurt "GDP" and "The Economy", but that would just mean we have an unproductive economy primarily inflated by a pointless circle of advertisement.
But how would you actually do it? Ban the exchange of money for delivering specific messages? I guess it could work. It would require judgement calls, but we have other laws that require even more subtle judgement calls.
Here’s a simple solution: the ad industry is welcome to not profile its users.
Don’t get distracted though:
> Furthermore, the reporting procedure is to be extended to include all content suspected of being unlawful.
Operating keyword here: “suspected”
What happened to due process?
1) A sign atop a storefront
2) A merchant yelling at a public marketplace
3) A prominent display by the roadside
4) A flyer delivered to your home
5) An advertisement alongside a news article
6) An advertisement that interrupts a radio and television broadcast
7) An advertisement alongside a digital written content (analogous to (5) but somewhat more intense)
8) An advertisement that pops up while you read content (analogous to (6) but more intense)
9) An obvious product placement within written/audio/visual content you consume
10) A non-obvious placement of an an idea, thought or bias toward a product within the content you consume
11) Content that evokes intense emotions that are presented to you alongside an advertisement
12) Content that activates involuntary addictive pathways in your brain, presented to you alongside an advertisement
Personalization requires intrusive data collection upfront and then it requires the production of a "fractured reality" at the presentation end.
IMO 99% of the big problems with advertising stem from these two "features."
If implemented as the title implies, data about minors would still be collected (though they'd get generic ads until 18), and now age verification becomes a hard requirement for anything that uses advertising.
Banning targeted advertising completely is a much better move and reduces the incentive to track people online.
Targeted ads are abused too often though and so despite the good I have to come out against them. That someone has a mouse problem is sensitive - they probably don't want to admit it even though it is a common problem. If the mouse problem is in a restaurant (which is very common), that getting out will drive customers to competitors (who also have a mouse problem but customers don't know it)
I don't think so. There's a fundamental conflict of interest between the entity paying for the ad, the entity serving the ad, and the people seeing it. Their goal is to ultimately get ad viewers to spend the most amount of money, which may or may not be aligned with their interests. The advertiser has an incentive to convince them to buy something, whether that will benefit them or not.
I believe convincing customers to buy something is a much bigger sales driver than solving problems for them, unfortunately. And those two seem to go to hand in hand less and less as time passes.
the ideal solution in my point would be that platforms that have a login or know or calculate (!) the ASL of the user would be disallowed from showing ads to users below age X.
An ad is a business proposal and minors cannot do business without the consent of their parents.
"Oh, no, I seem to have failed your intrusive system for proving I'm an adult and you have to assume I'm a minor, how awful. Don't mind me, I'm just a particularly precocious minor who loves to learn about computer science and whose search history looks an awful lot like a professional programmer, but nope, seriously, totally a minor."
I suppose banking would be a problem if the bank ever took that flag seriously. Probably have to go through the almost-certainly intrusive validation process for that, at least. But otherwise, gee golly it seems like Jerf Junior does a lot of interneting and he sure isn't an adult, nope, no way, not even a little. And it's pretty wild but when Jerf Junior aged out it seems Jerf III had just been born and is also a minor, an even more precocious baby who loves the same thing as his father and/or possibly his grandfather, it's, uh, honestly a bit unclear what is going on there. What a bizarre family I seem to have.
Cool.
Good thing no one did that in the mid-00s. Nope. Nobody. God, can you imagine if they had?
I often wonder how much better my life would have been had it not been for that day? /s
As a parent my job is to install restrictions to filter ads, the "TikToks", and other assorted corporate brainrot, same restrictions as for myself, but also explain to them why. once/if they can work around my tech, I think they can handle it all.
You can't raise your kids in isolation. Society raises them, if society says it is OK to feed kids Tiktok brainrot before they are 14/16/whatever age it will happen. To your kids as well.
This is exactly what government is for. Solving problems like this universally.
Cool, that's not how 99% of people experience internet though. The state has to put regulations because people are cattle, I'm not eating ultra processed food but I'd still like it to be banned
If you call humans cattle you cannot pretend some sort of patriarchal concern in the same breath. I mean your not compeltly wrong in the dynamic, but coddling people instead of expecting them to suffer the consequences of their actions will only make them worse, or is it that you don't want to suffer the consequences of their actions? In which case why advocate for making them less capable?