Alongside a password manager and keeping things up to date, using an ad blocker is truly a foundational security practice these days. The big advertising players simply have all of the wrong incentives to control this problem. They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks, but it’d be worse for them on two fronts: they’d have to pay for more moderation, and they’d lose billions in revenue in the process. Shoulder surfing while a non-savvy user browses Facebook or YouTube without an ad blocker and engages with obviously fraudulent ads is painful.
I don't see how the yearly tech support I do with my parents at Christmas will not one day converge to an outright ban of the internet. I am now demoing the level of sofistication of AI powered scams, telling them that it is now entirely possible they will get a VIDEO CALL from me that's not actually me asking for God knows what in a very convincing way using my face and voice. I am scared and this close to setting up a secret passphrase in case they need to tell me appart from a clone.
My guess is the already-existing trend towards walled gardens will simply continue. When a public space is dangerous, people retreat into "safe" enclosed spaces.
- "Never download anything unless it's from the Apple App Store"
- "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com"
Yes, but observe how that for all three of the things that immediately came to your mind, you have respectively 1. a thing that still has a lot of scams in it (though it may be the best of the three) [1] 2. A thing so full of scams and fake products that using it is already a minefield (one my mother-in-law is already incapable of navigating successfully, based on the number of shirts my family has gotten with lazy-AI-generated art [2]) and 3. a thing well known for generating false statements and incorrect conclusions.
I'm actually somewhat less critical of Apple/Google/Facebook/etc. than probably most readers would be, on the grounds that it simply isn't possible to build a "walled garden" at the scale of the entire internet. It is not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers. The scammers collectively are firing more brain power at the problem than even Big Tech can afford to, and the game theory analysis is not entirely unlike my efforts to keep my cat off my kitchen counter... it doesn't matter how diligent I am, the 5% of the time the cat gets up there and finds a tasty morsel of shredded cheese or licks some dribble of something tasty barely large enough for me to notice but constitutes a nice snack with a taste explosion for the much-smaller cat means I'm never going to win this fight. The cat has all day. I'm doing dozens of other things.
There's no way to build a safe space that retains the current size and structure of the current internet. The scammers will always be able to overpower what the walled garden can bring to bear because they're so many of them and they have at least an order of magnitude more resources... and I'm being very conservative, I think I could safely say 2 and I wouldn't be really all that surprised if the omniscient narrator could tell us it's already over 3.
[2]: To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it. Quite unpleasant to look at. What we're getting down the pipeline now is from some now very out-of-date models.
I don’t accept the excuse it’s too hard. If they have to spend $10 billion per year to maintain an acceptable level trust on their platforms then so be it. It’s the cost of doing business. If I went into a mall and opened up a fake Wells Fargo bank branch it would be shut down pretty instantly by human intervention. These are the conditions most businesses run under. Why should these platforms given such leeway just because ‘it’s hard’? Size and scale shouldn’t be an excuse. If its not viable to prevent fraud then they don’t have a viable business.
Yes, it's not that it's impossible, it's that it's impossible while operating how they want to operate, scaling as much as they want to scale, and profiting as much as they want to profit. But no business model that can't be pursued ethically and profitably should be execused as simply inevitably unethical. It should be regulated and/or banned.
YouTube regularly shows me ads that fit that analogy quite well. The ECB and Elon Musk take turns offering me guaranteed monthly deposits in my account for one time 200 and 400 euro fees. The deep fakes are intentionally bad enough to filter for good victims.
You don't even need a human to review these ads but inserting one wouldn't be expensive.
But what actually is an acceptable level of trust? Acceptable for whom? For the billionaires, it's good enough if outside is worse, or even if it merely appears worse.
> It is not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers
It's 100% possible. It might not be profitable
An app store doesn't have the "The optimum amount of fraud is not zero" problem. Preventing fraudulent apps is not a probability problem, you can actually continuously improve your capability without also blocking "good" apps accidentally.
Meanwhile, apple regularly stymies developers trying to release updates to already working and used by many apps for random things.
And despite that, they let through clear and obvious scams like a "Lastpass" app not made by Lastpass. That's just unacceptable. Anything with a trademark should never be possible to get a scam through. There's no excuse.
> Preventing fraudulent apps is not a probability problem
Unfortunately it is. You've even provided examples of a false positive and a false negative. Every discrimination process is going to have those at some rate. It might become very expensive for developers to go through higher levels of verification.
No, it's already a solved problem. For instance newspapers moderate and approve all content that they print. While some bad actors may be able to sneak scams in through classifieds, the local community has a direct way to contact the moderators and provide feedback.
The answer is that it just takes a lot of people. What if no content could appear on Facebook until it passed a human moderation process?
As the above poster said, this is not profitable which is why they don't do it. Instead they complain about how hard it is to do programmatically and keep promising they will get it working soon.
A well functioning society would censure them. We should say that they're not allowed to operate in this broken way until they solve the problem. Fix first.
Big tech knows this which is why they are suddenly so politically active. They reap billions in profit by dumping the negative externalities onto society. They're extracting that value at a cost to all of us. The only hope they have to keep operating this way is to forestall regulation.
> The answer is that it just takes a lot of people.
The more of those people you hire, the higher the chance that a bad actor will slip through and push malicious things through for a fee. If the scammer has a good enough system, they'll do this one time with one person and then move on to the next one, so now you need to verify that all your verifiers are in fact perfect in their adherence to the rules. Now you need a verification system for your verification system, which will eventually need a verification system^3 for the verification system^2, ad infinitum.
This is simply not true in every single domain. The fact people think tech is different doesn't mean it necessarily is. It might just mean they want to believe it's different.
At the end of the day, I can't make an ad and put it on a billboard pretending to be JP Morgan and Chase. I just can't.
> This is simply not true in every single domain. The fact people think tech is different doesn't mean it necessarily is. It might just mean they want to believe it's different.
Worldwide and over history, this behaviour has been observed in elections (gerrymandering), police forces (investigating complaints against themselves), regulatory bodies (Boeing staff helping the FAA decide how airworthy Boeing planes are), academia (who decides what gets into prestigious journals), newspapers (who owns them, who funds them with advertisements, who regulates them), and broadcasts (ditto).
> At the end of the day, I can't make an ad and put it on a billboard pretending to be JP Morgan and Chase. I just can't.
JP Morgan and Chase would sue you after the fact if they didn't like it.
Unless the owners of the billboard already had a direct relationship with JP Morgan and Chase, they wouldn't have much of a way to tell in advance. If they do already have a relationship with JP Morgan and Chase, they may deny the use of the billboard for legal adverts that are critical of JP Morgan and Chase and their business interests.
The same applies to web ads, the primary difference being each ad is bid on in the first blink of an eye of the page opening in your browser, and this makes it hard to gather evidence.
> The more of those people you hire, the higher the chance that a bad actor will slip through and push malicious things through for a fee.
Again, the newspaper model already solves this. Moderation should be highly localized, from the communities for which they are moderating the content. That maximizes the chance that the moderator's values will align with the community. Small groups are harder to hide bad actors, especially when you can be named and shamed by people that you see every day. Managers and their coworkers and the community itself are the "verifiers."
Again, this model has worked since the beginning of time and it's 1000x better than what FB has now.
> What if no content could appear on Facebook until it passed a human moderation process?
While I'd be just fine with Meta, X etc. (even YouTube, LinkedIn, and GitHub!) shutting down because the cost of following the law turned out to be too expensive, what you suggest here also has both false positives and false negatives.
False negatives: Polari (and other cants) existed to sneak past humans.
False positives: humans frequently misunderstand innocent uses of jargon as signs of malfeasance, e.g. vague memories of a screenshot from ages ago where someone accidentally opened the web browser's dev console while on Facebook, saw messages about "child elements" being "killed", freaked out.
> The answer is that it just takes a lot of people. What if no content could appear on Facebook until it passed a human moderation process?
A lot of people = a lot of cost. That would probably settle out lower than the old classified ads, but paying even a dollar per Facebook post would be a radically different use than the present situation.
And of course you'd end up with a ban of some sort on all smaller forums and BBS that couldn't maintain compliance requirements.
You’re right that there will always be some false positives and negatives. At the same time, I do think that if Apple really spent money and effort they could prevent most of the “obvious” scams (e.g. fake LastPass), which make up the majority, without passing the cost onto developers and while minimally affecting their profits.
No, sorry. It's eminently reasonable to ask or demand that a business to reduce its (fantastic) margins/profits in order to remain a prosocial citizen in the marketplace. In fact we do this all the time with things like "regulations".
It may be unreasonable to demand that a small business tackle a global problem at the expense of its survival. But we are not talking about small or unprofitable business. We are talking about Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon. Companies with more money than they know what to do with. These global companies need to funnel some % of their massive profits into tackling the global problems that their products have to some degree created.
> To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it.
Okay, but if it matches the illustration on the storefront, can it really be called a scam?
Fair, I was sloppy there. The cobra isn't a scam itself, it's just a demonstration that it's already a hard place to navigate what with everything that is going on there. A deluge of AI garbage may not be a "scam" in the strictest sense of the term but it still breaks certain unspoken expectations the Boomer generation has about goods and what exactly it is you are buying.
We have also received a number of shirts where AI has been used to create unlicensed NFL shirts and other such actual frauds. And whatever your feeling about IP laws, it was definitely low quality stuff... looked good if you just glanced at it but when you went to look at any particular detail of the shirt it was AI garbage. (I say "AI garbage" precisely because not all stuff from AI is necessarily garbage... but this was.)
> it still breaks certain unspoken expectations the Boomer generation has about goods and what exactly it is you are buying.
Sigh. I learned from my pre-boomer parents that if the product were any good it wouldn't need to be advertised.
> looked good if you just glanced at it but when you went to look at any particular detail of the shirt it was AI garbage.
To be fair, that was also all over the place before "AI" as currently understood. (And I don't think that previous iterations of machine learning techniques were involved.)
The Apple App Store is full of scam apps. It’s all the disadvantages of a walled garden with none of the supposed advantages for users. In that way, the App Store itself is a scam.
Amazon has the advantage over some company I don't have experience with, of that I know returns are pretty easy and generally not questioned at all (at least for me, long-standing account in the UK, with infrequent returns, it might vary for new accounts, those who return more than they keep, or those in countries with worse consumer rights at the legally enforced level).
My two most recent examples: a couple of rolls of 3D printer filament that looked nothing like as advertised (bad sales images there I think, rather than a comingled-with-a-cheap-scammy-alternative issue) which was taken back unquestioned for same-day full refund despite one of them being opened, and a couple of years ago a replacement drive for my media RAID array that, while the right drive and not, as far as I could tell, counterfeit, certainly wasn't new/unused which is what I ordered, which again was taken back with no quibble or cost (other than my time of course).
There are problems dealing with Amazon sellers, but those can mostly be avoided with care and a healthy dose of cynicism (to avoid ordering crap in the first place). I'd never buy some things from there though: safety equipment, for instance.
I order a lot from Amazon--especially over the past year for house-related reasons. I just haven't had (touch wood) the apparently pervasive problems that some people seem to experience. Maybe I'm more selective about not picking whatever is cheapest regardless of brand that I've never heard of.
Not sure how this works on Amazon, but Bol.com (dutch "amazon competitor") sells a lot of crap too. Stuff that sometimes has the images and literal description taken from e.g. aliexpress. People literally re-sell stuff from chinese webshops on there with profit.
Technically, on Bol.com, a EU-platform, EU consumer protection is in place. So if a product breaks within guarantee terms, is dangerous, never gets delivered etc. the person re-selling is responsible. They are importing "illegal" goods and could even go to jail for it.
So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws. That a TV I buy can be returned, is CE certified, won't explode and isn't a 12" TV pictured in a tiny living-room on the images on unpacking.
Except these products often don't meet EU criteria, aren't adhering to (food, safety, chidren protection) EU laws and money-back is often hard because the re-seller just dissapears. In the last case, Bol.com will step up and refund, because they have to. But for the rest, they plead innocence: It wasn't us that sold illegal goods, it was that reseller from which we skim a lot of fees.
The incentives are just wrong. And the solution simple: Make platforms by proxy legally responsible for their "users". Resellers in my case. Or advertisers in the case of TLA.
If some-guy sells a TV that explodes, and can't be found or held responsible, then make Bol.com responsible. Let their CEO go to jail in the very worst case. Let's see how fast they solve this.
> Not sure how this works on Amazon, but Bol.com (dutch "amazon competitor") sells a lot of crap too. Stuff that sometimes has the images and literal description taken from e.g. aliexpress.
That is bog-standard drop-shipping. Every open online market had a pile of that. It isn't that they've taken the images from AliExpress it is that both sets of sellers are drop-shipping product from the same source or collection of sources (or buying and reselling though that is much less common as it means managing stock) and the images come & other sales material come from there.
> So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws.
When comparing Amazon (UK) or eBay to the sellers on, for example, Facebook, often there isn't a premium, Amazon (or AliExpress, or similar) are often cheaper than sellers on social media and/or advertising via adverts on YouTube and their ilk. Those sellers will often try to make the product out to be some unique high quality item with a price to match (which of course is heavily discounted if you buy in the next hour or two), and if you check your preferred general marketplace you'll find several people with the same thing, often with the same images, making no such pretence of it being unique or high-value, at a price noticeably cheaper than the seller from SM/etc. I assume this is the same with Amazon in other jurisdictions and other marketplaces like Boi.
But how are you going to enforce that liability? Making and selling knock-off "Lego ™" is already "illegal"¹ yet Ali-express is filled with this. How would this change when this knock-off-lego is also made with poisonous plastics?
Point is that e.g. within the EU the liability is clear and enforcable and the manufacturer has a role there. But with imported products, it doesn't. That liability lies entirely on the importer.
¹ (in legislations that recognize the International Trademark and copyright laws)
Yeah there were entire categories of products I'd never buy again on Amazon because of the scams and the list got so large that I cancelled Prime a while ago.
The most common one I've run into is third party sellers taking items that come in multiple to a pack from the manufacturer and splitting them up but then also listing the single item for the same price as the multi-pack's MSRP.
As an example, pouches of cat food treats that come 10 to a pack. Scam sellers will split the pack and sell each pouch for the same price as the full 10 pack and because Amazon has historically done nothing to guard against this, their scam listing appears fully comingled with the manufacturer's listing in a way where it is very hard to recognize the scam option even if you are aware of the possibility.
Amazon has made some noise about fixing these comingling issues this year, but their plans have been vague and for me the well is already poisoned after years of letting it go.
Its actually shocking that it took until this year for Amazon to really acknowledge this as an issue. Manufacturer/brands can't have been happy about this considering that for any item that can be scammed like this you'll find lots of bad reviews on Amazon where the review isn't really complaining about the product, but the scam.
Some example reviews that I just randomly and easily found on Amazon:
I'm in Austria. There are price aggregator sites likes Geizhals and Idealo that helps you find deals across many stores. More often I just go to a store I know and like. It happens I pay a little more, but not having 15 cheap options with one off brand names is actually more a pro than a con..
Where the consumer ends up out of pocket? I realise scamming ligament sellers and brands is endemic; but it is still a safe place to buy as far as I can tell?
Out of pocket? Perhaps not, especially if it "works" as intended. Putting your life in danger and house burnt down though? More likely than you realize.
Let's not even mention the health and nutrient products that make the FDA shudder.
Sure, you can ask for your money back, and flag the seller. But new sellers pop up selling the same crap all over again with a new name and company ID. This is all while real sellers of real (and safety certified products) get pressured by Amazon and dissuaded from taking their business off platform.
Avoid Amazon if at all possible. It's not good for consumers nor sellers, and it's keeping a leach on online retail.
Most countries have laws around liability of sold products. This is often set up to fall on the importer of said product. Amazon Europe (and perhaps USA) is doing something very funny with these laws; You, the consumer, is the importer. If your house burns out, then it's between you and a random chineese ghost companny that just disappeared into smoke. Amazon is "handling the import paperwork for you", and not taking liability for anything.
A lot of consumers have no idea they got a cheap imitation. Counterfeiters have gotten quite good, and in many cases the scam is "falls apart in a year instead of ten", not "it's completely non-functional".
I use walmart.com, they have fast local delivery (often next day) but you do have to be careful, as they also have listings for third party sellers and they are just as shady as Amazon. I only buy items sold by Walmart, never a third party. You can filter your searches for that pretty easily.
I never buy food, supplements, OTC meds, etc. online from any source. That stuff I always buy in person at a local retailer.
That would be one possible dystopia, but I think we actually are going to dodge it.
Smart, on device agents that are aligned with a user's interests will be able to act as the "walled garden" the user needs. In fact, this future is anti-dysopian, because the agent will not care about existing walled gardens and digital fiefdoms, and to the extent that it's using them it's going to deprive them of ad revenue, and they'll have to sit and take it because being agent unfriendly will be a death sentence for a business.
I half joke that the term “parental controls” will change meaning from restrictions set by parents on children to the opposite: restrictions now set up by children to protect their parents.
It's so funny how millennials grew up and we were told "Don't trust the internet, you can't cite wikipedia, the internet is all a lie" And now, I look around and the people who engrained that in us just never listened to what they were telling us. And somehow, no one thought to tell that to Gen Z so they just just get scammed a ton.
Not a joke at all these days, I was at home with my mother for 2 weeks helping her with stuff around the house, watching how she uses her phone, scrolls facebook, clicks on everything, it was really shocking for me. I looked around and didn't see the product I wanted to help me help her, so we started a company to try and give tools to help make it easier for people like us (techy people) who want to protect our loved ones. Our original idea was around education/elearning and we have expanded to doing real integrations to just stop the spam from getting in inboxes (gmail, SMS, call filtering).
That's me! I use parental controls to try and protect my elderly father on other platforms (he's always quick to fall for ads and download Android apps he doesn't need). Unfortunately Facebook doesn't allow you to enable parental controls on an adult, and they also pretty severely limit your ability to update your birthday! Which is unfortunate because Facebook is such a hostile platform.
I started a company a few months ago that is trying to help people like you do exactly this! I would love to chat with you to hear what has worked, what hasn't, what product features you would be most excited about. If you'd be willing to chat, please email me kevin at trylifeguard.com
> I am scared and this close to setting up a secret passphrase in case they need to tell me appart from a clone.
do that sooner rather than later.
Voice mimicry is so much easier now, that you might not be able to tell from the phone. This is why a verbal password from family is important, esp. in unusual situations.
while ostensibly true, the more different types of passphrase/words you have, the less easy it is to remember.
You probably only need just one, for authentication purposes. I doubt grandmother can perform this sort of "spycraft" well if it's more complicated. Better to have something simple and easy, than to forget and panic later.
> it is now entirely possible they will get a VIDEO CALL from me that's not actually me asking for God knows what in a very convincing way using my face and voice
Worse, your fake version will be convincingly begging on the call for God knows what while being horribly tortured. Audio versions of this are already a thing.
I think the Internet will, sometime in the near future, just get shut down. That's been what actually happens in countries that are undergoing civil unrest or war like Russia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Tanzania, Israel, Myanmar, etc. And it's fairly likely civil unrest or perhaps even war may spread to an increasing fraction of the developed world too.
So my strategy here has been to start downloading anything that I think I might need from the Internet and keeping a local copy. It's free and abundant now. It could become inaccessible within a matter of minutes if the right powerful person says so. There may be a low probability of that happening, but given the potential disruptions to our life of our always-on connectivity going away, it's worth being prepared.
Keeping an offline copy of the Wikipedia is fine, but if "the Internet just get[s] shut down" I would think we'll all be more worried more about not being able to use our bank accounts, have medical providers see our records, etc.
We're back to whatever forms of trade you can source locally in that case, but that should not surprise anyone who observes regions that are actually in crisis, because that is how the economy functions in those regions. You do your best to do something nice for your neighbors and they do their best to do something nice for you, and anything that requires global trade or supply lines simply doesn't happen.
Having a copy of your own medical records could be critically important if suddenly your friend who is a doctor is now your doctor because there's nobody else.
Money tends to be worthless is such situations anyway - it's backed by the full faith and credit of a government that best case no longer cares about you and worst case no longer exists. So you aren't going to worry about your bank account, nobody will accept credit or debit anyway.
There is a whole lot of other data on the Internet that can be very, very useful in such situations. Even just having a few hundred hours of collected kids TV shows means you can sit them down in front of Bluey while the adults do stuff that is critical for survival. Knowing how to build a smelter and bellows out of clay that you can find locally means you can restart metal production in a matter of days rather than thousands of years. Knowing what the local plant species are and which are edible might keep you from starving. Knowing how to scavenge parts and wiring, as well as what their datasheets are and how you need to hook them up, means you can fix broken electronics and potentially create new ones, which gives you continuing access to knowledge.
- regulated, approved, monitored streaming walled gardens (like the cable TV of old),
- regulated, approved, monitored social media walled-gardens including chat focused ones like Discord and video focused ones like YouTube (replacing most for-print media, forums, and websites)
My mom did this in the '80s so we weren't kidnapped, even by a family member. I'm not going to share the secret phrase, but it has stuck with me and I use it with my kids too.
I know most of that was driven by the tragedy of Adam Walsh, but it was still great OpSec I'll never drop.
We are all going to need to have personal passwords/safe words we don't reveal to untrusted parties for authentication. Or maybe personal retinal scanners? I think personal auth might be an interesting startup to get ahead of this.
In the future AI bots which are a near perfect facsimile of yourself will indeed call, and an AI facsimile of your mother will answer, and once the appropriate security protocols are exchanged, you'll get through.
God help anyone not armed with AI in the future, that's why it cannot be locked up by corporations or government.
> I am scared and this close to setting up a secret passphrase in case they need to tell me apart from a clone.
I have done this already and convinced a friend to do it after her father fell victim to a scam where he was convinced the sheriffs department wanted him to pay off a fine in gift cards.
I am also concerned that one might steal a trove of texts from someone and plug it into AI which could mimic the writing and tone of someone.
We recently started a company to help with this exact situation! I would love to pick your brain about what features you would be most interested for helping protect your parents. If you'd be willing to chat can you email me at kevin at trylifeguard.com ?
I suspect this may not feel super helpful at first but I thought it worth mentioning, my first reaction to something like that was strongly negative and my guard went up immediately, it’s quite a weird dynamic that you’re stepping into of people who by the nature of their relationship have known each other their entire lives and you’re trying to talk to one on behalf of the other about a topic that requires a bunch of trust despite neither of the people in this scenario knowing you.
None of that is personal obviously just the gut reaction I got reading that initially. I suspect maybe nobody has mentioned it before and it might be helpful to hear on the assumption that others feel similar.
I don’t know how this changes for people who are less sure how to have that conversation and I suspect the fact that I’m a real life security person might have something to do with it.
Edit: I just saw the website after this and I get what you’re doing and can see how maybe it makes sense for some but I’d never recommend this to my own parents, I don’t think sticking an AI in the middle of all of their personal communications is the right answer and I’d have a lot of questions about how that data gets used to be honest.
Again, nothing personal but there’s just no possible universe where I’m setting something up so that every personal message I ever send my parents again is getting silently sucked up into some random company’s cloud to be read and analyzed and then paying them money for that. One of the things I actually had to show them was how to disable that kind of shit on their Gmail accounts for example.
This is really useful feedback, thanks for sharing. And 100% agree it is an interesting dynamic and I think there are a lot of people who share the "I don't want to give you my data" mindset. The original idea we started with was focused on elearning - trying to make really simple, short, effective lessons to highlight basic patterns for users to identify fraud & scams online. We have generic lessons on various channels (txts, emails, paper mail, phone, etc) and then we have scam specific lessons (grandparent scam, forgotten password scam, etc). We got some early feedback from users that were more in the "can you just automatically handle/prevent the scams from getting to my inbox!" so we expanded there. What do you think about eLearning content? I kind of view it as "I'm the IT admin for my mom and I set her the goal to complete one of the trainings." And again, thanks for the feedback you provided already.
Frankly, that passphrase should already have been established when you were a kid: it would have been used for if a stranger / unexpected person needed to give you a ride on behalf of your parents.
I already setup a secret passphrase with my family. My mother is particularly naive when it comes to what's online. Of course she is going to get abused.
A passphrase is cheap. If you never need to use it, so what?
And if she got a desperate, pleading call from "you" and "you" claim you can't remember the passphrase, then what?
These scams are imaginary. Yes they have probably happened but it's far more likely that your mother will get scammed by a "legitimate" financial advisor than some stranger using an AI to impersonate you.
The scams that people don't even know they are getting scammed on - GenZ has the one of the highest scam rates, but the dollar amount per scam is way low and they often dont even know they were scammed. Also, the political donation scams where the people "think" they are giving to a party or candidate but nope, just a PAC that spends all the money its collects on "operations" and "consulting fees" to its partners. Wild times.
Then it failed. Things fail. It's ok. Especially if it's cheap.
And no need for AI. I already had family members getting scammed by facebook or mail impersonation.
But at some point, the capability for AI is going to get so cheap it will be mass-produced by bots from millions of identities like SMS or email scams.
It's not an "if". It's a "when".
I'd rather have my mother at least have the reflex to try to send me a message if I can't remember the passphrase to check if it's indeed me.
And if it doesn't, work, it doesn't. I'm not working for a 3 letters agency and my mum is an old tech illiterate lady. There is a limit.
This isn't a situation we accept out of other industries. You water provider doesn't get to pipe you sewage every now and again because its too expensive to moderate. We shouldn't accept it for big tech either. And we certainly shouldn't make it the responsibility of the end use to protect themselves
If everybody on social media was an actual paying customer of social platforms, like we pay mobile providers (I originally wrote “water providers”, which was in fact a somewhat unfit analogy), we could demand better service and switch away to a competitor who offers it. Unfortunately, we are robbed of our ability to pay with our wallets.
"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." It's an outdated way of looking at tech. Many classes of paid products (e.g., cars, streaming services, IoT, operating systems) double-dip into tracking and advertisement. Why would a business actually want to do the hard work of serving user needs when they can hedge their bets with ad revenue? Line must go up.
First, in any case, the right solution is to make this business model (treating your users as a product, whether by offering free service or heavily discounted/subsidised product) simply illegal. It violates the way market is supposed to work and exploits information asymmetry—regulation against which there is plenty of precedent of.
This makes the rest moot, but I will still list why I don’t think it’s like you say at least in case of social media.
If social media was paid only (like any actual product or service intended to benefit the customer) and users were choosing between paying different amounts rather than paying vs. not paying, it would kill the network effect outright; platforms would have to struggle to keep users, and to that end would start implementing features users want and need (rather than exploiting their emotional state and employing dark patterns[0] to boost ad impressions).
The interest of a service provider is aligned with the interest of the customer. The incentive to do bad unethical things to the user may exist either way, but it is when the user is not the customer that it becomes a natural course of things. It is still possible to “double-dip”[1], but the difference between users being customers and users not being customers is that in the former you can be an honest service provider and sustain yourself by doing things in the benefit of the user.
[0] For example, have you noticed how Instagram’s GUI is carefully designed to require you to tap two times, with a teeny tiny chevron as the only indicator, every time you open the app to switch to the timeline of people you actually follow, rather than whatever the algorithm suggests (and how carelessly swiping photo carousel left makes you exist that carousel, and lose the scroll position)?
[1] Additionally, note that the examples you named (cars, IoT, OS[2]) make a lot of money from a single purchase and/or are fairly inflexible to switch away from, compared to social media where interoperability is pretty much solved with open standards.
[2] What is a paid-only streaming service that “dips” into advertisement in some unethical way?
This is not about regulating away illegal behaviour. Criminals will exist. It is about making [what we have reasons to consider] de facto scammy behaviour to be de jure illegal behaviour. Then it becomes a matter of enforcement.
The norm is reduced costs because there are ads. The same Samsung also sells deeply discounted TVs that are ridden with ads. Netflix, amazon prime, Hulu, and youtube offer ad-subsidized subscriptions.
They didn't need to offer a refund. It was already priced in. You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates while standing starry-eyed at the impossibly low price it was being offered at, but they knew it was coming. After all, appropriately specced hardware to be able to do it was already onboard.
Your comment is so naive. Most products out there have a terms and conditions that equate to 'the company can change the product at any time and you're always free to stop using it', while giving their salespeople little to no idea about future progress because that would limit sales. Even if you didn't "maybe forgot to ask", there isn't anyone to respond with the truth.
If you purchase a product that doesn't have ads and then they introduce ads - that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product.
> that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product.
It is, but one that is already calculated at time of purchase. You'd pay a lot more if there were strict guarantees that it would never display ads.
The Belarus tractor company learned that lesson. Once upon a time they tried to infiltrate western agriculture with, under the backing of the USSR, heavily subsidized products offered on the cheap. But farmers saw through the thin veneer and realized that they wouldn't be able to get parts for the machines down the road. As such, the much cheaper price wasn't a winner. Farmers were willing to pay significantly more to American companies, knowing that they would provide not just on day one but also long into the future. The economic lesson learned was that the marketplace doesn't value just initial purchase price, but the full value proposition over its entire lifetime.
Many people are willing to gamble, of course, especially for "disposable" things.
I read it as more rhetorical than not. No one was literally expected to ask about the future. However, one could be expected to ask oneself “what could such a low price tag on such capable hardware mean for the future?”
It is unrealistic, of course, because it is a textbook case of information asymmetry (the enemy of the market)—only a vanishingly small number of people can adequately assess the pricing, having to know enough about hardware and all the various forces that could bring it down, like potential upcoming lineup changes or inventory overflow.
The right move is to fight information asymmetry. Many developed countries, including the US, already do it in countless cases. A mild way could be requiring to disclose things like this in addition to the ToS; a more thorough way could be simply banning this business model.
Saying it's your (the consumers) fault because you didn't read the crystal ball for what was coming in the future.
The price a product is offered at is the price for the product at that time, you don't get to say well I sold it for $10 but it's worth $20 so I'll just sell your data until I recoup that $10 I "lost".
Exactly. The necessary hardware to enable the tracking was installed at the time of purchase. It is not like 10 years later someone dreamed up the idea and decided to stealthy in the night start bolting on new components to every vehicle they could find. It was a feature that was there at the time of purchase and the sale was priced accordingly.
So by your standards, it's totally fine for Lenovo to use the laptop you bought from them to mine crypto a year after you bought it from them because the necessary hardware to enable that (it having a GPU) was installed at the time.
I mean it's a viewpoint, it's a certifiably bonkers one but of all the viewpoints it definitely is one.
Much like the F-150, if the license agreement between you and Lenovo allow Lenovo to do so, yes. I mean, if you didn't want that, you wouldn't have agreed to it, right? You are allowed to say no.
>“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
If a contractual party is not acting in good faith, there is a legal system to address that.
But I know you will say that the legal system doesn't act in good faith, so... I guess you're screwed. Such is the pitfall of living under a dictatorship.
Which is why I'm not providing what you seek. Production goes to he who is paying, and in this case I am the one doing the paying. Thus, you know the content is written for me and me alone.
> What are we supposed to do about the fact that you are not arguing in good faith?
A rational actor acting in good faith would start talking terms to see the sale go through, but as you are also here in bad faith we can continue to write only for respective selves. Nobody was expecting anything else anyway. I don't imagine anyone has ever paid someone else to write a comment on HN and that isn't about to change today.
The "you can just not agree to it" argument is so bogus. You can only buy good/services that are for sale, and when they all have the same crappy terms, you have to agree to somebody's to live in the modern world.
That's like the people who claim only idiots live in HOAs but neglect the fact that, in some markets, nearly all real estate worth living in is covered by an HOA of some sort so your alternative isn't "buy a different house" it's "live in an apartment forever"
> You can only buy good/services that are for sale
The world is full of custom car builders. Buying a something like the F-150, but without the undesirable computing components, is quite practical and very possible.
It'll be expensive, which I expect is what you were really trying to say when you pretend there is no such thing for sale, but you're just returning us to the heart of discussion: The F-150 is cheap, comparatively, because it has already priced in the tracking subsidy. You're accepting of those undesirable terms because the lower price makes it compelling enough to do so.
Is it really "accepting a concession" if the "alternative" is so expensive as to not be an option anyway?
This is like telling someone who doesn't like that they have to wait in traffic they should just take a helicopter to work everyday. Yes, it's technically an option for some people, but for the vast majority it's not.
Yes. That concession is what gets one with limited means into an F-150. If it was sold at its true market value, absent of all value diminishing systems like tracking, they wouldn't be able to afford that either.
Same goes for roads. You most definitely can build roads that don't have traffic, but only the rich will be able to afford to use them. Traffic is what enables those of lesser means to also participate.
It's a pretty good tradeoff for those who are poor. And the rich can buy whatever they want anyway.
Yes, the world is full of custom car builders. I'm sure I'll find someone that can build me a replica of the f150 lightning that doesn't enable spyware on me.
Mind to help me out a bit and point me at a few companies doing that? Around Kentucky if you don't mind since that's where I am.
I'd start with Ford. They're well known for their custom builds — what they call VSO. And they're already tooled up for production of an F-150-style vehicle around Kentucky to boot.
It won't come cheap like an F-150, but nobody can expect it to be cheap when the value proposition is much higher.
When someone comes to you with a unique custom request for something, your response is: “Nope. Not on my website, not going to do it”?
Must be nice to have the luxury of being able to do nothing. Ford doesn’t have that luxury, though. It has to answer to angry shareholders if it lets a lucrative customer slip through.
A license agreement, or a contract in general, cannot permit either party to violate the law. What you're describing in this scenario, and what has actually happened in some cases, is effectively theft of use and arguably fraud.
Fraudulent terms of service are not above the law, nor are they above basic expectations in society of fair dealing. You can try to litigate this any which way you choose, based on the language contained in the contract/TOS, and it fundamentally does not matter. At some point, something has to give and it ends with burning down buildings and building guillotines. History is full of abundant lessons about the supremacy of social mores and standards that suborn the law, and the supremacy of the law over the specific parties of any given contract.
Who exactly would you ever ask to find out that the samsung fridge you were looking at was going to get ads in the future?
Certainly not the appliance salesman, they don't know samsung's plans. And good luck calling samsung and asking for the "future plans" department. This is such a dishonest take.
> You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates
Who exactly was I supposed to ask that? The check out cashier at the store? The CTO of the company that manufactures it? Who even knows the answer to that question, and how are millions of consumers supposed to find that out and contact them directly, and why are they permitted to reveal proprietary plans if they even know?
Your arguments are delusionally detached from reality.
Normally F-150s, and fridges for that matter, are sold not by cashiers, but salesmen. I suppose there isn't any meaningful difference in the end — except, unlike a cashier, salesmen are named as such because there is greater expectation of them being intimately familiar with the product so that they can answer such questions.
If they can't, that's a pretty big red flag. Why would you conduct business with someone who has proven to be shady (or at least incompetent)?
There's really no difference. If a company must subsidize costs with ad revenue, it clearly shows that they don't want paying customers to be the sole judges of the product's value proposition.
I don't know very many people who have a choice of water providers. Generally you are stuck with whoever owns the pipes to your home. And since you don't have a lot of choice, the government tends to regulate the shit out of water providers - and I don't see we have any other real choice when it comes to too-big-to-fail social media providers either.
I can choose not to use a social medial platform, it is kind of hard to choose not to drink water/wash/etc.
I do not use much social media platforms, while I try to stay social, like posting one picture a month and sending a message here and there, watching a cat video sometimes, etc. I think social networks are much more similar to drugs - you can try to regulate to prevent people hurting themselves, but people will find a way if they can't refrain themselves.
Scams existed before social networks, and maybe is a bit easier using them, but I do not feel it is a fundamental shift. Along the ages people were taught/encouraged "to believe (without checking)" into a multitude of subjects (state, church, horoscope, etc.), now seems a bit hypocritical to be amazed that they do just that.
> I can choose not to use a social medial platform, it is kind of hard to choose not to drink water/wash/etc.
I don't think that's actually true for WhatsApp in a lot of countries - it's the default communication for many, to the point I'm not sure I could get parcel deliveries reliably here in Spain if I didn't have WhatsApp.
Ditto for communicating with the entire generations who moved onto Facebook after we all abandoned it. I could delete Facebook entirely, but then I'd spend every family gathering hearing the chorus "why aren't you on Facebook? Your cousins are all on Facebook. They all know the family drama" (instead I keep Facebook off the homescreen of my phone, and check it about once a month).
The problem with this analogy as I see it is that water supply is heavily regulated and uncompetitive due to exactly the fact of it being impossible to switch.
For this to work for the likes of Meta, it would mean elevating Meta’s services to some sort of country-wide public utility, which I’m sure would create probably an even stronger moat than network effects, hindering any competiton.
However, is there such a constraint in case of social media? There are mechanisms and open standards that could allow interoperability between providers who implement them. It seems that it should be possible to leave it up to market forces and competition, but for that we have to have competition and be able to vote with our wallets.
Nebula is missing discovery, also comments, also the network effect of course. I can open YouTube at any time, and probably see something interesting within a few scrolls of the homepage.
Nebula would be as good if I consistently wanted to watch a particular creator - say, if I consistently listened to LegalEagle on my train ride to work - but I don't. And the channels that are good enough to consistently watch do not upload regularly enough to be spotted on a chronological feed and I'm sure that's no accident. Nor, I suspect, do they upload regularly enough to be eligible for a partnership with Nebula.
I have a subscription to Nebula because I want to support them and the idea and their future competitors other than YouTube, but I don't actually use it.
I have heard of Nebula and Floatplane. Is Nebula good?
My issue is that in presence of one large player who does it for free competition is already impossible: $2 is twice as much more than $1, but $1 is infinity/NaN times more than $0. It’s one of the many problems with the fact that it is legally allowed.
Nebula is good in that it properly allows me to pay the people who's content and reporting and art I like and support them without giving the toxic sludge of Youtube a dime.
It also allows them to focus on doing their job: Making the good videos I want and that they want to make, rather than play some absurd algorithm games.
Floatplane is similarly better aligned with what artists and creators want to do. The guy from DankPods is much happier on that platform than something like Twitch which gave him constant problems.
The GunTubers and "Current military events but from former soldiers who act like they know what they are talking about in reference to geopolitics" have created their own platform and I hope that succeeds too. I do not agree with a lot of the politics from some of these people (and believe some others are liars) but diversity is good.
Armchair Historian also created their own platform. That might not have panned out though, they had financial troubles that led to them abandoning another project.
IMO, the best platform is Patreon linking to a bunch of MP4s on S3 (or whatever cheaper medium exists). Nebula started out just using a "Youtube copycat" whitelabling service.
And don’t forget it was the EU regulators who threw away the opportunity to try to establish social media as a paid service as a thing, when they slapped Meta for trying to even offer it as an option.
And yes, I realize they rejected it when it was raised as the alternative to data collection, preferring the regulators’ plan of making it still universally $0 and funding the whole operation on rainbows and wishes.
We can pay with our attention, if we stopped using social media that takes advantage of us and use others that don't. They will change the way, they act.
We could demand it either way. There's no iron law of the universe that says otherwise. The application of the law is supposed to be objective but the contents are just made up by those with the power to do it.
Not enough people would demand it for it to be actionable, and not having to pay is part of the reason. Why would we spend effort on actively demanding things when we are spending not a cent on this in the first place, and can instead passively-aggressively deploy adblockers while waiting for the next iteration of this arms race (which something makes me think might involve LLMs)?
(An aside, there is a lot of scandal in the UK about how the privatised water providers have been basically shitting on the public and environment, and literally discharging raw sewage because its too expensive to moderate!)
I had a similar thought regarding OS'. Especially in they heydey of malware in the early 2000s when 3rd party apps were the only way to remove it. You don't buy a truck and accept that its wheel falls off every time you hit a bump. Therefore Microsoft should have been civilally liable for all the costs of software removal and loss of enjoyment of computers that ran Windows (along with OEMs that sold them).
Car door locks are wafer locks and can be defeated sometimes with a flathead screwdriver.
Security is about "good enough" though so that's usually sufficient.
Most of the worms of the early 2000s worked by exploiting vulnerabilities that Microsoft had already found, patched, and deployed, but users, including giant businesses just didn't install the patches.
Bonzai Buddy and the days of the toolbar didn't happen because Windows is insecure, it happened because at a fundamental level the only difference between spyware and a perfectly valid and runnable program is intent, and an OS has no insight into the user's mind. When you doubleclick on a desktop icon, Windows cannot know whether you totally intend to send most of your precious data to a sketchy server, or whether you have no idea what you are running.
Microsoft is moving more towards preventing users from running whatever they want.
"The user is god and the OS serves them" and "Never let the user run spyware or malicious code" are mutually exclusive, so be careful what you wish for.
> the only difference between spyware and a perfectly valid and runnable program is intent
This is true if you completely ignore that spyware was impossible to remove without specialized removal apps that were funded by volunteers, not Microsoft.
Telling me that locks are pickable is completely irrelevant and avoids the point I was making.
Most locks are trivially defeatable and easy to force. Heck, there's often a large window right beside a suburban door. Break the glass, open the door. Locks are only there to deter crimes of opportunity and make it more likely you'll actually notice a theft in a timely fashion.
And Microsoft didn't even bother to do that much. Spyware was able to embed itself in any windows installation for a solid decade, just by visiting a website. removing it required at least 30m of updating and installing specialized tools and was well out of reach of the average user.
Because the customer eventually decided it was worth paying for. Emphasis on eventually. It took over 30 years from the first car having optional door locks to locks becoming a standard feature.
> MSFT did nothing to stop spyware for at least a decade.
More like half a decade. The first real instance of spyware was recognized in 1999. Microsoft began working on their anti-spyware software in 2004.
Microsoft bought GeCAD RAV in 2003 with the intent of using that antivirus engine in Windows.
It's also worth pointing out that the 1998 antitrust case against Microsoft is most known as a Browser fight, but it included a heavy hand from Adobe and all of the major Anti-Virus tools of the time. It was seen by many at the time, including Microsoft, that the delivered court decision forbade Microsoft from including PDF software, anti-virus tools, firewalls, and other such software in Windows (and arguably against building some of them at all).
It's somewhat easy to understand why that decision almost made sense in 1998, but real easy to see why it aged very quickly like spoiled milk (including the wide spread of spyware and malware that soon followed).
Water, power, etc infrastructure regulations and things like the environmental movement happened when there was more working class solidarity and the working class had more power over the capital owning class. Now the working class have been propagandized to believe "regulations bad" and have been depowered as capitalism decays and the capital owning class further takes and consolidate power. The regulations you want are impossible in this political climate and probably impossible without an extremely radical reform movement or some mass resignation or revolution of government.
I mean, lets face it, no government that makes hard right turns and has intense corruption like the USA just goes back to being a proper liberal democracy. Most likely things will get a lot worse before they even get better and on a timescale thats unpredictable. We may be talking 20+ years before any sort of baby steps towards liberal reforms are even possible on the federal level. The right has the gerrymandering, scotus, the courts, the media machine, etc. Pro-working class regulations are just not going to happen like they did in the 60s and 70s for a very long time if history is any guide.
Its so odd to me people just have a "dont worry we'll got back to normal next election." To get back to what we had during those times of pro-worker regulation will take many, many, years if not decades of work now. At the very least until many in SCOTUS retire or pass away from old age. That just isnt happening anytime soon.
I'm sure it felt good to write something pithy like that, but the Flint, MI case is not one of a water utility screwing up, or causing harmful contaminants to enter the water. It's a story of the city switching providers, and that other provider having different water chemistry that was incompatible with the existing piping in the city which caused harmful contaminants to be introduced into the water. Neither water provider had failed to provide what they were intending to provide, the city failed to plan ahead and test things before moving the source of their water.
Yes. If you haven’t yet read it Cory Doctorow’s new book Enshittification is well worth a read. I am still reading it but it certainly explains some of the bad practices by these major advertising/spying giants and the resulting market distortion. We need to up our game as technologists and hold our employers to account.
The night before this story was published I was pondering what percentage of Youtube ads I was watching were scams -- not 100%, but it was higher than 50%. Which raises questions about semi-legitimate looking items might actually be soft scams or some kind of funny billing stuff going on.
What percent of the global economy is scams? Sure, the investment manager charging 1% a year to put all of your retirement savings in ETFs that also charge 1-1.5% a year funneling money in to companies being raided by executives and employees isn't a scam scam, but it is a massive mis-allocation of resources and probably more damaging than some dumb item purchased from a Meta ad that never showed up. Same for recently legalized (in the US) sports betting.
The startling thing is AI is being applied at scale to make this crap more pervasive. 10% scams? Meta would like advertisers to use their generative AI tools to create image and video ads of non-existent products.
Best thing we can do is delete all phone apps and only access online media from behind firewalls that block all ads and tracking. Windows is dead. Apple is transitioning to an adtech company. Linux is the only option.
I don't relate with this at all. I get ads for normal insurance companies, uber eats, air bnb, and gacha games to name a few. None of them are scams, so I can't understand understand why so many people on hacker news complain about scams.
Do you live in a region with barely any ad inventory?
Uber Eats opaquely inflates the base price of the food so that even when they advertise a low (or zero if you've paid for 'Uber One' to give you zero delivery fees on 'eligible' deliveries, whatever that means) delivery fee, you're still getting charged significantly more compared to picking up the food yourself. Call me crazy, but I would expect the delivery fee to be the difference between the cost to have something delivered and the cost to buy it outright.
Gacha games are famously deceptive and exploitative.
Airbnb has a good justification for keeping the location private, but it's typically pretty hard to get an idea of the value you're getting for your dollar until you actually arrive on site and discover just how functional the HVAC/kitchen actually are and how good the location actually is.
While you might not classify any of the three as "scams", they're certainly classic 'low-rent' advertisements for things that take advantage of information asymmetry to convince customers to pay more than they would be necessarily willing to if what their money got them was actually clear.
"Algorithms". Even if your region has plenty of ad inventory, Google's micro-targeting can mean even people in the same household see wildly different subsets of the ad inventory. You could just be lucky and aren't in any of the micro-target "demographics" scams want (or at least, can afford) right now.
Micro-Targeting is one of the worst mistakes of the entire advertising industry and we'll be probably dealing with its consequences for a while to come.
I don't see scam video ads on YouTube but pretty much all article/info sites like cnbc or weather are filled with garbage, possibly also served up by Google.
Facebook is one of the few pages my ad-blocker can't handle. In part I think this is because they do it differently by country, but mostly it's because Facebook makes a ton of effort to make it hard to recognize what's an ad from the page code.
Nope, it's what I have. It works in your country, but not in mine. They're serving up different versions of the site, with different adblock-blocking tricks.
I don't understand how more countries don't hold the publisher responsible, especially after they are notified. I'm sure that in a classic newspaper, the publisher would be held responsible for obvious scam ads. But by intentionally automating and outsourcing everything, suddenly that responsibility goes away?
Hold the publisher responsible, let them deal with the ad platform. Suddenly, it becomes very attractive to have an ad platform that doesn't allow scams.
If the publisher and the ad platform are the same, even better.
The answer isn't ad blocking, the answer is paying directly and in full (so no need to subsidize cost with ads) for the service.
I cannot wrap my head around how generally intelligent people are completely blind to this. I guess 20 years of ad-block-is-the-norm has left people totally confused about internet monetization. I've never encoutered a problem that has such a clear answer, and that so many intelligent people get totally spun around the axle on.
We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.
If you pay for Sky/Virgin/insert Cable provider in your country, you still get copious amounts of ads. If you pay to go to the cinema, you have to sit through 15 minutes of adverts before the film starts.
I'm buying off Amazon, they're showing sponsored products (so... ads).
A lot of people did pay for ad-free Netflix, only to wake up one day in the future to find that product ending, and a similarly priced tier that has ads in it.
Amazon Prime Video didn't have ads. Then one day it did.
Maybe you're right that _the masses_ need to start rejection ad-tiers, but so far we've seen that people will accept advertising to get more.
Facebook has made it very clear that they don't want you to do this: you can pay for ad-free (I believe it's because they're legally obliged to offer that as a result of some things they'be done and deals they've made), but the cost is easily 100 times what they can make directly on ads for me. The only conclusion can be that they place an immensely high indirect value on serving me ads.
Same with streaming services, ad-free services seem to be unusually higher priced than the ad-supported tiers. Netflix for example charges $10 for ad-free over the ad support tier ($18 vs. $8). I’ve seen estimates that ad revenue per subscriber is less than that, maybe $4-$8. And there’s a cost to that revenue as well, so their profit is even lower. Why go through all that trouble? Maybe the economics works out somehow, in that users willing to pay to get rid of ads are so price insensitive they may as well squeeze them for more money? Or the lower subscription cost opens up enough new subscribers to make it worthwhile to tolerate a much lower margin. I am very suspicious though and wonder if there is a more insidious or otherwise opaque motivation behind it. Is there some kind of ‘soft power’ benefit to being in the ad business?
They’re probably assuming that anyone who would pay for Facebook has a large disposable income, which means that they’re a juicy add target, and they are worth much more than the average Facebook user.
> We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.
Where are all these ad-free services everyone keeps talking about? Social media companies don't even find it worth it to offer an ad-free plan last I checked...
I don't really get why that's the responsibility of the consumer? Businesses offer shitty deal, consumer works around said deal... it's on the businesses to offer a better deal (a la Spotify vs limewire, or Netflix vs thepiratebay)
That's somewhat apples and oranges. Mastodon-the-software is free-as-in-AGPL, but most instances are funded by donations. I don't know of very many instances that offer explicitly paid subscription (in order to keep their interests aligned with their customers)
> We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.
You make it sound like there are no people that pay for ad-free services they find valuable. Or that there are no free ad-free services (ex: WhatsApp).
My feeling is that people know some "services" are not that "valuable" (ex: facebook, instagram, etc.), so they would not pay for them, but, like with drugs, they can't reduce their usage.
I pay for some ad free services, but it’s infeasible across the entire internet and every possible link you might follow. Additionally, I fundamentally disagree with the concept of paying someone so that they don’t show me malicious ads. If they cannot or will not ensure the ads that they accept money to display are not malicious, I will not look at their ads.
This would create a two tiered social commons however. Someone like me, homeless and on disability, what could I afford? Where would my word be heard?
It could also create "free" platforms, funded by billionaires, to control the speech on the platform.
The answer is a communal, government owned social media platform, that mimics the rules of the town square. in the US, this includes the same 1st amendment rights. This would allow equal access to everyone's voice.
IMHO, social media should not exists at all. It is too huge and too fast for our tiny brains.
You do realize that we are on a platform without ads where your word is heard, so it still is possible.
And before "social media" there were plenty of free forums (each with a certain main topic, but in which people were discussing occasionally more than that), so it was not that bad. And in fact that continues today (ex: this one), with more relevant discussions in my opinion than what I glimpse from my occasional social media incursions.
It's a place with bait for software engineers (lots of tech stories and discussion), and YC then gets lots of eyes on job postings for their companies. This is explicitly why it exists.
What is your threshold of what you consider advertisement?
In the same way, speaking with a friend (or anybody) can be seen as "advertising your ideas".
For me, HN is more of an open discussion forum, where you can find lots of critical opinions on the topics, which for me makes it less "advertisement" than lot of other things.
We need to have an easy way to pay small amounts for a one-time service. A lot of websites offer content that you need only a couple of times in your life. It's worth paying for, but not worth all the hassle of setting up a normal payment.
This leaves ads as the only form of revenue and because ads don't care about the content, this creates a race to the bottom on generating slop.
The advertisers do care about the content. Ad based models ensure that content doesn't piss off advertisers. User payment models ensure that content doesn't piss off the user base, which does sound better, but audience capture can be every bit as bad.
But the truth is that people don't want that. We had that before and it lost in the open market to free but ad supported. There is a very small and vocal group of people (which is massively over represented on HN) that really hate the ad supported model, but the vast majority don't really care and prefer it to paying in cash.
I have my view history turned off on Youtube. It appears that means I get a lot of low quality ads. Questionable health products, really questionable health products, "5G blocking beanies that prevent brain fuzzing", gross out advertisements about poop, and so on.
It really lowers my perception of Youtube as a product as just any old site with content, but also scams / creepy stuff. Youtube don't care I suspect, it's money for them, and it re-enforces my desire to not give them money... so yeah they take money form who they can.
Just curious what password manager I should use? I'm considering using a password manager instead of the Google ones and gradually switch all passwords to generated ones instead the one I usually use. Searched through HN for the last 6 months but found just too many posts about PM.
I believe Bitwarden, 1Password, or the stock Apple one are the typically recommended ones. Bitwarden is free (and can be self-hosted), 1Password is paid and has a slightly nicer UX, and the Apple one is good but requires you to be in their ecosystem. I personally use Bitwarden and have had no issues.
IMO MFA (or a passkey) is much more important. Most online accounts I have I couldn't give a rats ass if someone got in. (Not that they would because there would be no monetary value to them). Best to focus on those that are important and set MFA on them. If they don't offer MFA, find someone else who does. MFA + crappy password is better than strong PW w/o MFA, because even a PW manager can be leaked. This isn't to say you shouldn't care about secure PWs, but IMO it's the less important factor here.
Thanks, I use Firefox but I did save all of my past passwords in Google password already. So I guess I could keep it. I might switch anyway though as I'm switching to Brave.
I use KeePass XC. Open source, free, local storage with versions for both Linux and Windows and mobile (even carry your DB on an USB stick, works like a charm).
*>They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks
I'm not entirely sure that's true. It's equivalent to asking a platform to moderate all "harmful content" off the site. "Scam" is fundamentally subjective, just as "harm" is.
The real solution is to reform the justice system such that a citizen feeling they've been defrauded has a quick and easy process to get satisfaction for themselves and other similarly harmed people. We need a streamlined, totally online court that excels at gathering and interpreting data, and a decision in days not years. The ad networks are themselves the natural allies of such a reform, but such a change can and should start small as a pilot program at the state level. If successful, it removes the considerable legal-cost moat protecting scammers, and so it no longer makes sense to even attempt such a business, and the world becomes a slightly better place.
> "Scam" is fundamentally subjective, just as "harm" is.
From the article:
> Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams and banned goods, Reuters reports
I think we can agree that there's no "subjective" situation when a product is banned.
> The ad networks are themselves the natural allies of such a reform
The article (and the person you're replying to) point out that a significant portion of Meta's revenue comes from such scams. I'm really struggling to see how they're "natural allies" and not "antagonists" here. You're going to have to show me some research that backs up your claim because it flies in the face of the available information.
>I'm really struggling to see how they're "natural allies"
Ah, sorry. Perhaps I should have spelled it out. Meta desperately wants to avoid being regulated. One way they can avoid it is to help make the out-of-band justice system (much) more efficient such that they avoid messy moderation policies and don't need to be regulated anymore. Victims would be happier too, especially if they get remunerated for their pain, time, and trouble. The message to scammers everywhere (not just on Meta) becomes clear: go ahead and try it, you will get caught and put out of business, and likely sent to jail. Eventually the scammers will realize it's not worth it.
The unintended side-effect, sadly, is that legitimate business will be attacked as scams by profit-seeking or malicious individual malefactors.
In any event, I think reforming the US justice system is way overdue; it is far too expensive and time-consuming for most matters, and that means we live in a place with de facto lack of courts. And I don't like that.
> Meta desperately wants to avoid being regulated. One way they can avoid it is to help make the out-of-band justice system (much) more efficient such that they avoid messy moderation policies and don't need to be regulated anymore.
I might have bought that but a delayed flight spent reading Careless People swiftly disabused me of any such notions.
> In any event, I think reforming the US justice system is way overdue; it is far too expensive and time-consuming for most matters, and that means we live in a place with de facto lack of courts. And I don't like that.
Most countries have regulators that come with teeth, such that the only times they need to go to court are to confirm they have the teeth they're using. After that, companies fall in line. From the outside, it seems the USA does not have this system and has no desire to develop such a system.
Scams are absolutely not subjective and capitalism fails at every level without regulation like this. Your comment is very libertarian housecat coded.
Also 'just go to court' is such a naive take. As someone who has been in litigation before I can tell you those $350/hr billings add up quick. How many consumers can afford a 5 or even 6 digit legal bill for being scammed for a few hundred or thousands dollars on a FB ad? Of those who can, how many would see this pricetag as worth it? Sorry but small claims court isn't going to do discovery for you for some company hidden behind who knows how many storefronts and foreign proxies. You're going to have to do real litigation. Its absurd to expect every working class person to sue all scammers constantly. Instead ad providers should be policing their own ad networks and the working class should be using the government to implement proper regulations to protect ourselves.
People's first instinct is to attack the thing they don't like directly. The second instinct should be to consider the system in which those things arise, and what the incentives are for everyone involved. If you have a roomful of loud children, you could apply draconian rules on silence; or, if you notice there is no sound-deadening and so the children are unwittingly participating in a positive feedback loop to be heard above the din, you can add material. My goal is not a libertarian one, its a minimalism one. Streamlining the court system has many other benefits besides this one; the excessive cost and time required to use the court is used systematically by malefactors at every level of society. From patent trolls to absurd rates of criminal prosecutions that are never heard by a jury, it's an enormous problem in our society.
Regulation always seems simple, but there are inevitable unintended consequences. Sadly, those who see regulation as the only or best tool to shape behavior are quick to suggest yet more regulation to fix those unintended consequences, either unaware of the positive feedback loop or certain there exists some set of regulation that will finally, perfectly fix the system. I find this way of thinking naive; it is almost always better to make adjustments to the system to shape behavior that way. And in this case, the obvious way to do that is to fix the courts, and make justice affordable again.
Wonder how it would sound if we would use the same paragraph about "deregulation".
> Deregulation always seems simple, but there are inevitable unintended consequences. Sadly, those who see deregulation as the only or best tool to shape behavior are quick to suggest yet more deregulation to fix those unintended consequences ...
Which sounds more reasonable: "Deregulation always seems simple" or "Regulation always seems simple" ? Will let the reader decide, because in the end it is a subjective choice.
I personally don't think there is one optimum that we can reach. At certain points in time and for certain subjects deregulation should be applied at other points in time regulation should be applied. I don't see any point in talking "generally", this depends on topic, country, priorities, etc.
>I personally don't think there is one optimum that we can reach.
I agree with this, and the containing paragraph. Everything is trade-offs. It may very well be that Facebook is under-regulated (and it probably is the case). I suppose I'm thinking of ways to use the situation to fix the much bigger and arguably worse problem with the justice system in general. Non-rich people (I don't say "poor" because I include middle-class as well) are totally boxed out of the justice system in the USA. A pox of scammers is just one of the side-effects of the ossification and decay of the system. I'd like to solve a big chunk of problems all at once, including this one.
From across an ocean (in Europe) the USA justice systems seems definitely "weird" and hard to understand between news, movies and what probably actually happens in real life.
Me, as an engineer, I always look for most impactful issue to solve at once, but with social system I am constantly reminded that human "powered" systems (like economics, justice, politics, etc.) depend on what human do, think and hope. We can find things to fix, and we should definitely look, but boy I was surprised by how people react to some changes (irrationally, to say the least). Good luck convincing enough people that the system needs fixing (I agree with you that it does need some fixing, but I am not there, so my opinion does not matter much)!
Except in this case, the platform is actually paid real money for that content, so yeah, I absolutely expect them to review each and every piece of it.
If ads worked this way:
- Victim clicks crypto scam ad, loses their savings ($xx,xxx)
- Forensic investigation happens, determines that this happened due to a paid ad on site X. Site X knew that this was an ongoing problem and didn't manage to control it, but was still showing ads.
- Site X is considered complicit and just as liable for the loss as the scammer. Since the scammer is hard to find, the user sues the site and the site has to pay the losses.
- The site is now free to pursue their "business partner" for the damages, the user doesn't have to care.
I bet the ads would suddenly get reviewed a lot more. No sane publisher would allow ads from an ad platform that doesn't provide a guarantee against this issue. If a "good" ad platform started showing scams, the site would drop it once notified (because now they're on notice, and would be liable for any future scams). Thus, the platform would make damn sure that this doesn't happen.
"Scam" might be subjective but the legal system usually has a definition for it and judges to apply any remaining subjective judgement necessary. It's usually also pretty easy to avoid the need for a judge deciding by not trying to max out the we-think-this-is-technically-not-illegal grey area.
This doesn't require huge legal costs for the ad networks - they can simply refuse to do business with entities that are not verified, or allow ads for shady business areas where 40% of the businesses are borderline scams and 50% blatant scams...
While some things may exist in a grey area, there’s an immense volume of blatant, obvious fraud in mainstream ads. A deepfake of Elon Musk promoting a way to get rich with crypto is just so clearly a scam, and yet it’s one I’ve seen in preroll YouTube ads multiple times.
Making the platforms have some liability for facilitating fraud would be good, though. In the meantime I block ads.
I don't understand why the big advertisers don't scream about this. Facebook gets money from whoever, but the scams dilute the effectiveness of real companies that are not trying to scam you.
Real companies don't give a damn about what they are actually doing. Facebook tells them that their ad which nobody clicked on got them 40 000 new customers. The worker who put the ad on Facebook gets a pat on the back from his boss. The boss gets a raise and maybe a promotion. Leadership gets shown numbers of how great advertising on Meta is and doesn't take 5 minutes to check them. If sales are low it is those god damned customers, better hike prices and reduce product quality to show the bastards!
Yet in the days of newspapers companies collected data to see how well their ads worked. There are a lot of statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years ago.
And you can use the exact same methods today on digital channels to see exactly how efficient your ads are, without tracking or invading the privacy of anybody. But companies trust Meta and their sales department instead...
The scam in online advertising is far more sinister;
Google uses their panopticon to show your ad to a user who is just about to buy your product and then claim a conversion. So the stats look like Google is getting you thousands of conversions, when they only actually got a hundred people to look at your product who weren't already interested.
This kind of bullshit was not possible in legacy advertisement. A billboard cannot change itself to always be showing an ad that can be claimed as a conversion to every single user.
The newspaper ads could not change to ensure that you saw an ad that matched what you were about to purchase.
>There are a lot of statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years ago
Weren't those people the exact ones who came up with "Half of ad spend is wasted but we don't know which half"?
Targeted and online tracking based advertising has fundamental information asymmetry problems that fuck over everyone but Google and Meta.
If this theory were true companies would see no revenue impact from ad buys on Meta. Then they would stop buying, and Meta would go out of business. You need to face the facts here that no matter how much you hate Meta, it isn't a scam.
Companies will falsely attribute positive revenue impact to whatever sales channels they are using, including Meta. The option would be for dozens of people having to admit that they made a mistake and wasted money on ads which didn't work. It's 2025, people would rather let their company bankrupt than admit they made a mistake.
Why do you think there is no revenue impact? I would assume there is. Companies should have a good idea how much. That is also why companies should care about scams - if ads on meta lose value they lose.
The comment I was replying to implied that targeted advertising is a scam that finds people who were going to buy anyway and then advertises to them. If that were true, there would be no revenue increase because all the customers would have bought anyway.
oh. That makes sense. so long as other people see the ads that shows up in the stastics. Though companies should be pushing back on google doing that. (Though it may be they were going to buy but the ad influenced where which is worth the price)
What the adds really do is target people who are going to buy a certain category of product anyway, and then advertise the specific product made by the company that buys adds. It's hard to convince someone to buy something out of the blue. Much easier to convince them to buy a particular brand of something they were going to buy anyway, which is why targeted ads are so valuable.
I understand that impact calculation for ads is, at best, an inexact science. But I refuse to believe that businesses spend hundreds of billions of dollars on ads every year for absolutely no gain. That's chips in the vaccine level conspiratorial thinking.
Go talk to any small business owner of your choosing. When they have a slow day and nothing to do they like to chip in a few hundred dollars into the Meta casino. Since you can tweak endless parameters on which people will see the ads, you can always spend more until you find your winning number, like on the horse race track or in the lottery.
Zero click browser exploits still do pop up—it's also hard to say how common they are, because they're hard to detect, and likely to be used very judiciously by the people who discover them to avoid showing their hand. Ad networks have certainly been a direct vector for malware in the past.
Within the past few years there were quite many malicious ads floating around that would trigger a redirect on load on iOS Safari, sending the user to a scam page (phishing, "you've won!", or instant redirect to the App Store), no engagement necessary.
Some recent browser zero days/malicious ads situations, not necessarily "an ad loaded in my browser -> pwned", but reasonably applicable:
I think you don’t see ads that are served in there. Those are outright scams like fake investments and not just crypto but outright “buy big company X shares to get rich, photo of celebrity” with celebrities not even knowing they are used for those scam ads - meta doesn’t do shit about it.
Zero click malware would be most likely too sophisticated.
You click the ad contact people who will tell you where to wire money that’s the level we are talking about here.
I don’t use Android, but I understand uBlock Origin works with Firefox on it, which is kind of the gold standard on desktop, given the other browsers now restrict extensions in ways that make ad blockers less effective.
Yes, this works very well. The element zapper interface is a little challenging or I intuitive, but just using a default block list is so much better than using the internet without any ad blocking.
You can actively poison your ad profile by using AdNauseum, which clicks on all the ads and then throws away the response. The actual ads are still hidden using UBO under the hood.
You can also use AdGuard+Tailscale to get DNS blocking of all ads on all devices. Tailscale will let you block in app ads, even on your phone even when on the cell network.
Honestly, not just ad networks. It’s also publishers. We tried 2 major non-google ad networks. The amount of scams and borderline scams were crazy. And apparently asking for some quality control is complicated. Even with google and ad-exchange, we had to raise the minimum costs by quite a bit to keep most of the scams out. This lowers revenue so most publishers have the same interest in fighting those scams as the networks.
The only reason to fight against the scams is because one cares a little about ones viewers (well, and I guess maybe a bit of brand safety). Which seems to not be the case for the vast majority.
