So many times on this website, people say, "I will pay for the service to get rid of advertising." You pay for this service and rides aren't getting any cheaper. It is naive to think any company isn't finding ways to monetize your behavior, whether you're paying them or not.
If you have the disposable income to pay to remove advertising, you are exactly the market segment advertisers want to reach. They will always be willing to pay to outbid that segment’s own desire to not see ads.
Added to that: it's in the middleman's interest to blur this distinction. You can sell a lot more "may or may not be rich enough to buy your product" adverts than you can "definitely rich enough" adverts. Even if the rate per advert is slightly lower, it probably makes the middleman (Uber in this case) more money. (And the rate per advert probably won't be a lot lower because companies have fixed advertising budgets.)
So now, to justify removing someone from your pool of advertisees, they don't just need to pay what could be made by advertising to them; they need to pay for what could be made to advertise to them and (unwittingly) several poorer people.
I get a lot of private aviation ads. I certainly can’t and will not be flying private anytime soon, but I assume I get fed these expensive ad buys because I do have an ADSB radio hobby.
Yep. People are paying for the privilege of segmenting themselves into the high disposable income categories of the market. They're paying to do the corporation's market segmentation for them.
I don't know about "always", but the general correlation of interest in "paying to not have ads" and interest of advertising dollars in "paying to get to you" rings true and is often overlooked.
I think the general correlation is that corps will find ways to make more money than they are now while they will all eventually realize data aggregation can be monetized
Fair enough, but keep in mind that many Americans are just not wealthy enough for a lot of advertised products; a luxury car ad, for example, is mostly useless if it's shown to people making < $60k a year.
This demographic is inherently attractive simply because they can spend money.
Just to give you another little titbit if you're interested. I work in go to market, and part of that is awareness, and part of that is advertising. Where people use the platform has a huge impact on the prices you pay to advertise on the platform, for example reddit is very expensive because they have a very high mobile traffic population, and the ads can't be blocked, advertising on X is hard because the people I want to reach all pay for premium, so the traffic you get from it now is basically useless, linkedin skews towards desktop, but their targeting is amazing, but because they skew towards desktop people run ad blocks, some platforms let you pick the devices you serve to, some don't, all of it impacts the price you pay to serve the ads.
Well, it doesn't really matter that it's expensive or hard: that's what we have VCs for. More money you can raise, better targeting you can pay up for. You'd be amazed at how much oxygen you can suck out of a market for a million bucks.
You could just as logically say that if the user has spent money to remove advertising, then they now have less money and are less valuable to advertise for.
> You could just as logically say that if the user has spent money to remove advertising, then they now have less money and are less valuable to advertise for.
Thank you for the laugh.
While this may be true on an individual level, it’s wildly not true in aggregate.
The first dollar is hardest to get. Once someone has shown a propensity to spend on pretty much anything, they become much more valuable as an advertising target.
I can't understand why you're so sure about that. First of all, every person in the world spends money. The first dollar identifies a customer interested in your product, absolutely. But that means your product, not any random product in the world. So it's not a signal at all for being a good advertising target.
That's like thinking that a girl is likely to sleep with everybody because she has a boyfriend. "She's already sleeping with one guy, so why shouldn't she sleep with everybody?".
Of course your current customers are excellent targets for your own upsells and your other products. But not much else.
I started to rebut this with the expected value of the bid... but if you're advertising a sports car, it's worth paying $100/impression even if your conversion rate is 1%.
If the ad impression is worth that much (which seems extremely rare), then there's a profitable trade to be had, where I'm paid to see the ad and the platform is paid to provide the ad. Then all parties are happy.
Anyway, the devil is in the implementation details here, but this doesn't strike me as a common case.
I paid quite a fee to have crave streaming service in canada. It's pretty premium with HBO and that. Yet, all the star trek shows are now behind ads.. several minutes for a 20 minute episode of lower decks. Things are getting out of hand.
That technically is also competition. And if the market offers garbage for money, but the illegal market is free and better, go with the illegal choice.
You'll be treated like a criminal either way with DRM. So... Yeah.
I think when you give money for a service it's a reasonable expectation that the company you're giving the money to will respect your privacy, if only because selling your data is not a great outlook and could jeopardize the main revenue stream. I'm guess I'm proven wrong
Without regulation, you have no protections against these corporate actions. If you’re expecting or relying on corporations to act in good faith, you are going to be disappointed.
Just one more piece of regulation, that will fix it! Voting with your wallet is better. No one is forcing you to use Uber, get more creative and stop using men with guns to impose <current hot take because I'm pissed> onto everyone else.
Is there any recent example of one of these huge tech companies actually reducing advertising due to people "voting with their wallets"? Or even making any customer-favoring change whatsoever (ad-related or otherwise) as a result of voting with wallet? "Vote with your wallet" gets trotted out here all the time but it doesn't work.
Doesn't work for who? If you stop using their service then you're not subject to getting your data sold by them because that data simply won't exist. There is no inherent need to get tech companies to "stop advertising" on a societal level.
It gets trotted on a lot here because the overarching narrative on HN is that regulation is an answer to everything when it's easier to just... not use the thing if you don't like it. Rather than creating a mountain of regulations that only big business can comply with, I think it's better to choose what you do with your money as a consumer.
Doesn't work for YOU, because Uber burned many billions across 15 years making sure they killed all their competitors.
In most places, your options for a taxi service are Uber or go fuck yourself. That's how they're able to get away with their price gouging, privacy recklessness, and share-cropped labor.
Free market dynamics only work if you are in a free market. We're not, there's one player, and they won the market by literally just cheating and breaking the law. Sorry, sorry, "disrupting".
what alternatives in ride sharing / streaming / whatever are you suggesting I vote for with my money that doesn't do this? They all follow the same playbook.
Not giving them money is a start, and for alternatives I'd recommend finding another taxi service. Either the traditional yellow cabs or another private company/single owner-operator ones (like the ones that drive black SUVs/cars)
For streaming, I'm not sure since I don't watch much, and YT+adblocker is sufficient for me. Again, not giving them money is enough of a signal if you don't find the product good.
What if the service costs more to deliver than the market is willing to pay (e.g., search engines and social media)? I think it's reasonable to have advertising-supported services, it just needs to be clear up front. I don't mind dropping Netflix, Hulu, or other streaming services for Blu-Ray ripping and Plex if it gets too expensive, even with ads.
While totally unaware of the underlying economics, I do find it interesting how the major LLM providers found a way to get a non-trivial portion of consumers to actually pay for the consumer service. Of course, ads are still coming, but it was objectively impressive to go from 20+ years of "search is free" to "search is free, but capped, unless you pay us."
LLM use is not a simple search. I pay for it to either aid me or autonomously do work with document authoring, software development, and market research. It's not apples-to-apples when comparing.
if you looked at the underlying = economics - even a quick review - you'd see that paying customers is a relatively trivial portion. This is much closer to the dotcom race to maximum eyeballs; figure out the money part later.
> It uses LiveRamp's clean room technology, which lets companies aggregate their data in a privacy-safe environment, without sharing or seeing each other's raw or personally identifiable customer information.
It's apparently not that they directly sell your PII at least.
I don't think G-Suite customers are excluded from Google's ad tracking network. Microsoft enterprise? Neither. All you can ask if that they don't show you ads. And even that is temporary
- Downloading a file often means hopping through several redirects (each of which is an ad) and sometimes even having to "complete an offer" to get the final link
- Private websites have some affiliate deal with VPN providers. "We did the research, this one is the best, if you subscribe through this link you will get some perks on our website".
Of all the kinds of ads out there, that last one is the least objectionable to me. They don't force it on you, it doesn't clog up the important parts of the site, and they supposedly do some research to pick the best provider to affiliate with. I "never" click on ads but this one worked on me.
Torrent is what I meant by public/private website, I didn’t want to spell it out in case someone got offended. I rarely use direct file download but for the odd mp3, console firmware/keys, etc it can be easier to grab exactly what I want.
Not until that asshat company wanting to deploy satellite constellation that displays ads from space. It's not like there are billboards in the middle of the ocean
That was a stretch, really had to jam that little dig in there, huh?
Although if they did somehow deploy their constellation as a legible ad, I wouldn't even complain. "Drink Coke" spelled out with a hundred satellites would be hilarious.
Yeah this is where I think government-regulation would actually be a solid-fit to try and govern some of this manipulative and unfair practices.
There just needs to be a blanket-law where your data is considered every-bit as intellectual property as a piece of copyrighted media and for there to be consent established to sell or give your data to a third-party there needs to be an active exchange of payment, credit or services that is opt-in only, not opt-out from an intentionally obfuscated EULA update email.
Require active opt-in and consent along with a clear set of goods/services/payment, and active simple on-demand revocation with strict timelines, and you could have companies actually properly incentivizing users to sell them their own personal data instead of it just being harvested.
Unfortunately too many libertarian nutjobs out here think that the market here will magically fix all issues.
> too many libertarian nutjobs out here think that the market here will magically fix all issues
I'll see your libertarian market nutjobs and raise you reflexive "regulation will fix it" liberals (I don't really know the right term here, but I guess it's the one that fits most closely with US politics for the last 60+ years). Neither group has much room in its worldview for the simple fact that some people are just jerks and will abuse any system.
Regulation can be done well, but doing so in a way that doesn't just hand the entire segment to the current incumbents is hard and regulatory capture isn't just something market worshipers conjured out of thin air.
In the earliest days of getting people to pay for cable TV when OTA was free, the pitch was that you'd see fewer/no commercials. That didn't last long...
> In the earliest days of getting people to pay for cable TV when OTA was free, the pitch was that you'd see fewer/no commercials.
No, it was quality of reception, especially for people who were farther from (or had inconvenient terrain between them and) broadcast stations; literally the only thing on early capable was exactly the normal broadcast feed from the covered stations, which naturally included all the normal ads.
Premium add-on channels that charged on top of cable, of which I think HBO was the first, had being ad free among their selling points, but that was never part of the basic cable deal.
That varied by region. When cable came to my town in the early 1980s, HBO and Cinemax were part of the local cable provider's basic package. That lasted until the next provider bought them out.
Oh, sure, definitely some providers did some things like that early on to drive growth, especially when they were trying to drive into the areas less dissatisfied with existing broadcast quality then the initial cable markets. (And even once it stopped, it was common to bundle premium channels into the basic cost for a limited time for new customer acquisition.)
this doesn't ring true; TV has always been deeply linked with ads, it just seems that they moved to fractional ownership of a show via many advertisers vs. the (perhaps less intrusive) show sponsor where the advertising was woven into the plot.
I think I'm older than most HN commenters. I can't Google up a citation, but "no or fewer ads" was part of the pitch in the early-mid 1970s in my recollection. You are correct about TV and ads, so maybe I'm wrong.
Not really. Cable TV started as a better way for people to get OTA channels when they were in marginal reception areas. My family had cable TV in the 1970s and it was a maybe eight or ten OTA channels and except for the PBS station they all had commercials, between shows and during shows.
HBO was the first offering that didn't have ads during the show.
Catv originally stood for 'community antenna' and was for those who lived in a valley where tv signals couldn't reach. The community built one antenna at the top and ran a cable down to everyone. Of course it was an obvious addition after that to add extra channels.
Interesting, I grew up in an area with good reception, so the pitch was definitely fewer commercials on the cable channels (HBO, Nickelodeon, MTV), I remember standing in the living room as the salesman said this. It was true for a while, but eventually they caught up to OTA ad loads.
Yea, the no ads theory of the history is cable seems to be pervasive. The only ad free channels were the premium ones like HBO. It's like people think the OTA channels that were packaged together had some magic applied that eliminated ad breaks from the exact same feed as the OTA broadcast. The cable only channels like USA also had ads as well. I guess it's just another example if you tell a lie often enough people will accept it as truth
People object to advertising because it is annoying and distracting. If the ads disappear, they got what they paid for. It's not about avoiding their "behavior being monitized", most people don't care about that at all.
I specifically mentioned people on this website. Based on comments I regularly come across on this website, I don't think the person you're responding to is an outlier. I would hope we can stay on topic.
People on this website are too small a fraction of society to ever move the needle. My point is that it doesn't matter what people on this website want with respect to privacy, in our capitalist democratic society it will never happen unless most people want it.
The reality right now is that most people don't want it.
If I went up to random people and went like, "Do you approve of companies tracking what you buy, eat, do, where you go, and every other aspect of your life?" I promise you I would get a majority of "No"s
It's an interesting theory, for sure. Continuing down the rabbit hole... I guess you could ask about "company promises" versus "regulatory prohibition". But then one might argue that similarly rests on the population's perception of the efficacy of government regulation, which is certainly also somewhat low...
People will also say they will pay more for a ephemeral good like privacy or patriotism, so I think you'd be surprised if you ask them your question. Where you're right is will they actually do it, and even if they will how much?
I'd guess that if you ask people about a broad right to privacy, they will mostly express support for it. You could ask:
"Would you pay extra for a guarantee your personal data is kept private?"
vs
"Would you pay extra for a guarantee your data isn't sold for marketing purposes?"
...and I would guess the first would have a higher "yes" rate, although still low. But I also expect a chunk of people would ask you to define "private" before answering the first question...
One might argue "private" implies more than can truly be promised, for example no US company can promise to ignore subpoenas and actually follow through.
I'd say it mirrors for patriotism: "do you support $OUR_COUNTRY" will get more "yes" responses than almost any more specific question about support for anything tangible. Precisely because it's sort of meaningless and unobjectionable... (well except in the US, where I'm sure it's correlated with whether or not one's favored party is in power)
Don't care enough to sacrifice anything tangible to avoid it, yes. I would think it's obvious the question as you framed it biases responses to the point they're meaningless...
'People object to advertising because it is annoying and distracting. If the ads disappear, they got what they paid for. It's not about avoiding their "behavior being monitized", most people don't care about that at all.'
That's your quote as I read it in case some editing happens. There's no caveat in your original post that you are claiming now. You've moved the goal posts. As you originally stated, I agree with all of the follow up comments to it that you are now trying to expand on your original comment. Maybe that's what you always meant but just left out of the original. It happens. But now you're being obstinate about it in a way that doesn't look good.
No, you're just nitpicking the semantics and missing the forest for the trees. Everyone except you seems to understand that that was the beginning of a discussion, not an opening statement in a fucking court.
It's because acompany promise is useless without actual enforced regulation which is harsh enough to actually add trust in such a contractual agreement being honoured.
This is how we have a free-market to begin with. You need enforcement and structures in place so people will actually trust any of this crap. Instead, we have the nutjob early 90's cyber libertarians thinking this will all be magically fixed with just magical freedom and the invisible hand fixing everything.
Your opinion is unpopular in this subset of folks here, but it's valid.
It isn't out-of-keeping in this kind of company for a person to start discussions about personal data privacy. In fact: We chat about this stuff here all the time.
But in reality: The number of discussions I've had about personal data privacy and monetization face-to-face with people that I did not meet through a computer network, or bring up myself is exactly 1.
It's thus my observation that most people in the world care about this issue approximately...never.
(The reason they don't care may be that they don't know enough to even begin to question whether the people behind their air fryer, genealogical DNA service, garage door opener, and food delivery system may have ulterior motives.
But guesses about root causation are, at best, both tangential and broadly inconsequential. We can guess and figure and re-figure and even prove theories until the cows come home.
And it doesn't matter.
They didn't care yesterday, they still don't care today while I write this, and they will continue to not care tomorrow.)
People "don't care" because they do not understand the implications or the technology, not because they genuinely have no interest in privacy. Of course its easy to dupe people without technical literacy by characterizing it as some benign "targeted advertising" as if its a service being provided for you (when clearly it's not) rather than the actual answer which is "we want to follow your every movement and pattern of behaviour as if we had someone following you in an unmarked car and then sell that data to anyone willing to cough up the cash without any of your consent".
This narrative is incredibly toxic and honestly a very antisocial viewpoint of people as if they are all just stupid sheep who deserve to be exploited.
There's zero reason why its unfair for a person to both object to advertising because of the annoyance (because it is annoying) AND for a person to not want to be digitally surveilled endlessly without their consent.
> People "don't care" because they do not understand the implications or the technology, not because they genuinely have no interest in privacy.
I don't disagree with you there.
> This narrative is incredibly toxic and honestly a very antisocial viewpoint of people as if they are all just stupid sheep who deserve to be exploited.
The people get what they vote for, whether or not its what they deserve. The only way to move the needle on this is to educate people. Telling people they're "stupid sheep" for not wanting the thing you think they should want is not typically a winning strategy, in my experience.
> There's zero reason why its unfair for a person to both object to advertising because of the annoyance (because it is annoying) AND for a person to not want to be digitally surveilled endlessly without their consent.
I'm simply saying I think most people care more about the first thing.
"You pay for this service and rides aren't getting any cheaper" - you can't just say things. You could very well be right but you need to actually look at their margin profile over time to know if this is true.
To give an industry that's a counterexample to the "they add ads and don't make things cheaper", look at groceries. It's a terrible, single-digit percentage margin business but they sell everything from placement in catalogue to whether the product is in a convenient spot on the shelf. That's a clear case where ads make it _cheaper_ for consumers.
> look at groceries. It's a terrible, single-digit percentage margin business but they sell everything from placement in catalogue to whether the product is in a convenient spot on the shelf. That's a clear case where ads make it _cheaper_ for consumers.
I don't follow... it certainly improves the grocer's margins, but how does that do anything at all for the consumer?
I don't think you were unclear, that's what I understood you to be saying.
Surely, the grocer just pockets the extra ad money? Never in my life have I seen a for-profit corporation voluntarily charge a lower price than the market will bear because they increased their margin by other means.
The ads are also inherently shitty to the producers: they all have to spend money on the grocer's ads now, because if they don't, their competitors will. If you look at it that way, the ads are almost extortion.
Which is why I don't pay to remove ads on YouTube, nor I give Amazon the pleasure to see more from my money than what I need to pay for prime deliveries.
Are you saying you are purchasing a minimum of $25 to get those prime deliveries, or are you some how thinking you can pay for Prime deliveries while not also paying for Prive Video??
I am paying for the deliveries, the fact that Prime Video is part of the deal is something nice, but not what I care about, even less so after Amazon decided to force ads to people that were already paying in first place.
Uber ride app has ads in it now on top of data collection, service fees, etc, uber eats also sells sponsored placement, and then the fees and prices now... like what the actual fuck is this? https://s.h4x.club/9Zun85Lj - these people have lost their minds, y'all really gonna drive the business down to 10 loyal customers who you milk to hell and high water? Weird strategy.
As someone who has spent their whole career in growth and awareness for business building, I see why people hate ads so much now - personally I love running ads, trying to place a good ad in a good spot for someone who will genuinely appreciate it, it can be very rewarding... but late stage capitalism, aka fervent consumerism, has driven business into a real bad place, it's a shame because business and commerce is pretty fun, better than conquering via killing anyways.
Sometimes I believe they aren't monetizing me. With Kagi I feel quite confident, for example. It depends how prominently they put 'no monetization/ads' as part of their marketing. Uber doesn't do that, to be fair, and never have done.
The key concept is that maximising the monetisation of each user is the ultimate goal. Once that is understood, Uber's behaviour makes sense as a subgoal of that bigger goal
The prevailing implementation of capitalism compels all companies to continue developing revenue streams to increase their overall “worth.”
Any company that has unique or rare data is compelled to do things with it. Those that don’t either can’t figure out how or explicitly reject the reward function of contemporary capitalism. We should really expect those deviations to be the exception.
Delivery in particular remains underpriced at even the high prices we see. The way the platforms are set up, you're basically paying to chauffeur a single order straight to your house, on-demand. Mobile tech and "own car" efficiencies don't begin to cover those costs. The problem was that this is the kind of service that they had to offer in order to supersede existing delivery.
In an ideal world, you'd instead have drivers assigned to either particular neighborhoods or particular restaurants, allowing for order-stacking and predictable routes. Bonus for set-time daily deliveries (get your order in before 6 or have to wait until 9). Bigger bonus for set neighborhood drop-off points (like those consolidated mailboxes, but warming compartments). Anything more bespoke would cost extra.
Unfortunately, the balance of inefficient operations, decreasing competition, and "line go up" is that prices have to increase.
Delivery was financially viable for decades before delivery apps. That's why restaurants did it on their own. What's not financially viable is VCs investing billions to create global oligopolies, and and then expecting outsized returns on that investment.
At the same time you have processes like increasing suburbanization and development of even more car-centric infrastructure, which makes houses and restaurants even further from each other, and makes cheaper delivery vehicles like motorbikes infeasible.
All of that is true. However, I think you don't account enough for the differences in the current and previous delivery models in delivery's viability. The old model was "drivers employed or contracted to individual restaurants, with fairly strict distance limits." Today's apps let you order from arbitrary restaurants to arbitrary delivery addresses. The other factors make the situation worse, but just this one is enough to turn a viable model into one that can't be profitable without someone involved getting scammed.
When people say they are going to pay for an ad free product they very often underestimate how much the service would cost them. This is often a price higher than what they would be willing to pay.
I respectfully disagree my friend.
When Investors , board, wall street is chasing second order and third order delta increase in a stock enshitification is bound to happen. If there is a board that wants return higher than previous year and when you can't optimize costs by improving tech, You find new avenues like showing 2 ads, showing 3 ads. Increasing subscription price or cheekly modifing terms of service and selling your data to 3rd party data brokers. it has nothing to do with subscription cost.
This data is extremely extremely valuable, so my guess is that they were sitting on it until they were sure this was the best business decision. Also they already have their own ads so they have certainly been using this data internally all along.
I just genuinely thought this had been the case for at least ten years. That's what makes it so surprising.
That they haven't monetized it like this when this is how basically everything is monetized and they spent so long burning money hand over fist just boggles my mind.
Marketing lead-generation and sales conversion is what every company does with their customer list eventually (sign of a failing business model.) Whether it is internal revenue generation, or a 3rd party... this is what most large web companies trade with Marketers.
I would be more surprised if they kept peoples privacy, as even your credit card company sells the purchase data. =3
The Uber app keeps pushing notifications to advertise fast food. This is so annoying since you need alerts enabled for when your ride is on its way. As I am a very infrequent customer I just uninstall the app, and reinstall it if I need a ride.
You don’t actually need alerts enabled for your ride - I just get ready, order my ride, then have a seat in a chair where I can see the road and do some reading. When my ride shows up I leave the house.
So many freaking apps do this crap, Apple needs to implement a categorization system for notifications and allows users to choose which categories of notifications to allow. Anything other than essential notifications needs to go in the useless crap category.
The allegation that driver payouts are manipulated to:
1) Hook new drivers with better than average rates before tapering off
2) Take into account the age/model/value of the vehicle and what payments for it would look like in the market and dole out enough to cover costs but not "too much" that they're getting ahead of other drivers
Totally baseless and sourceless hearsay tho. Still, if true, really plays into the image of "there's no depth they won't go".
Add another: the various platforms talk to each other (or analyze driver movement) in order to manipulate order offerings in such a way as to discourage drivers from taking orders from more than one app at once. One app will wait until the other has confirmed an accepted order before deluging you with their own orders, all taking you in the opposite direction (which makes you late for one or more deliveries, giving cause to terminate your contract).
Pure anecdata. However, the change from the first two days I multi-apped and made almost 3 times my usual hourly rate, to the following weekend, when
>neither app would send me orders for up to half an hour
>as soon as one had assigned me and order, the other would start sending my multiple per minute
>all of these orders were either comically low-compensation (no tip), a 15-minute-plus drive away from the order I'd just accepted (to areas it had never sent me before), or both
> Uber Intelligence will let advertisers securely combine their customer data with Uber's to help surface insights about their audiences, based on what they eat and where they travel.
So the companies have the identities. It sounds like they're going to be learning something about their customers, the question is just how much detail they'll get.
One of the easiest methods is to find a different data source with overlap and use that to map real people to anonymized lists. Big tech companies find this super easy to do because of all the internal data they already have on everyone
Whether they know how to best exploit my commercial footprint via anonymous data or personal data, doesn't stop them from exploiting my commercial footprint.
When done properly is going a lot of heavy lifting there. Time and time again it's been found most aggregates are not filtered properly and be deanonymized with eaze.
It's not that one is big bad, and one is little bad, it's the little bad can become big bad with a small amount of work by an attacker/company. Then when you add in zero external third party verification of these company claims, you really don't have any reason to believe them.
> When done properly is going a lot of heavy lifting there.
Not really. There are common practices for it. Yes it hits HN when deanonymization can happen at a well-known company, just like it hits HN when there's a security vulnerability that gets patched at a well-known company.
But "it's the little bad can become big bad" is what's doing the heavy lifting in your argument. No, that's not how it works. There's no universe in which aggregate data can be deanonymized to anywhere close to what all of the individual profiles would be. It's a completely false equivalenace, period.
And I'm tired of people acting like companies putting on a show of protecting our privacy is doing anything actually helpful. But you're right. I'm wrong and clearly don't care about privacy.
As a completely unrelated aside, I wonder how much social progress is hindered by people alienating people on their own side.
It's easy, just admit the two are not the same and move on. You don't need to get defensive about it. "I wonder" how much social progress is hindered by people making wrong statements and then getting defensive about it? Or by making snarky "completely unrelated" asides?
I'm surprised they weren't already doing this. Maybe they wanted to give it some time to see if there were other ways to monetize it before opening up the aggregates for sale.
There should be a law forcing ride hailing apps to give anonymized ride data to local governments so that they can plan public transport better. If they sell it to marketers they must be able to do this technically.
> New York City has released data of 173m individual taxi trips – but inadvertently made it "trivial" to find the personally identifiable information of every driver in the dataset.
Interesting read, thanks. The related article shows that even more robust anonymization techniques may still be insufficient (in the case of the taxi rides, spatial-temporal analysis could still lead to de-anonymization). More reason to reduce data collection. Unfortunately the trend is the opposite for governments all around the world.
That example only demonstrates leaked information of the drivers, not the passengers/customers. And the "anonymized" driver and license data wouldn't need to be released in any form at all to produce a dataset useful for public transportation planning purposes: approximate time of day and approximate location are sufficient to estimate demand, and there's no need to keep track of who is making which trips.
Well, there are pitfalls, and it's easy for an "anonymization" scheme to leak more detail than it would seem at first glance. But I agree that motive plays a big role. If your purpose in sharing data is to make money off it, then you'll be trying to share as much data as possible, and will try to convince yourself that your anonymization is "good enough".
If you're sharing data for a specific purpose, then it's much easier to limit the data sharing to suit that purpose: omit irrelevant data, aggregate where possible, and anonymize individual data points only when you actually need to share that level of detail.
Sadly almost no local governments would be equipped to process the data. This would probably benefit firms like Streetlight and Replica but not materially improve public transport. Written by someone turned cynical after years of working in this space.
I'm not surprised. It won't hesitate to turn more unethical than any other company.
Uber support in India is the most robotic and useless I have ever seen with any vendor. I gave up after fighting for months, just to utilize my wallet amount in other country or get refund. Both were impossible.
I have misguided friends working with payment processors (think companies like VISA, mastercard, etc.) to build models that run across all transactions to extract the purchasing behaviors of individuals, uncover correlations between accounts for marketing purposes, and predictively model future purchases and life events. Surveillance is inescapable at this point. How long until AI shops for us based on past purchases or we live in a world where mass individualized price discrimination is the norm? How to avoid that future? Sometimes I forget privacy is a basic right, as society often requires that we sign it away.
It sounds like Uber is literally selling data; as opposed to when Facebook is accused of more metaphorically "selling data" (allowing advertisers to target their ads).
A lot of other companies are in the business of selling data, too. It's not like Uber is uniquely evil for doing this. I'd argue that selling aggregated metrics is comparatively innocuous compared to what Meta does with fingerprinting, shadow profiles, etc. and also compared to what credit card companies, banks, credit rating agencies, ISPs, etc. can do.
> It uses LiveRamp's clean room technology, which lets companies aggregate their data in a privacy-safe environment, without sharing or seeing each other's raw or personally identifiable customer information.
> A hotel brand could use Uber Intelligence to help identify which restaurants or entertainment venues it might want to partner with for its loyalty program, for example.
Not much details on that "Clean room" but it sounds like the third parties get an environment where they can join their data to ubers and then run aggregate queries, but not actually see individual customer records. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
Consider what will happen every time there is a trade-off to be made between making/keeping the data more useful to the companies involved, and actually upholding the anonymity of the data subjects.
Anonymization is nearly impossible to get right even when you're trying really hard, and this is more likely to be a fig leaf to be able to do things that are illegal by sufficiently obfuscating them.
I hope that if EU customer data is included in this, the EU will have the balls to actually enforce GDPR. Uber is one of the few tech company cases where 2-4% of overall revenue would actually hurt, rather than being a small "tax" on the extra profit made through the illegal use of data.
They're called taxi cabs. You'll see "taxi" printed on the vehicle. If they have a light on the top of the vehicle that's lit, you can just wave at it, arm raised and it'll pick you up.
Pretty amazing really. They'll even uturn if they are on the other side of the road.
Ah but there was an Uber before Uber called private car services or gypsy cabs.
Flatbush Ave and Church Ave in Brooklyn also have a good amount of $1 buses and $1 cabs going up and down the avenue. This is on top of the MTA busses and subway in the area.
Cool so not only do the prices of the food not drop (because Uber's crazy fees to the restaurant), but we also get to suffer through (more) ads, and they will now be targeted? And Uber makes even more off it all while making no improvements to the user and/or provider experience?
I just realized taxis still exist and most restaurants offer their own delivery service (or pick-up!)
I'm quite surprised this was not already being done. But yes, ALL services will do their best to maximize value and make the service worse for you. One way in which they do this is to sell your data to marketers.
Back in the day in my country, if your neighbor or taxi driver was informing the authorities of your habits and travels, this was considered a dangerously hostile action. If no willing informant could be found, there were torture basements to get it. It's what kept the government in power for so long. E.g. travel data makes it easy to identify nascent political groups.
Thankfully corporations have proven themselves so trustworthy and benevolent, we don't think twice about giving them the data they used to have to torture out of us. Likewise the governments, that we know are among the buyers [1], are just as beloved and uncontroversial, unlike in the old days.
The core issue here is one of companies lying about the service and the price. TOS should not be allowed to hide price at time of checkout, which they effectively are doing by allowing selling personal data. So the fix is simple. if they are going to make additional money on you after the service ends and that is considered part of the payment then it should be clearly displayed as part of the cost and NOT allowed in the TOS. This should be required by law. If you are making money off of me and I don't know it it should be a crime. You stole from me.
At this point im just going to move to Shetland, live in a hut and spend the next 30 years making wooden boats. It's the only way to be free of this nonsense.
I mean, this is just one particular service, have you not read the other articles on how private companies are mass tracking license plate information/location and selling it?
The only thing legacy taxis add that Uber's don't is being able to hail them from the street.
Other than getting in a taxi line at the airport, I've never been able to use street hailing as a practical way to get around. There just have never been enough taxis in the places that I've lived.
As long as it is to advertise in their own platform sounds great. I'd rather have nice restaurant suggestions on top than McDonald's and Dominoes or whoever paid the most every day. Using Uber eats is like some app from the past with ads as global banners that are the same for all users. If you're going to throw me ads at least use my history to try and do something useful.
Just so we are clear about how advertising works, you will still just see suggestions from who paid the most every day. The data just informs the marketing teams whether they should pay more for your eyeballs specifically.
That something useful is turning you into a data cow and making money off of it while returning zero value to you.
Seriously you want people to use your travel and movement and choice data to make a suggestion list of restaurants for you to order from? How helpless are you?
Just wanted to verify how far you are willing to go to get a list generated for you that’s probably not even that unique from the other Y number of people who love being suggested obvious information.
How many combinations of the restaurants around you do you think exist and are needed to provide that information? Certainly need Uber guzzling down Terabytes of data to rank the local Chiles over the local Applebees.
Lets be honest, restaurant suggestions aren’t a real problem anyone has.
> Lets be honest, restaurant suggestions aren’t a real problem anyone has.
I suspect you don't live in New York City, or another city with a thriving restaurant scene where new places open and old places close all the time and you can't keep track of them all in your head.
Lol I do live in Nyc in Brooklyn (between Bedford Ave and Rogers Ave on Martense St, I’ve also lived in Carroll Gardens, East Village, Crown Heights, Upper West Side) and there are plenty of blogs and people with a vocal enough opinion in Nyc to not need to hand off my restaurant searches to Uber of all companies.
If you have problems with restaurant rankings in Nyc you’re not living right.
Sometimes you just need a quick decision, whether you're going somewhere with friends at the last second, or yes ordering delivery and just want something that will be one of the better options. Because there isn't 1 Chinese place in your delivery radius, there are 20.
Believe me, I read restaurant blogs and talk to people too. But that's more for stuff I plan in advance, not last-minute decisions in a neighborhood I don't visit often.
So maybe don't be so quick to judge that others aren't "living right", how about?
I get your point, but the problem here for me is that most of the available information about said restaurants (ads and social media reception) and just noise, there’s no actual signal there about whether I’d actually like to eat at a restaurant.
Why would the recommendations be "good"? I assume you mean "good" here to mean good for you or in your interests. That isn't how ads are sold, they're sold to the highest bidder
Trying to convince me to buy things isn't always good for me, though. It's good if the thing is useful or I already needed one and just need to know about brands, but a lot of advertising is trying to drive up consumption in more general ways that might cost me money unnecessarily.
Rationality requires an actual estimate of the incrementality of your visit. As someone who has worked in the incrementality estimation function of adtech, for a measurment vendor to the likes of YoutTube, TikTok, Meta, etc., I promise you: the advertisers and the publishers have no fucking clue because the masurement companies, in their competition with one another for the business of these internet titans, juice their estimates to make them more attractive.
I don't think the problem is these kind of suggestions.
Are people suddenly moving more between corp A and corp B? Must be something going on, let's buy the stock.
Suddenly multiple Ubers are dropping off people at a residential building during the night? They probably know each other. Let's flag that as a potential risk.
So many times on this website, people say, "I will pay for the service to get rid of advertising." You pay for this service and rides aren't getting any cheaper. It is naive to think any company isn't finding ways to monetize your behavior, whether you're paying them or not.
If you have the disposable income to pay to remove advertising, you are exactly the market segment advertisers want to reach. They will always be willing to pay to outbid that segment’s own desire to not see ads.
Added to that: it's in the middleman's interest to blur this distinction. You can sell a lot more "may or may not be rich enough to buy your product" adverts than you can "definitely rich enough" adverts. Even if the rate per advert is slightly lower, it probably makes the middleman (Uber in this case) more money. (And the rate per advert probably won't be a lot lower because companies have fixed advertising budgets.)
So now, to justify removing someone from your pool of advertisees, they don't just need to pay what could be made by advertising to them; they need to pay for what could be made to advertise to them and (unwittingly) several poorer people.
I get a lot of private aviation ads. I certainly can’t and will not be flying private anytime soon, but I assume I get fed these expensive ad buys because I do have an ADSB radio hobby.
I also click them often. $$$$
Yep. People are paying for the privilege of segmenting themselves into the high disposable income categories of the market. They're paying to do the corporation's market segmentation for them.
So it’s not
“If you don’t pay for a product, you are the product”
It’s
“If you don’t pay for a product, you are a less valuable product than if you’d pay for the product”
I don't know about "always", but the general correlation of interest in "paying to not have ads" and interest of advertising dollars in "paying to get to you" rings true and is often overlooked.
I think the general correlation is that corps will find ways to make more money than they are now while they will all eventually realize data aggregation can be monetized
I'm not sure this is true, the people who would pay to not have non-distracting ads are likely a demographic that does not convert very well.
If they're half as likely to convert but four times wealthier, does it matter?
Four times wealthier does not mean they'll spend four times more on your products.
The answer here isn't really obvious, but I'd suspect that in many cases this is not a very attractive demographic to advertise to.
Fair enough, but keep in mind that many Americans are just not wealthy enough for a lot of advertised products; a luxury car ad, for example, is mostly useless if it's shown to people making < $60k a year.
This demographic is inherently attractive simply because they can spend money.
They should have used the term more valuable not more wealthy, their point is generally cogent.
On the wealthy side, you don't need to be that rich to pay not to get ads.
This is very insightful
Just to give you another little titbit if you're interested. I work in go to market, and part of that is awareness, and part of that is advertising. Where people use the platform has a huge impact on the prices you pay to advertise on the platform, for example reddit is very expensive because they have a very high mobile traffic population, and the ads can't be blocked, advertising on X is hard because the people I want to reach all pay for premium, so the traffic you get from it now is basically useless, linkedin skews towards desktop, but their targeting is amazing, but because they skew towards desktop people run ad blocks, some platforms let you pick the devices you serve to, some don't, all of it impacts the price you pay to serve the ads.
So, don't do targeted advertising then?
Well, it doesn't really matter that it's expensive or hard: that's what we have VCs for. More money you can raise, better targeting you can pay up for. You'd be amazed at how much oxygen you can suck out of a market for a million bucks.
> If you have the disposable income to pay to remove advertising
So a fancy way to say that if you have 10 dollars?
I’m describing the general principle. If x + x = 2x, then it already follows that 1 + 1 = 2.
You could just as logically say that if the user has spent money to remove advertising, then they now have less money and are less valuable to advertise for.
> You could just as logically say that if the user has spent money to remove advertising, then they now have less money and are less valuable to advertise for.
Thank you for the laugh.
While this may be true on an individual level, it’s wildly not true in aggregate.
The first dollar is hardest to get. Once someone has shown a propensity to spend on pretty much anything, they become much more valuable as an advertising target.
I can't understand why you're so sure about that. First of all, every person in the world spends money. The first dollar identifies a customer interested in your product, absolutely. But that means your product, not any random product in the world. So it's not a signal at all for being a good advertising target.
That's like thinking that a girl is likely to sleep with everybody because she has a boyfriend. "She's already sleeping with one guy, so why shouldn't she sleep with everybody?".
Of course your current customers are excellent targets for your own upsells and your other products. But not much else.
I started to rebut this with the expected value of the bid... but if you're advertising a sports car, it's worth paying $100/impression even if your conversion rate is 1%.
If the ad impression is worth that much (which seems extremely rare), then there's a profitable trade to be had, where I'm paid to see the ad and the platform is paid to provide the ad. Then all parties are happy.
Anyway, the devil is in the implementation details here, but this doesn't strike me as a common case.
For ads I see in places I paid not to see them, I add all the vendors to my "never buy from" list when this happens.
Isn't it fun when monopolies show you ads.
I paid quite a fee to have crave streaming service in canada. It's pretty premium with HBO and that. Yet, all the star trek shows are now behind ads.. several minutes for a 20 minute episode of lower decks. Things are getting out of hand.
I was paying $24 for crave. They showed me ads.
I'm not paying crave anymore.
But rest assured they'll blame piracy for their downturn in revenue.
Unlikely, does anyone in this sector actually bother complaining about piracy anymore? Except for sports, they've largely managed to kill it off.
I had read it was resurging since they started upping the pricing and the fragmentation that occurred since Disney split off.
Get a cheap VPN and then pirate.
That technically is also competition. And if the market offers garbage for money, but the illegal market is free and better, go with the illegal choice.
You'll be treated like a criminal either way with DRM. So... Yeah.
For $24 a month you can even get an expensive vpn
For 24$ a month you can get a good enough VPS to stream Terabytes of movies with jellyfin.
Even if you take away the money a vpn costs, you still can have a decent vps with decent storage.
If you only need storage, even better. Found an offer for a "Storage VPS" with low hardware specs and 2TB of HDDs for 10€/monthly
I was paying for Prime. They showed me ads. I'm not paying for Prime anymore
I think when you give money for a service it's a reasonable expectation that the company you're giving the money to will respect your privacy, if only because selling your data is not a great outlook and could jeopardize the main revenue stream. I'm guess I'm proven wrong
Without regulation, you have no protections against these corporate actions. If you’re expecting or relying on corporations to act in good faith, you are going to be disappointed.
Uber, famously a company that respects existing laws and regulations.
Just one more piece of regulation, that will fix it! Voting with your wallet is better. No one is forcing you to use Uber, get more creative and stop using men with guns to impose <current hot take because I'm pissed> onto everyone else.
Is there any recent example of one of these huge tech companies actually reducing advertising due to people "voting with their wallets"? Or even making any customer-favoring change whatsoever (ad-related or otherwise) as a result of voting with wallet? "Vote with your wallet" gets trotted out here all the time but it doesn't work.
Doesn't work for who? If you stop using their service then you're not subject to getting your data sold by them because that data simply won't exist. There is no inherent need to get tech companies to "stop advertising" on a societal level.
It gets trotted on a lot here because the overarching narrative on HN is that regulation is an answer to everything when it's easier to just... not use the thing if you don't like it. Rather than creating a mountain of regulations that only big business can comply with, I think it's better to choose what you do with your money as a consumer.
Doesn't work for YOU, because Uber burned many billions across 15 years making sure they killed all their competitors.
In most places, your options for a taxi service are Uber or go fuck yourself. That's how they're able to get away with their price gouging, privacy recklessness, and share-cropped labor.
Free market dynamics only work if you are in a free market. We're not, there's one player, and they won the market by literally just cheating and breaking the law. Sorry, sorry, "disrupting".
what alternatives in ride sharing / streaming / whatever are you suggesting I vote for with my money that doesn't do this? They all follow the same playbook.
Not giving them money is a start, and for alternatives I'd recommend finding another taxi service. Either the traditional yellow cabs or another private company/single owner-operator ones (like the ones that drive black SUVs/cars)
For streaming, I'm not sure since I don't watch much, and YT+adblocker is sufficient for me. Again, not giving them money is enough of a signal if you don't find the product good.
What if the service costs more to deliver than the market is willing to pay (e.g., search engines and social media)? I think it's reasonable to have advertising-supported services, it just needs to be clear up front. I don't mind dropping Netflix, Hulu, or other streaming services for Blu-Ray ripping and Plex if it gets too expensive, even with ads.
>What if the service costs more to deliver than the market is willing to pay
What if I don't have enough money to buy something and I want it anyway!
While totally unaware of the underlying economics, I do find it interesting how the major LLM providers found a way to get a non-trivial portion of consumers to actually pay for the consumer service. Of course, ads are still coming, but it was objectively impressive to go from 20+ years of "search is free" to "search is free, but capped, unless you pay us."
LLM use is not a simple search. I pay for it to either aid me or autonomously do work with document authoring, software development, and market research. It's not apples-to-apples when comparing.
if you looked at the underlying = economics - even a quick review - you'd see that paying customers is a relatively trivial portion. This is much closer to the dotcom race to maximum eyeballs; figure out the money part later.
FTA:
> It uses LiveRamp's clean room technology, which lets companies aggregate their data in a privacy-safe environment, without sharing or seeing each other's raw or personally identifiable customer information.
It's apparently not that they directly sell your PII at least.
I don't think G-Suite customers are excluded from Google's ad tracking network. Microsoft enterprise? Neither. All you can ask if that they don't show you ads. And even that is temporary
If you arent paying, you are the product.
And if you are paying… you’re still the product as well.
Yeah. Only way to avoid becoming the product is to become a "pirate" instead. Pretty sad but it is what it is.
Thers no ads on the high seas?
I've seen ads of several varieties:
- Public websites are chock full of ads
- Downloading a file often means hopping through several redirects (each of which is an ad) and sometimes even having to "complete an offer" to get the final link
- Private websites have some affiliate deal with VPN providers. "We did the research, this one is the best, if you subscribe through this link you will get some perks on our website".
Of all the kinds of ads out there, that last one is the least objectionable to me. They don't force it on you, it doesn't clog up the important parts of the site, and they supposedly do some research to pick the best provider to affiliate with. I "never" click on ads but this one worked on me.
Why are you doing it that way? That's the hardest way to get content and most likely to infect you along the way. Just torrent stuff.
Torrent is what I meant by public/private website, I didn’t want to spell it out in case someone got offended. I rarely use direct file download but for the odd mp3, console firmware/keys, etc it can be easier to grab exactly what I want.
If you can get a private tracker or sonarr running, pretty much no ads.
Not until that asshat company wanting to deploy satellite constellation that displays ads from space. It's not like there are billboards in the middle of the ocean
That was a stretch, really had to jam that little dig in there, huh?
Although if they did somehow deploy their constellation as a legible ad, I wouldn't even complain. "Drink Coke" spelled out with a hundred satellites would be hilarious.
What dig?
Yeah this is where I think government-regulation would actually be a solid-fit to try and govern some of this manipulative and unfair practices.
There just needs to be a blanket-law where your data is considered every-bit as intellectual property as a piece of copyrighted media and for there to be consent established to sell or give your data to a third-party there needs to be an active exchange of payment, credit or services that is opt-in only, not opt-out from an intentionally obfuscated EULA update email.
Require active opt-in and consent along with a clear set of goods/services/payment, and active simple on-demand revocation with strict timelines, and you could have companies actually properly incentivizing users to sell them their own personal data instead of it just being harvested.
Unfortunately too many libertarian nutjobs out here think that the market here will magically fix all issues.
> too many libertarian nutjobs out here think that the market here will magically fix all issues
I'll see your libertarian market nutjobs and raise you reflexive "regulation will fix it" liberals (I don't really know the right term here, but I guess it's the one that fits most closely with US politics for the last 60+ years). Neither group has much room in its worldview for the simple fact that some people are just jerks and will abuse any system.
Regulation can be done well, but doing so in a way that doesn't just hand the entire segment to the current incumbents is hard and regulatory capture isn't just something market worshipers conjured out of thin air.
In the earliest days of getting people to pay for cable TV when OTA was free, the pitch was that you'd see fewer/no commercials. That didn't last long...
> In the earliest days of getting people to pay for cable TV when OTA was free, the pitch was that you'd see fewer/no commercials.
No, it was quality of reception, especially for people who were farther from (or had inconvenient terrain between them and) broadcast stations; literally the only thing on early capable was exactly the normal broadcast feed from the covered stations, which naturally included all the normal ads.
Premium add-on channels that charged on top of cable, of which I think HBO was the first, had being ad free among their selling points, but that was never part of the basic cable deal.
That varied by region. When cable came to my town in the early 1980s, HBO and Cinemax were part of the local cable provider's basic package. That lasted until the next provider bought them out.
Oh, sure, definitely some providers did some things like that early on to drive growth, especially when they were trying to drive into the areas less dissatisfied with existing broadcast quality then the initial cable markets. (And even once it stopped, it was common to bundle premium channels into the basic cost for a limited time for new customer acquisition.)
this doesn't ring true; TV has always been deeply linked with ads, it just seems that they moved to fractional ownership of a show via many advertisers vs. the (perhaps less intrusive) show sponsor where the advertising was woven into the plot.
I think I'm older than most HN commenters. I can't Google up a citation, but "no or fewer ads" was part of the pitch in the early-mid 1970s in my recollection. You are correct about TV and ads, so maybe I'm wrong.
Not really. Cable TV started as a better way for people to get OTA channels when they were in marginal reception areas. My family had cable TV in the 1970s and it was a maybe eight or ten OTA channels and except for the PBS station they all had commercials, between shows and during shows.
HBO was the first offering that didn't have ads during the show.
Catv originally stood for 'community antenna' and was for those who lived in a valley where tv signals couldn't reach. The community built one antenna at the top and ran a cable down to everyone. Of course it was an obvious addition after that to add extra channels.
Interesting! That makes sense now. I thought it stood for CAble TV and always wondered why they used two letters instead of just CTV.
Interesting, I grew up in an area with good reception, so the pitch was definitely fewer commercials on the cable channels (HBO, Nickelodeon, MTV), I remember standing in the living room as the salesman said this. It was true for a while, but eventually they caught up to OTA ad loads.
HBO was always a premium ad free channel. MTV was never promoted as ad free.
and premium channels were ridiculously expensive back then too!
Yea, the no ads theory of the history is cable seems to be pervasive. The only ad free channels were the premium ones like HBO. It's like people think the OTA channels that were packaged together had some magic applied that eliminated ad breaks from the exact same feed as the OTA broadcast. The cable only channels like USA also had ads as well. I guess it's just another example if you tell a lie often enough people will accept it as truth
People object to advertising because it is annoying and distracting. If the ads disappear, they got what they paid for. It's not about avoiding their "behavior being monitized", most people don't care about that at all.
No, I care about that as much or more.
You're an outlier. Ask ten people at your local bus stop if this is important to them, and tell me how many start laughing at you :)
I specifically mentioned people on this website. Based on comments I regularly come across on this website, I don't think the person you're responding to is an outlier. I would hope we can stay on topic.
You missed the point.
People on this website are too small a fraction of society to ever move the needle. My point is that it doesn't matter what people on this website want with respect to privacy, in our capitalist democratic society it will never happen unless most people want it.
The reality right now is that most people don't want it.
If that was your point, I suggest you post more clearly in the future, because your post did not suggest this.
If I went up to random people and went like, "Do you approve of companies tracking what you buy, eat, do, where you go, and every other aspect of your life?" I promise you I would get a majority of "No"s
The question I'm asking is "would you pay more money if the service promised not to sell your data". That's a hard no for most people.
If you frame it as a negative thing with no downsides for agreeing with you, of course people will agree. But that's not the reality.
Not because people don't value their personal data but because they, rightfully, value those promises as worth approximately nothing.
It's an interesting theory, for sure. Continuing down the rabbit hole... I guess you could ask about "company promises" versus "regulatory prohibition". But then one might argue that similarly rests on the population's perception of the efficacy of government regulation, which is certainly also somewhat low...
What's the solution then?
People will also say they will pay more for a ephemeral good like privacy or patriotism, so I think you'd be surprised if you ask them your question. Where you're right is will they actually do it, and even if they will how much?
I'd guess that if you ask people about a broad right to privacy, they will mostly express support for it. You could ask:
vs ...and I would guess the first would have a higher "yes" rate, although still low. But I also expect a chunk of people would ask you to define "private" before answering the first question...One might argue "private" implies more than can truly be promised, for example no US company can promise to ignore subpoenas and actually follow through.
I'd say it mirrors for patriotism: "do you support $OUR_COUNTRY" will get more "yes" responses than almost any more specific question about support for anything tangible. Precisely because it's sort of meaningless and unobjectionable... (well except in the US, where I'm sure it's correlated with whether or not one's favored party is in power)
The claim you made was that people don't care about their behavior being monetized.
Don't care enough to sacrifice anything tangible to avoid it, yes. I would think it's obvious the question as you framed it biases responses to the point they're meaningless...
'People object to advertising because it is annoying and distracting. If the ads disappear, they got what they paid for. It's not about avoiding their "behavior being monitized", most people don't care about that at all.'
That's your quote as I read it in case some editing happens. There's no caveat in your original post that you are claiming now. You've moved the goal posts. As you originally stated, I agree with all of the follow up comments to it that you are now trying to expand on your original comment. Maybe that's what you always meant but just left out of the original. It happens. But now you're being obstinate about it in a way that doesn't look good.
No, you're just nitpicking the semantics and missing the forest for the trees. Everyone except you seems to understand that that was the beginning of a discussion, not an opening statement in a fucking court.
yeah, it's me with the problem, that's why i'm at least the 3rd person to take issue
It's because acompany promise is useless without actual enforced regulation which is harsh enough to actually add trust in such a contractual agreement being honoured.
This is how we have a free-market to begin with. You need enforcement and structures in place so people will actually trust any of this crap. Instead, we have the nutjob early 90's cyber libertarians thinking this will all be magically fixed with just magical freedom and the invisible hand fixing everything.
Yeah, I don't disagree, another comment touched on the distrust part. But would people trust government privacy regulation more?
But are you most people?
I'd wager that just by the virtue of being commenters on HN, we're already outliers.
Some of us don't care that much about advertising, but we object to surveillance.
Your opinion is unpopular in this subset of folks here, but it's valid.
It isn't out-of-keeping in this kind of company for a person to start discussions about personal data privacy. In fact: We chat about this stuff here all the time.
But in reality: The number of discussions I've had about personal data privacy and monetization face-to-face with people that I did not meet through a computer network, or bring up myself is exactly 1.
It's thus my observation that most people in the world care about this issue approximately...never.
(The reason they don't care may be that they don't know enough to even begin to question whether the people behind their air fryer, genealogical DNA service, garage door opener, and food delivery system may have ulterior motives.
But guesses about root causation are, at best, both tangential and broadly inconsequential. We can guess and figure and re-figure and even prove theories until the cows come home.
And it doesn't matter.
They didn't care yesterday, they still don't care today while I write this, and they will continue to not care tomorrow.)
People "don't care" because they do not understand the implications or the technology, not because they genuinely have no interest in privacy. Of course its easy to dupe people without technical literacy by characterizing it as some benign "targeted advertising" as if its a service being provided for you (when clearly it's not) rather than the actual answer which is "we want to follow your every movement and pattern of behaviour as if we had someone following you in an unmarked car and then sell that data to anyone willing to cough up the cash without any of your consent".
This narrative is incredibly toxic and honestly a very antisocial viewpoint of people as if they are all just stupid sheep who deserve to be exploited.
There's zero reason why its unfair for a person to both object to advertising because of the annoyance (because it is annoying) AND for a person to not want to be digitally surveilled endlessly without their consent.
> People "don't care" because they do not understand the implications or the technology, not because they genuinely have no interest in privacy.
I don't disagree with you there.
> This narrative is incredibly toxic and honestly a very antisocial viewpoint of people as if they are all just stupid sheep who deserve to be exploited.
The people get what they vote for, whether or not its what they deserve. The only way to move the needle on this is to educate people. Telling people they're "stupid sheep" for not wanting the thing you think they should want is not typically a winning strategy, in my experience.
> There's zero reason why its unfair for a person to both object to advertising because of the annoyance (because it is annoying) AND for a person to not want to be digitally surveilled endlessly without their consent.
I'm simply saying I think most people care more about the first thing.
"You pay for this service and rides aren't getting any cheaper" - you can't just say things. You could very well be right but you need to actually look at their margin profile over time to know if this is true.
To give an industry that's a counterexample to the "they add ads and don't make things cheaper", look at groceries. It's a terrible, single-digit percentage margin business but they sell everything from placement in catalogue to whether the product is in a convenient spot on the shelf. That's a clear case where ads make it _cheaper_ for consumers.
> look at groceries. It's a terrible, single-digit percentage margin business but they sell everything from placement in catalogue to whether the product is in a convenient spot on the shelf. That's a clear case where ads make it _cheaper_ for consumers.
I don't follow... it certainly improves the grocer's margins, but how does that do anything at all for the consumer?
I should have been clearer: it's a terrible single-digit percentage business, including the ads. The ads are cross-subsidizing the food.
> The ads are cross-subsidizing the food.
I don't think you were unclear, that's what I understood you to be saying.
Surely, the grocer just pockets the extra ad money? Never in my life have I seen a for-profit corporation voluntarily charge a lower price than the market will bear because they increased their margin by other means.
The ads are also inherently shitty to the producers: they all have to spend money on the grocer's ads now, because if they don't, their competitors will. If you look at it that way, the ads are almost extortion.
Yeah, in competitive markets this would inherently cause some downward pressure on prices.
Which is why I don't pay to remove ads on YouTube, nor I give Amazon the pleasure to see more from my money than what I need to pay for prime deliveries.
Are you saying you are purchasing a minimum of $25 to get those prime deliveries, or are you some how thinking you can pay for Prime deliveries while not also paying for Prive Video??
I am paying for the deliveries, the fact that Prime Video is part of the deal is something nice, but not what I care about, even less so after Amazon decided to force ads to people that were already paying in first place.
Uber ride app has ads in it now on top of data collection, service fees, etc, uber eats also sells sponsored placement, and then the fees and prices now... like what the actual fuck is this? https://s.h4x.club/9Zun85Lj - these people have lost their minds, y'all really gonna drive the business down to 10 loyal customers who you milk to hell and high water? Weird strategy.
Target just started hitting me with completely third party ads right after you press pay in their app.
They have also advertised for the Starbucks in thr Target stores long before when you go to pickup something.
As someone who has spent their whole career in growth and awareness for business building, I see why people hate ads so much now - personally I love running ads, trying to place a good ad in a good spot for someone who will genuinely appreciate it, it can be very rewarding... but late stage capitalism, aka fervent consumerism, has driven business into a real bad place, it's a shame because business and commerce is pretty fun, better than conquering via killing anyways.
Sometimes I believe they aren't monetizing me. With Kagi I feel quite confident, for example. It depends how prominently they put 'no monetization/ads' as part of their marketing. Uber doesn't do that, to be fair, and never have done.
The key concept is that maximising the monetisation of each user is the ultimate goal. Once that is understood, Uber's behaviour makes sense as a subgoal of that bigger goal
The prevailing implementation of capitalism compels all companies to continue developing revenue streams to increase their overall “worth.”
Any company that has unique or rare data is compelled to do things with it. Those that don’t either can’t figure out how or explicitly reject the reward function of contemporary capitalism. We should really expect those deviations to be the exception.
Yup. The most surprising thing about this announcement is that they haven't been doing it, already...
Delivery in particular remains underpriced at even the high prices we see. The way the platforms are set up, you're basically paying to chauffeur a single order straight to your house, on-demand. Mobile tech and "own car" efficiencies don't begin to cover those costs. The problem was that this is the kind of service that they had to offer in order to supersede existing delivery.
In an ideal world, you'd instead have drivers assigned to either particular neighborhoods or particular restaurants, allowing for order-stacking and predictable routes. Bonus for set-time daily deliveries (get your order in before 6 or have to wait until 9). Bigger bonus for set neighborhood drop-off points (like those consolidated mailboxes, but warming compartments). Anything more bespoke would cost extra.
Unfortunately, the balance of inefficient operations, decreasing competition, and "line go up" is that prices have to increase.
Delivery was financially viable for decades before delivery apps. That's why restaurants did it on their own. What's not financially viable is VCs investing billions to create global oligopolies, and and then expecting outsized returns on that investment.
At the same time you have processes like increasing suburbanization and development of even more car-centric infrastructure, which makes houses and restaurants even further from each other, and makes cheaper delivery vehicles like motorbikes infeasible.
All of that is true. However, I think you don't account enough for the differences in the current and previous delivery models in delivery's viability. The old model was "drivers employed or contracted to individual restaurants, with fairly strict distance limits." Today's apps let you order from arbitrary restaurants to arbitrary delivery addresses. The other factors make the situation worse, but just this one is enough to turn a viable model into one that can't be profitable without someone involved getting scammed.
Okay.
They’re going to sell to marketers for ads I don’t watch?
We have to be real, there's no way anyone is currently paying the real cost of having McDonalds delivered right now...
They just need a subscription model at Mickey Dee's. They can make up for the inefficiency with volume </sarc>.
that and a shitty little delivery robot
Have we tried AI drive through kiosks yet??
Surely that is the answer.
When people say they are going to pay for an ad free product they very often underestimate how much the service would cost them. This is often a price higher than what they would be willing to pay.
I respectfully disagree my friend. When Investors , board, wall street is chasing second order and third order delta increase in a stock enshitification is bound to happen. If there is a board that wants return higher than previous year and when you can't optimize costs by improving tech, You find new avenues like showing 2 ads, showing 3 ads. Increasing subscription price or cheekly modifing terms of service and selling your data to 3rd party data brokers. it has nothing to do with subscription cost.
I’m pretty surprised they haven’t been doing that for years already tbh.
That was my thought too. "Starts"?? I assumed they had been selling aggregated data about user trips the whole time.
This data is extremely extremely valuable, so my guess is that they were sitting on it until they were sure this was the best business decision. Also they already have their own ads so they have certainly been using this data internally all along.
I just genuinely thought this had been the case for at least ten years. That's what makes it so surprising.
That they haven't monetized it like this when this is how basically everything is monetized and they spent so long burning money hand over fist just boggles my mind.
Who said they did not? It's probably not public, that's all.
Marketing lead-generation and sales conversion is what every company does with their customer list eventually (sign of a failing business model.) Whether it is internal revenue generation, or a 3rd party... this is what most large web companies trade with Marketers.
I would be more surprised if they kept peoples privacy, as even your credit card company sells the purchase data. =3
The Uber app keeps pushing notifications to advertise fast food. This is so annoying since you need alerts enabled for when your ride is on its way. As I am a very infrequent customer I just uninstall the app, and reinstall it if I need a ride.
This abuse of notifications (and the user) is quite prevalent, unfortunately.
In the case of the Uber app you should be able to turn these off (they are conveniently enabled by default, of course!).
On the iphone it's Setting -> Communication -> Marketing Preferences -> Push notifications.
You don’t actually need alerts enabled for your ride - I just get ready, order my ride, then have a seat in a chair where I can see the road and do some reading. When my ride shows up I leave the house.
This is why I use Lyft, and only install Uber when I'm traveling to a country where Lyft doesn't operate.
So many freaking apps do this crap, Apple needs to implement a categorization system for notifications and allows users to choose which categories of notifications to allow. Anything other than essential notifications needs to go in the useless crap category.
I have a rule that if an app gives me a marketing push notification, they lose notification privileges.
Uber really are the piranhas of the corporate world.
I can't imagine any depth they wouldn't dive to, in order to get a morsel to feed on.
The allegation that driver payouts are manipulated to:
1) Hook new drivers with better than average rates before tapering off 2) Take into account the age/model/value of the vehicle and what payments for it would look like in the market and dole out enough to cover costs but not "too much" that they're getting ahead of other drivers
Totally baseless and sourceless hearsay tho. Still, if true, really plays into the image of "there's no depth they won't go".
Add another: the various platforms talk to each other (or analyze driver movement) in order to manipulate order offerings in such a way as to discourage drivers from taking orders from more than one app at once. One app will wait until the other has confirmed an accepted order before deluging you with their own orders, all taking you in the opposite direction (which makes you late for one or more deliveries, giving cause to terminate your contract).
Source?
Pure anecdata. However, the change from the first two days I multi-apped and made almost 3 times my usual hourly rate, to the following weekend, when
>neither app would send me orders for up to half an hour
>as soon as one had assigned me and order, the other would start sending my multiple per minute
>all of these orders were either comically low-compensation (no tip), a 15-minute-plus drive away from the order I'd just accepted (to areas it had never sent me before), or both
was marked.
From the article: ”aggregate users' data without revealing their identities.”
Also from the article:
> Uber Intelligence will let advertisers securely combine their customer data with Uber's to help surface insights about their audiences, based on what they eat and where they travel.
So the companies have the identities. It sounds like they're going to be learning something about their customers, the question is just how much detail they'll get.
Everything? Ok, everything. Names "anonymmized" (but easily trackable) and the list of addresses. Why not sell it to get money? /s
That's how it starts
Over/under on when someone is able to de-aggregate an identity down to an individual user?
I’ve got it on less than 6 months.
6 weeks would be optimistic
how do de-aggregation attacks or whatever you'd call this work?
One of the easiest methods is to find a different data source with overlap and use that to map real people to anonymized lists. Big tech companies find this super easy to do because of all the internal data they already have on everyone
More like 15 minutes.
Why do you think this makes it better?
You think data tied to individual users isn't any worse? That privacy has no value?
I think they're suggesting that anonymized and potentially aggregated data can still have individual data extracted from it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/27/new-york-...
What the heck? Where did I say either of those things?
Privacy is very important. That's why I think sharing of customer data - individual or aggregate - is bad.
You asked why someone would think aggregating would make it better.
Aggregating protects privacy when done properly.
It seems pretty obvious to me that sharing individual data is orders of magnitude worse than sharing aggregated data.
If you think they're the same, then you don't seem to value the privacy that aggregation provides.
So what am I misrepresenting about what you said?
I'm tired of false equivalences. One thing that's maybe slightly bad, and another thing that's super-super-bad, aren't equally bad.
Whether they know how to best exploit my commercial footprint via anonymous data or personal data, doesn't stop them from exploiting my commercial footprint.
>Aggregating protects privacy when done properly.
When done properly is going a lot of heavy lifting there. Time and time again it's been found most aggregates are not filtered properly and be deanonymized with eaze.
It's not that one is big bad, and one is little bad, it's the little bad can become big bad with a small amount of work by an attacker/company. Then when you add in zero external third party verification of these company claims, you really don't have any reason to believe them.
> When done properly is going a lot of heavy lifting there.
Not really. There are common practices for it. Yes it hits HN when deanonymization can happen at a well-known company, just like it hits HN when there's a security vulnerability that gets patched at a well-known company.
But "it's the little bad can become big bad" is what's doing the heavy lifting in your argument. No, that's not how it works. There's no universe in which aggregate data can be deanonymized to anywhere close to what all of the individual profiles would be. It's a completely false equivalenace, period.
And I'm tired of people acting like companies putting on a show of protecting our privacy is doing anything actually helpful. But you're right. I'm wrong and clearly don't care about privacy.
As a completely unrelated aside, I wonder how much social progress is hindered by people alienating people on their own side.
Just don't make false equivalences.
It's easy, just admit the two are not the same and move on. You don't need to get defensive about it. "I wonder" how much social progress is hindered by people making wrong statements and then getting defensive about it? Or by making snarky "completely unrelated" asides?
Source: "trust us bro"
I'm surprised they weren't already doing this. Maybe they wanted to give it some time to see if there were other ways to monetize it before opening up the aggregates for sale.
There should be a law forcing ride hailing apps to give anonymized ride data to local governments so that they can plan public transport better. If they sell it to marketers they must be able to do this technically.
Anonymizing data is incredibly difficult to do: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/27/new-york-...
> New York City has released data of 173m individual taxi trips – but inadvertently made it "trivial" to find the personally identifiable information of every driver in the dataset.
Interesting read, thanks. The related article shows that even more robust anonymization techniques may still be insufficient (in the case of the taxi rides, spatial-temporal analysis could still lead to de-anonymization). More reason to reduce data collection. Unfortunately the trend is the opposite for governments all around the world.
That example only demonstrates leaked information of the drivers, not the passengers/customers. And the "anonymized" driver and license data wouldn't need to be released in any form at all to produce a dataset useful for public transportation planning purposes: approximate time of day and approximate location are sufficient to estimate demand, and there's no need to keep track of who is making which trips.
Exactly, all you need to start is "a significant amount of people from this area want to go to those areas".
It's really not unless of course you are dis-incentivized to provide anonymous data. The ground is thick with prior art and existing solutions.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/d...
Well, there are pitfalls, and it's easy for an "anonymization" scheme to leak more detail than it would seem at first glance. But I agree that motive plays a big role. If your purpose in sharing data is to make money off it, then you'll be trying to share as much data as possible, and will try to convince yourself that your anonymization is "good enough".
If you're sharing data for a specific purpose, then it's much easier to limit the data sharing to suit that purpose: omit irrelevant data, aggregate where possible, and anonymize individual data points only when you actually need to share that level of detail.
Sadly almost no local governments would be equipped to process the data. This would probably benefit firms like Streetlight and Replica but not materially improve public transport. Written by someone turned cynical after years of working in this space.
I'm not surprised. It won't hesitate to turn more unethical than any other company.
Uber support in India is the most robotic and useless I have ever seen with any vendor. I gave up after fighting for months, just to utilize my wallet amount in other country or get refund. Both were impossible.
I have misguided friends working with payment processors (think companies like VISA, mastercard, etc.) to build models that run across all transactions to extract the purchasing behaviors of individuals, uncover correlations between accounts for marketing purposes, and predictively model future purchases and life events. Surveillance is inescapable at this point. How long until AI shops for us based on past purchases or we live in a world where mass individualized price discrimination is the norm? How to avoid that future? Sometimes I forget privacy is a basic right, as society often requires that we sign it away.
It sounds like Uber is literally selling data; as opposed to when Facebook is accused of more metaphorically "selling data" (allowing advertisers to target their ads).
A lot of other companies are in the business of selling data, too. It's not like Uber is uniquely evil for doing this. I'd argue that selling aggregated metrics is comparatively innocuous compared to what Meta does with fingerprinting, shadow profiles, etc. and also compared to what credit card companies, banks, credit rating agencies, ISPs, etc. can do.
Article says:
> It uses LiveRamp's clean room technology, which lets companies aggregate their data in a privacy-safe environment, without sharing or seeing each other's raw or personally identifiable customer information.
> A hotel brand could use Uber Intelligence to help identify which restaurants or entertainment venues it might want to partner with for its loyalty program, for example.
Not much details on that "Clean room" but it sounds like the third parties get an environment where they can join their data to ubers and then run aggregate queries, but not actually see individual customer records. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
> I'm not sure how I feel about that.
Consider what will happen every time there is a trade-off to be made between making/keeping the data more useful to the companies involved, and actually upholding the anonymity of the data subjects.
Anonymization is nearly impossible to get right even when you're trying really hard, and this is more likely to be a fig leaf to be able to do things that are illegal by sufficiently obfuscating them.
I hope that if EU customer data is included in this, the EU will have the balls to actually enforce GDPR. Uber is one of the few tech company cases where 2-4% of overall revenue would actually hurt, rather than being a small "tax" on the extra profit made through the illegal use of data.
Will gladly start using and paying for local car services instead.
They're called taxi cabs. You'll see "taxi" printed on the vehicle. If they have a light on the top of the vehicle that's lit, you can just wave at it, arm raised and it'll pick you up.
Pretty amazing really. They'll even uturn if they are on the other side of the road.
Ah but there was an Uber before Uber called private car services or gypsy cabs.
Flatbush Ave and Church Ave in Brooklyn also have a good amount of $1 buses and $1 cabs going up and down the avenue. This is on top of the MTA busses and subway in the area.
Do those still exist?
Yes.
Cool so not only do the prices of the food not drop (because Uber's crazy fees to the restaurant), but we also get to suffer through (more) ads, and they will now be targeted? And Uber makes even more off it all while making no improvements to the user and/or provider experience?
I just realized taxis still exist and most restaurants offer their own delivery service (or pick-up!)
It's been real Uber. GL HF
Can you buy Uber's "Ride of Glory" data? [1]
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/uber-crunches-user...
I'm quite surprised this was not already being done. But yes, ALL services will do their best to maximize value and make the service worse for you. One way in which they do this is to sell your data to marketers.
Back in the day in my country, if your neighbor or taxi driver was informing the authorities of your habits and travels, this was considered a dangerously hostile action. If no willing informant could be found, there were torture basements to get it. It's what kept the government in power for so long. E.g. travel data makes it easy to identify nascent political groups.
Thankfully corporations have proven themselves so trustworthy and benevolent, we don't think twice about giving them the data they used to have to torture out of us. Likewise the governments, that we know are among the buyers [1], are just as beloved and uncontroversial, unlike in the old days.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/14/23759585/odni-spy-report-...
Welcome to the Panopticon.
The core issue here is one of companies lying about the service and the price. TOS should not be allowed to hide price at time of checkout, which they effectively are doing by allowing selling personal data. So the fix is simple. if they are going to make additional money on you after the service ends and that is considered part of the payment then it should be clearly displayed as part of the cost and NOT allowed in the TOS. This should be required by law. If you are making money off of me and I don't know it it should be a crime. You stole from me.
Honestly, I'm surprised this is news. As in, I assumed they were already doing it, because that's what companies do in 2025.
At this point im just going to move to Shetland, live in a hut and spend the next 30 years making wooden boats. It's the only way to be free of this nonsense.
Or not use these services? I've never used Uber once in my life.
I mean, this is just one particular service, have you not read the other articles on how private companies are mass tracking license plate information/location and selling it?
Imagine a World where legacy taxis are no more. Yup, it's gonna get way worse.
The only thing legacy taxis add that Uber's don't is being able to hail them from the street.
Other than getting in a taxi line at the airport, I've never been able to use street hailing as a practical way to get around. There just have never been enough taxis in the places that I've lived.
duh
Advertising is a virus that seeks to invade every ecosystem.
Another reason to use Waymo (for now).
As long as it is to advertise in their own platform sounds great. I'd rather have nice restaurant suggestions on top than McDonald's and Dominoes or whoever paid the most every day. Using Uber eats is like some app from the past with ads as global banners that are the same for all users. If you're going to throw me ads at least use my history to try and do something useful.
Just so we are clear about how advertising works, you will still just see suggestions from who paid the most every day. The data just informs the marketing teams whether they should pay more for your eyeballs specifically.
Not necessarily. It depends on the ad type; cost per impression vs click. The latter incentivizes relevance.
That something useful is turning you into a data cow and making money off of it while returning zero value to you.
Seriously you want people to use your travel and movement and choice data to make a suggestion list of restaurants for you to order from? How helpless are you?
I got a mirror, you're the cow.
...yes?
I like good recommendations better than bad recommendations. The value I get is better recommendations.
Like, I literally update the categories of things I'm interested in, in my Google profile, so I get less useless ads.
People complain about bad and useless recommendations and irrelevant ads all the time. Personalization is how you get better ones.
Just wanted to verify how far you are willing to go to get a list generated for you that’s probably not even that unique from the other Y number of people who love being suggested obvious information.
How many combinations of the restaurants around you do you think exist and are needed to provide that information? Certainly need Uber guzzling down Terabytes of data to rank the local Chiles over the local Applebees.
Lets be honest, restaurant suggestions aren’t a real problem anyone has.
> Lets be honest, restaurant suggestions aren’t a real problem anyone has.
I suspect you don't live in New York City, or another city with a thriving restaurant scene where new places open and old places close all the time and you can't keep track of them all in your head.
Lol I do live in Nyc in Brooklyn (between Bedford Ave and Rogers Ave on Martense St, I’ve also lived in Carroll Gardens, East Village, Crown Heights, Upper West Side) and there are plenty of blogs and people with a vocal enough opinion in Nyc to not need to hand off my restaurant searches to Uber of all companies.
If you have problems with restaurant rankings in Nyc you’re not living right.
"you’re not living right."
Oh really?
Sometimes you just need a quick decision, whether you're going somewhere with friends at the last second, or yes ordering delivery and just want something that will be one of the better options. Because there isn't 1 Chinese place in your delivery radius, there are 20.
Believe me, I read restaurant blogs and talk to people too. But that's more for stuff I plan in advance, not last-minute decisions in a neighborhood I don't visit often.
So maybe don't be so quick to judge that others aren't "living right", how about?
I get your point, but the problem here for me is that most of the available information about said restaurants (ads and social media reception) and just noise, there’s no actual signal there about whether I’d actually like to eat at a restaurant.
Why would the recommendations be "good"? I assume you mean "good" here to mean good for you or in your interests. That isn't how ads are sold, they're sold to the highest bidder
A rational advertiser is willing to bid more for someone is more likely to purchase (i.e., for whom the ad would be "good").
Trying to convince me to buy things isn't always good for me, though. It's good if the thing is useful or I already needed one and just need to know about brands, but a lot of advertising is trying to drive up consumption in more general ways that might cost me money unnecessarily.
Rationality requires an actual estimate of the incrementality of your visit. As someone who has worked in the incrementality estimation function of adtech, for a measurment vendor to the likes of YoutTube, TikTok, Meta, etc., I promise you: the advertisers and the publishers have no fucking clue because the masurement companies, in their competition with one another for the business of these internet titans, juice their estimates to make them more attractive.
> People complain about bad and useless recommendations and irrelevant ads all the time.
I've never heard any complaint about that except from people who work in adtech.
I see it literally all the time on HN, how useless and spammy and low-quality ads on the internet are.
In contrast to high-quality ads that are e.g. for a movie you actually want to see.
Good recommendations are places where you maximize payment [to people willing to pay], not best experience.
It's going to be a conflict of interest like most ads. It's not optimized for you but toward you
How often do you act on these recommendations?
The "value" you get is recommendations generated by some combination of:
-opaque optimization function over which you have no control and is not tailored to you (but yay you can sort by a few predetermined fields)
-willingness of the recommended to outbid one another for your attention
-companies who have paid some baseline pay-to-play vig
If you want real recommendations, talk to someone who isn't profiting off of you.
I don't think the problem is these kind of suggestions.
Are people suddenly moving more between corp A and corp B? Must be something going on, let's buy the stock.
Suddenly multiple Ubers are dropping off people at a residential building during the night? They probably know each other. Let's flag that as a potential risk.