![]() Online services have let tracking companies like Google, Facebook and thousands of other, smaller ones do whatever they want. But does that mean advertisements must be distracting, privacy-invasive, targeted, or not even remotely related to the content? In the field of journalism for example, non-profit journalism is still an exception almost everywhere despite its clear advantages. Often, it might be the only option to provide content to the public and avoid limiting a service to subscribers only, though alternatives should be preferred if available. Many people realize that advertising is a convenient way to fund a service. Online services which employ advertising should understand one central point: advertising, per se, is not the issue. Given the sheer number of companies online services work with, and the fact that they just “may” have been given data (due to real-time bidding), it’s a lot of work to contact all these data processors, explain who you are, and request information, correction or deletion of your data. right to be forgotten), against advertising companies. Though less of a concern nowadays, another problem with online advertisements is that even if they don’t track you, because of real-time bidding and a lack of proper technological and editorial oversight, malicious (phishing, malware distribution, misinformation), distracting (such as needless animations or videos) and bandwidth-wasting (where the advertising data is significantly larger than the actual content) advertisements are the norm, not the exception.Īt present, it can still be very hard to exercise your basic digital rights, such as the right of access by the data subject, the right to rectification or the right to erasure (a.k.a. However, there's at least a "reject all" option, and they don't pre-select all options like many other websites do (which would be illegal in the EU anyway). It only opens after clicking a less highlighted button next to an "accept all" option. If you have ever embedded such files on a website yourself, did you read the privacy policies of these services? Privacy dialog of The Guardian. Also, even if the websites no longer actively insert tracking code, they often still embed data from advertising companies like Google, such as fonts, which still load data from foreign servers, and thus, allow tracking to take place. For instance, they might have a large, highlighted “Accept all” button, whereas “Reject all” requires additional clicks. More often than not, they employ what UI designers refer to as dark patterns. Since the GDPR came into force in 2018, and following some court decisions in the meantime, more and more websites have been trying to comply with those laws, and now offer users a choice through banners. Informed consent means that you must actively opt in, i.e., you must click a button, switch a slider or something like that in order to legally give your consent. ![]() The EU data protection agencies have published standards and guidelines, stating that tracking, for the purpose of advertising or for any another reason, is only legally possible if users provide their informed consent. At least the major websites which operate within the EU offer ways to opt out. The introduction of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has helped mitigate some of these effects. This is not a conspiracy theory it’s the world we live in, unfortunately. Users have little to no control over whether their data is sent to any of these companies, and usually have no control over their data once it has been sold. ![]() Why we don’t like (conventional) online advertisingĬompanies which engage in targeted advertising have developed an insane number of techniques to gather as much personal data as possible (or, rather, to guess about the personalities of natural persons in order to predict their actions and influence them), which is nowadays sold in real-time auctions to an indeterminably large number of companies. In this article, we present our position on advertising in general, show the difference between ethical and unethical advertising, and explain why we do not intend to support technologies like SponsorBlock. The NewPipe project recently had a few debates on advertising, its ethics and how Team NewPipe decides whether or not a certain form of advertising is acceptable.
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