There's been a lot of recent swiss efforts to curtail advertising. Off the top of my head:
- Zurich's parliament voted 58–57 last year to place limits on outdoor advertising (have 2027 to come up with implementation)
- Bern fully instituted the ban but reversed course over revenue concerns
- Vernier & Lancy have banned billboards
They certainly seem to have the appetite to reduce the size of the industrial advertising complex... but there's clearly some successful industry pushback (like in the case of Bern). Curious to see how this profiling shakes out. Hard to make a revenue loss argument so I'm guessing it'll pass.
Hamburg in Germany had a city referendum to ban all public animated/screen ads in 2025, but they didn't get enough people signing it (got 50k votes, needed 65k).
Because advertising (and in particular targeted advertising) is so entrenched in every aspect of our lives and society that it's very hard to admit that it's harmful. Because doing so means admitting a multi-decade failure gross failure of the government and regulators, and accepting that we need a massive structural overhaul of the entire industry, and of the operating model of a significant chunk of the Internet.
Our aspirations for our children reflect our own anxieties. It's the same with social media bans.
Our culture is pretty permissive of businesses inflicting indirect harms on adults. I think a lot of that goes back to lobbying from the cigarette and alcohol industries.
If the actions of these advertising companies are harmful, then everyone should be protected from them, not just one demographic that is considered to be more vulnerable.
And if they're not harmful, then in what sense are kids "vulnerable" to them and need protecting?
That is the justification, yes. And it is impossible to tell whether there is a kid, an adult or a dog on my side of the tcp connection without mass internet surveillance which is the actual reason.
You don't need mass internet surveillance. You can simply restrict advertisement much further than today: the types of things that can be advertised, where they can be advertised, etc. We restrict all sorts of harmful activities, why not extend it to ads?
But that's not the proposed law under discussion, which instead limits the restrictions to children, menaing implementations of the law will need to come up with things that are convenient for the surveillance state.
Constant surveillance has become the default order of things. Doing what's best for corporations is the default order of things. On the flip side, "think of the children" is a strong appeal to lawmakers and has won this round. Us adults still have to suffer under the thumb of big business though.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
Common topic amongst friends on online advertising: feels like it would be reasonable for platforms like Meta, TikTok, etc to explain why they've served you the ad you're seeing. Imagine an "explain why I'm seeing this" button.
The adtech of today feels very opaque to me; I often have no clue why I see what I do. If platforms had to disclose why you're seeing what you are, you could plug the holes in your privacy. (Fully aware this will never happen, but it's the type of regulation I wish we were proactive about.)
I don't think there's even a technical way to do this anymore. Digital ads are not actually audiences anymore (bundles of people labeled a certain way).
IMO the regulation needs to be at the data collection side: advertisers should only be able to collect data on a defined set of dimensions and each dimension should have a defined maximum specificity. Then beyond those, advertising platforms need to compete on making their actual products more compelling rather than making them better at sucking up data.
I agree, but I think the concept of data provenance would have a role. It should not matter if data is laundered through 'aggregation' or 'anonymization': if it was originally generated about an individual, and used to target an individual, that data should be an expensive regulatory liability.
The answer is that (approximately) every ad you see is targeted based on (approximately) everything you've ever done on the Internet, every purchase you've made in-person or online, and every location you've been to physically.
I don't think attaching a disclaimer like this to every ad will be impactful at all.
If it's more visible how pervasive it is to your average person who might not think very much about it, there might be louder demand for it to change. Or everybody will just begrudgingly accept it because they don't want to give up their TikTok, who knows, but I still think it should be more transparent. And maybe if a company has to attach "Disclaimer: this ad is provided by gross violations of your privacy" to their ads like the health warnings on a pack of cigarettes when they choose to advertise that way, they'll choose to not do it that way.
I'm sure there's some flaw in my logic here but I'm not the only one who thinks something's got to change.
YouTube has this! It usually gives a vague reason like "Time of day" and "Your general location". Though I wonder if it's extra vague because I turned off some of the more creepy advertising sertings.
While I agree with the sentiment, any answer would likely be vague (unless it is only interests based) since the models used to choose specific ads to be displayed can be rather complex.
The few cases where it was clear to me why I was seeing a certain ad was after I had ordered that product online. Which is kind of useless for the advertiser, but at least it's slightly reassuring that the tracking doesn't go that far...
Instagram does have a "Why you're seeing this ad" button. Clicking it for an ad on my feed, I see:
- "chasetravel wants to reach people like you" (clicking through reveals that this is because I am 18 years of age or older and based in the US)
- "Your activity" which includes interacting with "ads about travel, fine arts and music" and "posts, stories, reels and pages about food & drinks, fine arts and cameras"
So, basically, the button reveals nothing. But with regulation maybe it would. I don't see how this would make things worse (for users - of course Meta would fight it).
EDIT: As another commenter has noted, I have also turned off every possible bit of tracking. Maybe if I hadn't I'd see more here. But I'm sure Meta is doing all sorts of fingerprinting along with tracking pixels across websites that's informing the auction, but they're not telling me about that.
They’d have to tell you directly that they’ve been pulling info on you from other sites/sources, effectively spying on your activity even when you aren’t on their platforms, which would be a PR nightmare.
You are seeing and ad because someone won the bid on the ad exchange. Why they bid to show you their ad? That answer lies not with the platform, but with the advertiser. Good luck getting an answer from them (and _all_ of them).
Here in Sweden it's illegal to make ads directed at children. Consequently the TV channels that do so transmit from abroad.
This would of course have been easy to ban anyway-- it's not like we can't have rules on foreign internet firms, for example, but historically the politicians were unwilling to make a useful law.
I think the Swiss could take one step further and add a general ban on ads targeting young children in addition to this; and then we Swedes should imitate the package.
The US has (had? I haven't checked in 40 years) rules like that for TV. It killed most of the TV programs for kids that were populate. The programs my parents remember fondly - not possible anymore because they need ads. I remember only public broadcasting kids programs.
TV cannot be paid for. You might be thinking of Cable TV which can be paid for, but regular TV is just public radio waves, which everybody gets. (remember we are talking about the 1960s - things have changed)
It is also banned in Iceland, but sometimes in the 2000s they stopped enforcing it, probably as people were getting more and more of their broadcasts from abroad. Curiously the milk monopoly (Mjólkursamsalan) was allowed to target children in their ads throughout this period.
This kind of ballot issue is a great filter. It's so obviously correct, the reason of any normal person will be "why was it legal at all?", so anyone arguing against the ban is quite probably paid to do so and should be ignored.
There's no way to implement this without (1) usage-based profiling (what's being banned in the first place) or (2) ID verification.
I'm against both of those.
For me, the only acceptable solutions are: (1) ban all profiling-based ads (2) require respecting DO_NOT_TRACK (so that people/minors/their parents can individually decide what to do, but websites are then legally forced to respect that)
A best effort implementation should be fine. Advertisers already have suspected age fields available (derived from behavioral patterns, linked information across devices, etc). When you develop a reasonable suspicion that it's a minor then stop fleshing out the profile and targeting them. That's what the big players already do (maybe not Meta, but certainly at least Google). That doesn't quite fall into your (1) point since it's not profiling that's being banned, but profiling-based ads.
It seems like a roundabout way of banning profiling of non-ID’d users in general which seems… good? Like, if overlapping regulations have the practical effect of banning tracking, then that’s a win for society, right?
If you ban profiling-based ads to minors, and it's not possible to reliably detect when a user is a minor, then you have de facto banned all profiling-based ads. Since you deem that solution acceptable (as do I!) I don't see what the problem is.
by "zero knowledge" you of course mean "the government can shadowban you without your knowledge" ?
Edit: non-snarky response: what's the default "fall-back" if government's signature is missing? IMO any option ("tracking/no tracking/invalid request") will be exploitable in bad ways.
for my taste that goes a bit too much into "you don't have anything to hide" and doomerism. if one wants, one can boot a TailsOS with a VPN and then no, the gov does not have all the data it needs to link it to you. just because lots of stuff is being monitored we don't have to destroy every privacy boundary in existence.
> We're talking about age, not about your foot fetish, the government definitely knows about your age.
well, yeah, they also know how much i earn, where i live etc. but that's not really my point. my point is what online-stuff they can additionally link to me. you responding with the fetish stuff as a counter-argument is kinda weird, and doesn't really seem to take what i wrote seriously.
i hope if we ever have such a solution its one of those hypothetical zero-knowledge "all we do is check your age and give back a single boolean flag and we also don't record from where and why these requests come", just not that optimistic about it. ban online ads and you got a way easier solution without having to build such a system in the first place.
> it's a political problem, not a technical one
i'd say it's both, so i at least half-agree on that point :)
Why allow profiling at all? This way everyone gets a bit more privacy, second it doesn't create another situation where you got to prove that you're an adult.
how will the age of the browsing person be evaluated without checking for IDs? or do kids still get profiled, but if they get profiled and determined to be a kid you can't serve them ads? we could also teach kids at school how to install adblockers.
i'm all for it if we expand it to banning ads in all virtual and physical spaces of Switzerland :D (or at least inside of public transport, i hate how distracting and useless these freaking ad-panels in buses, trains, trams etc. are).
EDIT: okay per a different article[0], social media platforms and search providers have to analyze if their service enhances risks for minors, and do something against it if so. and "big platforms" shouldn't be allowed to serve personalized ads to kids. so they'll just serve unpersonalized ads to kids then? bwoah...
Can't wait for every website to show you "before you can view this ad, verify your age by logging in" banners!
Realistically, lawmakers know that ad companies know which age cohort a user is in. For companies like Google/Facebook/etc. this shouldn't be too much of an issue, they already know your age when you make an account.
And if they cannot determine what vulnerable groups they're not allowed to show profiled ads, maybe they should disable profiled ads by default until you sign in. Everybody wins!
in a couple of years we'll have to get through 5 different banners just to access a website, which you can bypass by logging in with your eID which then acts as kind of an SSO for every website.
suddenly everyone gets profiled as being at least 18 years old, problem solved.
> based on bidding on users that watch MrBeast and Minecraft videos
but then what is the cutoff for "childish" topics? i mean firstly i'm sure there are people who aren't minors who watch MrBeast and Minecraft, but that's the lesser problem. but if i take myself as an example, i did also watch content as a kid which wasn't targeted to kids. not talking about NSFW stuff either, just stuff you wouldn't think as kids being the target audience.
Won’t somebody please think of the…Disney kidults? The adult Lego enthusiasts? The 7-year-olds who watch Masterpiece Theater?
You’re not wrong, but content made for kids is intended for kids, and vice versa. If someone wants crossover appeal, they intentionally do it —-hence the jokes in Pixar movies with cultural references the parents recognize.
if the goal is to protect kids and you determine who's a kid by looking at what they're watching instead of who they are, then it seems like political flag-waving or a half-baked approach, as you'll guesstimate who's how old.
which means you have to profile everyone and not serve statistical kids ads, or require ID checks, both solutions being clunky and weird as well.
you could just not profile or serve personalized ads to anyone, no matter who they are, how about that? easiest solution. but of course that would mess with ad-sales profits or whoever feels disadvantaged by that approach.
and in the end, kids don't have Interessensvertreter in the Bundeshaus.
EDIT: also, this whole idea is literally a "won't somebody think of the kids?", not sure why you point that gun towards me instead of Monsieur Rösti.
Switzerland really is fascinating. They do things like this while also having the most regressive and least restrictive rules around advertising tobacco (to minors and in general) and consuming it (basically anywhere you can see the sky or the outdoors. That includes parking garages, underground parts of train stations, bus stops, under kindergarten windows, and in virtually every accessible building entrance.)
This would be awesome. Imagine you would need to build excellent products, that advertise through word of mouth. And all that slot machines that only exist to force ads onto you would actually need to provide real value that people want to pay for.
how would you want to keep having free journalism without advertising? (and we all know where any democracy goes to die). historically nothing else worked at scale minus a few exceptions.
i think the sentiment against ads from the educated bubble really completely takes a working democracy for granted. spoiler: its not and look whats happening in the US... and the budget shift from openweb/newspapers towards video (mainly google) in the advertising industry is massive...
disclaimer: i work in adtech but we do not profile users and do not track them.
The press has largely depended on ads since the 17th century. The revenue from subscriptions and individual paper sales typically only covered about 20% of the costs.
The weak point of journalism has always been the larger-tier patrons. Can't report negative things if money-man says "no".
The advertising industry at large is at fault for our degradation in journalism.
Advertising needs clicks and eyes, the providers produce highly targeted profile algorithms to ensure maximum clicks and eyes, which degrades the information conveyed into the smallest, most enraging snippets possible. Those rise to the top as the most profitable ways to convey information, and continues the cycle, further destroying news that doesn't profit in this ecosystem.
Killing most forms of advertising across the board would of course basically destroy these large tech companies that rely on them. But the same companies have completely derailed society with their "services". We'd be better off without them.
Of course this would likely hurt "GDP" and "The Economy", but that would just mean we have an unproductive economy primarily inflated by a pointless circle of advertisement.
I don't know, but is "free journalism" actually good? If the incentives of free journalism (thanks to being ad funded) are to increase engagement and avoid criticizing their advertisers is the product actually journalism at all?
The idea of banning all ads sounds great, but legitimate content is paid for with ads. Ban tracking and targeted ads. It’s not a far stretch into cyberstalking, wiretapping, and other privacy laws.
There was 75 or more years of media ads that had no feedback except when very explicitly asking (Nielsen). Everyone was making money and doing just fine.
If content is truly legitimate, people will pay a fair price for it. If your business model collapses without ads, maybe you didn't deserve one to begin with
But how would you actually do it? Ban the exchange of money for delivering specific messages? I guess it could work. It would require judgement calls, but we have other laws that require even more subtle judgement calls.
Why only for minors? It's not good for adults either.
If implemented as the title implies, data about minors would still be collected (though they'd get generic ads until 18), and now age verification becomes a hard requirement for anything that uses advertising.
Banning targeted advertising completely is a much better move and reduces the incentive to track people online.
That depends on how they use it. Targeted ads that profile me as someone who buys things in the niche I buy things are good. someone who has a mouse problem needs your ad for a better mouse trap - they are better off for your product that solves their problem and you are better off for selling it to them.
Targeted ads are abused too often though and so despite the good I have to come out against them. That someone has a mouse problem is sensitive - they probably don't want to admit it even though it is a common problem. If the mouse problem is in a restaurant (which is very common), that getting out will drive customers to competitors (who also have a mouse problem but customers don't know it)
> Targeted ads that profile me as someone who buys things in the niche I buy things are good.
I don't think so. There's a fundamental conflict of interest between the entity paying for the ad, the entity serving the ad, and the people seeing it. Their goal is to ultimately get ad viewers to spend the most amount of money, which may or may not be aligned with their interests. The advertiser has an incentive to convince them to buy something, whether that will benefit them or not.
I believe convincing customers to buy something is a much bigger sales driver than solving problems for them, unfortunately. And those two seem to go to hand in hand less and less as time passes.
I wonder if it would be simpler for the digital advertisement to ban companies to block adblockers solutions. Yes we might kill a certain business area, which lead to let companies find other income sources.
Removing targeted advertisement on minor should be no brainer but just harder to implement (everyone is curious and say they are 18).
I feel now there's growing support behind the idea that advertising that (a) bypasses a person's volition and (b) consumes a significant amount of their daily attention quota, should be illegal. I think the boundary is crossed somewhere along this progression:
1) A sign atop a storefront
2) A merchant yelling at a public marketplace
3) A prominent display by the roadside
4) A flyer delivered to your home
5) An advertisement alongside a news article
6) An advertisement that interrupts a radio and television broadcast
7) An advertisement alongside a digital written content (analogous to (5) but somewhat more intense)
8) An advertisement that pops up while you read content (analogous to (6) but more intense)
9) An obvious product placement within written/audio/visual content you consume
10) A non-obvious placement of an an idea, thought or bias toward a product within the content you consume
11) Content that evokes intense emotions that are presented to you alongside an advertisement
12) Content that activates involuntary addictive pathways in your brain, presented to you alongside an advertisement
It is not enough banning ads; it is necessary to outlaw the profiling to take place in the first place. In fact, today's profiling remains a viable business regardless of any ads placed downstream, because bulk data gets routinely purchased for surveillance purposes.
Such a common sense law. It's crazy to me that we have so many youth protections in place but only in the last year or two governments have started to pay attention to this
The platform should first determine whether the current user is a minor; if a minor is using an account registered to an adult, how can this be detected?
as a swiss and as someone working in adtech that does not track users i think its good first step.
the ideal solution in my point would be that platforms that have a login or know or calculate (!) the ASL of the user would be disallowed from showing ads to users below age X.
I don't think this should be considered a child protection thing; I as an adult am not that much better equipped to protect myself against these psychologists, and would also want to have regulators protect me from advertising. So this is one of several reasons why I wish I lived in Switzerland.
All my life, minors have wanted to fake being of age, so they can get access to the various privileges thereto, but for the first time I find myself asking, how do I, as an adult (multiple times over at this point) convince the system I'm a minor?
"Oh, no, I seem to have failed your intrusive system for proving I'm an adult and you have to assume I'm a minor, how awful. Don't mind me, I'm just a particularly precocious minor who loves to learn about computer science and whose search history looks an awful lot like a professional programmer, but nope, seriously, totally a minor."
I suppose banking would be a problem if the bank ever took that flag seriously. Probably have to go through the almost-certainly intrusive validation process for that, at least. But otherwise, gee golly it seems like Jerf Junior does a lot of interneting and he sure isn't an adult, nope, no way, not even a little. And it's pretty wild but when Jerf Junior aged out it seems Jerf III had just been born and is also a minor, an even more precocious baby who loves the same thing as his father and/or possibly his grandfather, it's, uh, honestly a bit unclear what is going on there. What a bizarre family I seem to have.
Ah, no, that's why Discord did the sudden mass-push to verify everyone they could as an adult, because "Real Money Gaming" is now an advertising category they welcome with open arms.
I wonder why gambling and prediction markets have suddenly popped up so much in the past couple months or so. Like, Polymarket's been a thing for years at this point, so what caused the sudden surge? Is it just Discord pushing ads or what?
I'd guess they know there is no chance of any push back from Trump, so they are around half way through 4 years of zero regulation change, and are making the most of it. Isn't Kushner or one of them invested?
So now instead of children pretending to be adults in Australia, to keep using social media, adults in Switzerland will want to be identified as children to avoid profile based advertising.
I agree with that. If profiling-based ads were allowed, minors would no longer receive ads for booze and porn. They'd have to ask their older brother about the real internet, which is embarrassing.
Meta profiled for vulnerable, low self-esteem minors (eg by monitoring added and quickly removed photos). It was used by advisers to push ads for beauty & lifestyle products feeding on depressed teenagers. Booze is non issue compared to that.
I don’t think the mentality, “people would do it anyways,” is convincing. Just like we don’t put Playboy in Grocery store checkout there’s a reason some advertising isn’t front and center.
Considering grocery stores around here in the US are now running gambling machines I think you underestimate what grocery store operators are willing to sink to.
Playboy was always in the grocery store checkout in usa, it sometimes had a black cover over it, but that was usually only for the real porn.
My first glance at playboy was in 1st grade at my first sleepover, I don't think anyone even liked girls at that point. It was purely about it being forbidden, and guess how it was obtained?
Yes the older brother of course.
I often wonder how much better my life would have been had it not been for that day? /s
You can keep your kids off the internet. Mine will have access to all torrents, shadow librarys, and local LLMs, ( and if I can afford it as many real life engineering tools as they can use) Let's see who is better prepared for life at 18?
As a parent my job is to install restrictions to filter ads, the "TikToks", and other assorted corporate brainrot, same restrictions as for myself, but also explain to them why.
once/if they can work around my tech, I think they can handle it all.
Or they just go to their friends who's parents don't give a shit and fill up on brainrot there. Or probably even at school.
You can't raise your kids in isolation. Society raises them, if society says it is OK to feed kids Tiktok brainrot before they are 14/16/whatever age it will happen. To your kids as well.
This is exactly what government is for. Solving problems like this universally.
> Mine will have access to all torrents, shadow librarys, and local LLMs
Cool, that's not how 99% of people experience internet though. The state has to put regulations because people are cattle, I'm not eating ultra processed food but I'd still like it to be banned
That's purely your opinion, mine is that your are interfering with natural selection.
If you call humans cattle you cannot pretend some sort of patriarchal concern in the same breath.
I mean your not compeltly wrong in the dynamic, but coddling people instead of expecting them to suffer the consequences of their actions will only make them worse, or is it that you don't want to suffer the consequences of their actions? In which case why advocate for making them less capable?
Sheesh, following your logic we should stop enforce mandatory schooling, any kind of social safety net, etc. that's bleak, at least in my world we take good care of the cattle
.. and then eat or milk them? Mandatory schooling wasn't implemented for their betterment it was done to make them a more valuable resource to employers and originally, the army, so yes the logic fits.
There's been a lot of recent swiss efforts to curtail advertising. Off the top of my head:
- Zurich's parliament voted 58–57 last year to place limits on outdoor advertising (have 2027 to come up with implementation)
- Bern fully instituted the ban but reversed course over revenue concerns
- Vernier & Lancy have banned billboards
They certainly seem to have the appetite to reduce the size of the industrial advertising complex... but there's clearly some successful industry pushback (like in the case of Bern). Curious to see how this profiling shakes out. Hard to make a revenue loss argument so I'm guessing it'll pass.
That's good: billboards ruin our cities.
Washington State has a clever balance: Signs visible on the highway can only advertise things people can actually get on the property below.
So it's not a hard ban, but it kneecaps the business model behind forests of billboards showing whatever the highest bidder wants.
worst case scenario we get Tokyo style trucks (apparently called koukoku torakku).
I'm afraid billboard boat on Florida beach was even worse.
Auch, their music is so annoying. TECHNICATION... TECHNICATION...
i think i saw a digital billboard swinging from a helicopter yesterday :(
The billboards here, in Zurich at least, are quite small and tasteful. The design museum even has exhibits at times of them.
For example: https://monocle.com/design/how-zurichs-poster-culture-has-tu...
The Lindt billboard across the Limat from the train station is an institution. I don’t know when it appeared but my guess would be the 80s.
Hamburg in Germany had a city referendum to ban all public animated/screen ads in 2025, but they didn't get enough people signing it (got 50k votes, needed 65k).
Same initiative also failed to collect enough votes in Berlin this year
Billboards on the information superhighway
What happens when the billboard company also makes cars, sells fuel, maps and so on
I'm a bit surprised there weren't already limits on outdoor advertising in Zurich? There certainly are in most place in Germany for example...
I really don't get why all these improvements are only geared towards minors. What is the reasoning here to not extend this to every citizen?
Because advertising (and in particular targeted advertising) is so entrenched in every aspect of our lives and society that it's very hard to admit that it's harmful. Because doing so means admitting a multi-decade failure gross failure of the government and regulators, and accepting that we need a massive structural overhaul of the entire industry, and of the operating model of a significant chunk of the Internet.
Our aspirations for our children reflect our own anxieties. It's the same with social media bans.
Our culture is pretty permissive of businesses inflicting indirect harms on adults. I think a lot of that goes back to lobbying from the cigarette and alcohol industries.
Kids are more vulnerable
That doesn't really answer the question though.
If the actions of these advertising companies are harmful, then everyone should be protected from them, not just one demographic that is considered to be more vulnerable.
And if they're not harmful, then in what sense are kids "vulnerable" to them and need protecting?
That is the justification, yes. And it is impossible to tell whether there is a kid, an adult or a dog on my side of the tcp connection without mass internet surveillance which is the actual reason.
You don't need mass internet surveillance. You can simply restrict advertisement much further than today: the types of things that can be advertised, where they can be advertised, etc. We restrict all sorts of harmful activities, why not extend it to ads?
But that's not the proposed law under discussion, which instead limits the restrictions to children, menaing implementations of the law will need to come up with things that are convenient for the surveillance state.
Won't someone think of the smartphone addicted adults!
It's easier to sell when you can say "think of the children! they need to be protected" and then later extend it.
Because the development and ability of minors to push back against adults is poor, and the ability to push back against corporations is abysmal.
If this works for kids, and then adults want it, it can then be considered.
Constant surveillance has become the default order of things. Doing what's best for corporations is the default order of things. On the flip side, "think of the children" is a strong appeal to lawmakers and has won this round. Us adults still have to suffer under the thumb of big business though.
United nations human rights
"Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
Ad tech Data fusion violates that right
Common topic amongst friends on online advertising: feels like it would be reasonable for platforms like Meta, TikTok, etc to explain why they've served you the ad you're seeing. Imagine an "explain why I'm seeing this" button.
The adtech of today feels very opaque to me; I often have no clue why I see what I do. If platforms had to disclose why you're seeing what you are, you could plug the holes in your privacy. (Fully aware this will never happen, but it's the type of regulation I wish we were proactive about.)
I don't think there's even a technical way to do this anymore. Digital ads are not actually audiences anymore (bundles of people labeled a certain way).
IMO the regulation needs to be at the data collection side: advertisers should only be able to collect data on a defined set of dimensions and each dimension should have a defined maximum specificity. Then beyond those, advertising platforms need to compete on making their actual products more compelling rather than making them better at sucking up data.
I agree, but I think the concept of data provenance would have a role. It should not matter if data is laundered through 'aggregation' or 'anonymization': if it was originally generated about an individual, and used to target an individual, that data should be an expensive regulatory liability.
The answer is that (approximately) every ad you see is targeted based on (approximately) everything you've ever done on the Internet, every purchase you've made in-person or online, and every location you've been to physically.
I don't think attaching a disclaimer like this to every ad will be impactful at all.
If it's more visible how pervasive it is to your average person who might not think very much about it, there might be louder demand for it to change. Or everybody will just begrudgingly accept it because they don't want to give up their TikTok, who knows, but I still think it should be more transparent. And maybe if a company has to attach "Disclaimer: this ad is provided by gross violations of your privacy" to their ads like the health warnings on a pack of cigarettes when they choose to advertise that way, they'll choose to not do it that way.
I'm sure there's some flaw in my logic here but I'm not the only one who thinks something's got to change.
YouTube has this! It usually gives a vague reason like "Time of day" and "Your general location". Though I wonder if it's extra vague because I turned off some of the more creepy advertising sertings.
It's a great idea too because it would force the companies to disclose the downright creepy extent of the data they've collected on you.
"We're showing you ads for diapers because we find it highly likely that you are pregnant. Oh, you didn't know that?"
“We know this because we gathered data from your CVS, Amazon, and Walmart purchases.”
While I agree with the sentiment, any answer would likely be vague (unless it is only interests based) since the models used to choose specific ads to be displayed can be rather complex.
The few cases where it was clear to me why I was seeing a certain ad was after I had ordered that product online. Which is kind of useless for the advertiser, but at least it's slightly reassuring that the tracking doesn't go that far...
Instagram does have a "Why you're seeing this ad" button. Clicking it for an ad on my feed, I see:
- "chasetravel wants to reach people like you" (clicking through reveals that this is because I am 18 years of age or older and based in the US) - "Your activity" which includes interacting with "ads about travel, fine arts and music" and "posts, stories, reels and pages about food & drinks, fine arts and cameras"
So, basically, the button reveals nothing. But with regulation maybe it would. I don't see how this would make things worse (for users - of course Meta would fight it).
EDIT: As another commenter has noted, I have also turned off every possible bit of tracking. Maybe if I hadn't I'd see more here. But I'm sure Meta is doing all sorts of fingerprinting along with tracking pixels across websites that's informing the auction, but they're not telling me about that.
They’d have to tell you directly that they’ve been pulling info on you from other sites/sources, effectively spying on your activity even when you aren’t on their platforms, which would be a PR nightmare.
You are seeing and ad because someone won the bid on the ad exchange. Why they bid to show you their ad? That answer lies not with the platform, but with the advertiser. Good luck getting an answer from them (and _all_ of them).
Meta had such feature but was bullshit: it always showed extremely generic reasons for extremely specific ads.
Here in Sweden it's illegal to make ads directed at children. Consequently the TV channels that do so transmit from abroad.
This would of course have been easy to ban anyway-- it's not like we can't have rules on foreign internet firms, for example, but historically the politicians were unwilling to make a useful law.
I think the Swiss could take one step further and add a general ban on ads targeting young children in addition to this; and then we Swedes should imitate the package.
The US has (had? I haven't checked in 40 years) rules like that for TV. It killed most of the TV programs for kids that were populate. The programs my parents remember fondly - not possible anymore because they need ads. I remember only public broadcasting kids programs.
But people pay for TV? Surely, if ads weren't there, the TV production would be funded by the people paying.
TV cannot be paid for. You might be thinking of Cable TV which can be paid for, but regular TV is just public radio waves, which everybody gets. (remember we are talking about the 1960s - things have changed)
It is also banned in Iceland, but sometimes in the 2000s they stopped enforcing it, probably as people were getting more and more of their broadcasts from abroad. Curiously the milk monopoly (Mjólkursamsalan) was allowed to target children in their ads throughout this period.
Yeah, I can understand an exception for milk producers.
They were mostly selling sugary yogurt products though. Not much different from candy.
This kind of ballot issue is a great filter. It's so obviously correct, the reason of any normal person will be "why was it legal at all?", so anyone arguing against the ban is quite probably paid to do so and should be ignored.
I'm arguing against a ban.
There's no way to implement this without (1) usage-based profiling (what's being banned in the first place) or (2) ID verification.
I'm against both of those.
For me, the only acceptable solutions are: (1) ban all profiling-based ads (2) require respecting DO_NOT_TRACK (so that people/minors/their parents can individually decide what to do, but websites are then legally forced to respect that)
A best effort implementation should be fine. Advertisers already have suspected age fields available (derived from behavioral patterns, linked information across devices, etc). When you develop a reasonable suspicion that it's a minor then stop fleshing out the profile and targeting them. That's what the big players already do (maybe not Meta, but certainly at least Google). That doesn't quite fall into your (1) point since it's not profiling that's being banned, but profiling-based ads.
What's the downside to the ban as described, when compared to the status quo?
If there's no profile already, then they can serve the ad, since it's not a profiling-based ad and they don't need to know if the viewer is a minor.
If there is a profile then they have the knowledge to avoid advertising based on that if it's a minor.
I don't see why ID verification needs to come into play?
I would love to see a ban on _all_ profiling-based ads, but this seems like a step in the right direction to me.
It seems like a roundabout way of banning profiling of non-ID’d users in general which seems… good? Like, if overlapping regulations have the practical effect of banning tracking, then that’s a win for society, right?
If you ban profiling-based ads to minors, and it's not possible to reliably detect when a user is a minor, then you have de facto banned all profiling-based ads. Since you deem that solution acceptable (as do I!) I don't see what the problem is.
> There's no way to implement this without (1) usage-based profiling (what's being banned in the first place) or (2) ID verification.
(3) zero knowledge age verification hosted by the gov which already has all the data anyways
by "zero knowledge" you of course mean "the government can shadowban you without your knowledge" ?
Edit: non-snarky response: what's the default "fall-back" if government's signature is missing? IMO any option ("tracking/no tracking/invalid request") will be exploitable in bad ways.
That's already the case right now. They can ban you from getting internet, a phone, a bank account, a car...
Sometimes I wonder in what kind of alternative reality some people live...
for my taste that goes a bit too much into "you don't have anything to hide" and doomerism. if one wants, one can boot a TailsOS with a VPN and then no, the gov does not have all the data it needs to link it to you. just because lots of stuff is being monitored we don't have to destroy every privacy boundary in existence.
We're talking about age, not about your foot fetish, the government definitely knows about your age.
There are technical ways to implement this correctly, it's a political problem, not a technical one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
> We're talking about age, not about your foot fetish, the government definitely knows about your age.
well, yeah, they also know how much i earn, where i live etc. but that's not really my point. my point is what online-stuff they can additionally link to me. you responding with the fetish stuff as a counter-argument is kinda weird, and doesn't really seem to take what i wrote seriously.
i hope if we ever have such a solution its one of those hypothetical zero-knowledge "all we do is check your age and give back a single boolean flag and we also don't record from where and why these requests come", just not that optimistic about it. ban online ads and you got a way easier solution without having to build such a system in the first place.
> it's a political problem, not a technical one
i'd say it's both, so i at least half-agree on that point :)
Why allow profiling at all? This way everyone gets a bit more privacy, second it doesn't create another situation where you got to prove that you're an adult.
You bring up an excellent argument there, however, haven’t you thought about the money?
I mean, who cares about the developing minds of the next generation when there’s money to be made involved?
how will the age of the browsing person be evaluated without checking for IDs? or do kids still get profiled, but if they get profiled and determined to be a kid you can't serve them ads? we could also teach kids at school how to install adblockers.
i'm all for it if we expand it to banning ads in all virtual and physical spaces of Switzerland :D (or at least inside of public transport, i hate how distracting and useless these freaking ad-panels in buses, trains, trams etc. are).
EDIT: okay per a different article[0], social media platforms and search providers have to analyze if their service enhances risks for minors, and do something against it if so. and "big platforms" shouldn't be allowed to serve personalized ads to kids. so they'll just serve unpersonalized ads to kids then? bwoah...
[0]https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/kommunikationsplattformen-bu...
Can't wait for every website to show you "before you can view this ad, verify your age by logging in" banners!
Realistically, lawmakers know that ad companies know which age cohort a user is in. For companies like Google/Facebook/etc. this shouldn't be too much of an issue, they already know your age when you make an account.
And if they cannot determine what vulnerable groups they're not allowed to show profiled ads, maybe they should disable profiled ads by default until you sign in. Everybody wins!
please no, sounds like cookie banners 2.0 :D
in a couple of years we'll have to get through 5 different banners just to access a website, which you can bypass by logging in with your eID which then acts as kind of an SSO for every website.
I was thinking that based on the profiling itself. So if you profile that the user is 18, you cannot serve them profiled ads.
You can also not build marketing campaigns based on profiling technologies.
So an advertiser would not be able to advertise a toy with a marketing strategy based on bidding on users that watch MrBeast and Minecraft videos
suddenly everyone gets profiled as being at least 18 years old, problem solved.
> based on bidding on users that watch MrBeast and Minecraft videos
but then what is the cutoff for "childish" topics? i mean firstly i'm sure there are people who aren't minors who watch MrBeast and Minecraft, but that's the lesser problem. but if i take myself as an example, i did also watch content as a kid which wasn't targeted to kids. not talking about NSFW stuff either, just stuff you wouldn't think as kids being the target audience.
Won’t somebody please think of the…Disney kidults? The adult Lego enthusiasts? The 7-year-olds who watch Masterpiece Theater?
You’re not wrong, but content made for kids is intended for kids, and vice versa. If someone wants crossover appeal, they intentionally do it —-hence the jokes in Pixar movies with cultural references the parents recognize.
to quote myself, "that's the lesser problem".
if the goal is to protect kids and you determine who's a kid by looking at what they're watching instead of who they are, then it seems like political flag-waving or a half-baked approach, as you'll guesstimate who's how old.
which means you have to profile everyone and not serve statistical kids ads, or require ID checks, both solutions being clunky and weird as well.
you could just not profile or serve personalized ads to anyone, no matter who they are, how about that? easiest solution. but of course that would mess with ad-sales profits or whoever feels disadvantaged by that approach.
and in the end, kids don't have Interessensvertreter in the Bundeshaus.
EDIT: also, this whole idea is literally a "won't somebody think of the kids?", not sure why you point that gun towards me instead of Monsieur Rösti.
>but then what is the cutoff for "childish" topics?
This is pretty much Law 101, a written law sets the rules, and the courts evaluate the cases, effectively finding that cutoff in practice.
makes sense, i'm frequently confused by Law 101 and its totally logical ways.
For anyone who’s concerned about the whole “oh we need to check the age of the user”
Here’s a simple solution: the ad industry is welcome to not profile its users.
Don’t get distracted though:
> Furthermore, the reporting procedure is to be extended to include all content suspected of being unlawful.
Operating keyword here: “suspected”
What happened to due process?
Switzerland really is fascinating. They do things like this while also having the most regressive and least restrictive rules around advertising tobacco (to minors and in general) and consuming it (basically anywhere you can see the sky or the outdoors. That includes parking garages, underground parts of train stations, bus stops, under kindergarten windows, and in virtually every accessible building entrance.)
Why not just ban all ads?
Or more realistically, ban targeting ads based on profiling the individual, and instead require that they're targeted based on the content.
I'd love a world without advertising, but it's never going to happen. But a world without profile-targeted advertising could.
This would be awesome. Imagine you would need to build excellent products, that advertise through word of mouth. And all that slot machines that only exist to force ads onto you would actually need to provide real value that people want to pay for.
how would you want to keep having free journalism without advertising? (and we all know where any democracy goes to die). historically nothing else worked at scale minus a few exceptions.
i think the sentiment against ads from the educated bubble really completely takes a working democracy for granted. spoiler: its not and look whats happening in the US... and the budget shift from openweb/newspapers towards video (mainly google) in the advertising industry is massive...
disclaimer: i work in adtech but we do not profile users and do not track them.
People do pay for quality journalism. Democracy and the press did fine before the adtech industry thank you very much
You: "Why not just ban all ads?" (emphasis added)
The press has largely depended on ads since the 17th century. The revenue from subscriptions and individual paper sales typically only covered about 20% of the costs.
The weak point of journalism has always been the larger-tier patrons. Can't report negative things if money-man says "no".
The advertising industry at large is at fault for our degradation in journalism.
Advertising needs clicks and eyes, the providers produce highly targeted profile algorithms to ensure maximum clicks and eyes, which degrades the information conveyed into the smallest, most enraging snippets possible. Those rise to the top as the most profitable ways to convey information, and continues the cycle, further destroying news that doesn't profit in this ecosystem.
Killing most forms of advertising across the board would of course basically destroy these large tech companies that rely on them. But the same companies have completely derailed society with their "services". We'd be better off without them.
Of course this would likely hurt "GDP" and "The Economy", but that would just mean we have an unproductive economy primarily inflated by a pointless circle of advertisement.
I don't know, but is "free journalism" actually good? If the incentives of free journalism (thanks to being ad funded) are to increase engagement and avoid criticizing their advertisers is the product actually journalism at all?
The idea of banning all ads sounds great, but legitimate content is paid for with ads. Ban tracking and targeted ads. It’s not a far stretch into cyberstalking, wiretapping, and other privacy laws.
There was 75 or more years of media ads that had no feedback except when very explicitly asking (Nielsen). Everyone was making money and doing just fine.
If content is truly legitimate, people will pay a fair price for it. If your business model collapses without ads, maybe you didn't deserve one to begin with
I'm in favor, in principle.
But how would you actually do it? Ban the exchange of money for delivering specific messages? I guess it could work. It would require judgement calls, but we have other laws that require even more subtle judgement calls.
Similar laws (total ban of ads and promotion) are already in place in few countries for alcohol and tobacco.
Wow slow down cow boy, the economy would collapse overnight
yes please, sign me up for a free trial...
Yes, please
Why only for minors? It's not good for adults either.
If implemented as the title implies, data about minors would still be collected (though they'd get generic ads until 18), and now age verification becomes a hard requirement for anything that uses advertising.
Banning targeted advertising completely is a much better move and reduces the incentive to track people online.
That depends on how they use it. Targeted ads that profile me as someone who buys things in the niche I buy things are good. someone who has a mouse problem needs your ad for a better mouse trap - they are better off for your product that solves their problem and you are better off for selling it to them.
Targeted ads are abused too often though and so despite the good I have to come out against them. That someone has a mouse problem is sensitive - they probably don't want to admit it even though it is a common problem. If the mouse problem is in a restaurant (which is very common), that getting out will drive customers to competitors (who also have a mouse problem but customers don't know it)
> Targeted ads that profile me as someone who buys things in the niche I buy things are good.
I don't think so. There's a fundamental conflict of interest between the entity paying for the ad, the entity serving the ad, and the people seeing it. Their goal is to ultimately get ad viewers to spend the most amount of money, which may or may not be aligned with their interests. The advertiser has an incentive to convince them to buy something, whether that will benefit them or not.
I believe convincing customers to buy something is a much bigger sales driver than solving problems for them, unfortunately. And those two seem to go to hand in hand less and less as time passes.
I am not disagreeing with the conflict. However lets not go overboard in solutions. I don't know what is right, but we should be careful.
I wonder if it would be simpler for the digital advertisement to ban companies to block adblockers solutions. Yes we might kill a certain business area, which lead to let companies find other income sources. Removing targeted advertisement on minor should be no brainer but just harder to implement (everyone is curious and say they are 18).
Banning all personalized advertisements and predatory recommender systems seems like a good move for the whole population.
Great start, now do it for all ages.
This would also prevent the issue of having to age verify.
I feel now there's growing support behind the idea that advertising that (a) bypasses a person's volition and (b) consumes a significant amount of their daily attention quota, should be illegal. I think the boundary is crossed somewhere along this progression:
1) A sign atop a storefront
2) A merchant yelling at a public marketplace
3) A prominent display by the roadside
4) A flyer delivered to your home
5) An advertisement alongside a news article
6) An advertisement that interrupts a radio and television broadcast
7) An advertisement alongside a digital written content (analogous to (5) but somewhat more intense)
8) An advertisement that pops up while you read content (analogous to (6) but more intense)
9) An obvious product placement within written/audio/visual content you consume
10) A non-obvious placement of an an idea, thought or bias toward a product within the content you consume
11) Content that evokes intense emotions that are presented to you alongside an advertisement
12) Content that activates involuntary addictive pathways in your brain, presented to you alongside an advertisement
Seems to totally avoid the most salient dimension which is the degree of personalization, no?
Personalization requires intrusive data collection upfront and then it requires the production of a "fractured reality" at the presentation end.
IMO 99% of the big problems with advertising stem from these two "features."
It is not enough banning ads; it is necessary to outlaw the profiling to take place in the first place. In fact, today's profiling remains a viable business regardless of any ads placed downstream, because bulk data gets routinely purchased for surveillance purposes.
Ban ads without users' consent altogether.
What benefit does this have for minors that wouldn't also apply to adults?
Such a common sense law. It's crazy to me that we have so many youth protections in place but only in the last year or two governments have started to pay attention to this
The platform should first determine whether the current user is a minor; if a minor is using an account registered to an adult, how can this be detected?
Should do it across the board. The world would be a better place if harvesting personal data for ad targeting was illegal.
as a swiss and as someone working in adtech that does not track users i think its good first step.
the ideal solution in my point would be that platforms that have a login or know or calculate (!) the ASL of the user would be disallowed from showing ads to users below age X.
All ads to minors should be banned.
An ad is a business proposal and minors cannot do business without the consent of their parents.
What?! Minors absolutely are allowed to have money and to purchase things with it on their own.
Cool, but let them decide... don't put them up against a team of behavior psychologists at a billion dollar company
I don't think this should be considered a child protection thing; I as an adult am not that much better equipped to protect myself against these psychologists, and would also want to have regulators protect me from advertising. So this is one of several reasons why I wish I lived in Switzerland.
I agree, but it's always easier to whip people into a fervor over protecting children and this is one of the better angles
The problem is: how do, ou identify minors without requiring everyone to ID themselves.
and how do you know who's a minor?
All my life, minors have wanted to fake being of age, so they can get access to the various privileges thereto, but for the first time I find myself asking, how do I, as an adult (multiple times over at this point) convince the system I'm a minor?
"Oh, no, I seem to have failed your intrusive system for proving I'm an adult and you have to assume I'm a minor, how awful. Don't mind me, I'm just a particularly precocious minor who loves to learn about computer science and whose search history looks an awful lot like a professional programmer, but nope, seriously, totally a minor."
I suppose banking would be a problem if the bank ever took that flag seriously. Probably have to go through the almost-certainly intrusive validation process for that, at least. But otherwise, gee golly it seems like Jerf Junior does a lot of interneting and he sure isn't an adult, nope, no way, not even a little. And it's pretty wild but when Jerf Junior aged out it seems Jerf III had just been born and is also a minor, an even more precocious baby who loves the same thing as his father and/or possibly his grandfather, it's, uh, honestly a bit unclear what is going on there. What a bizarre family I seem to have.
Could we drop the 'to minors' part of that? Either way, great move.
> to minors
why limit only to them? why not to ban it altogether?
so does one need to profile if someone is a minor in order to show them an ad from a random pool of minor and non-minor ads?
So they can get gambling and wiener pill ads too?
Ah, no, that's why Discord did the sudden mass-push to verify everyone they could as an adult, because "Real Money Gaming" is now an advertising category they welcome with open arms.
I wonder why gambling and prediction markets have suddenly popped up so much in the past couple months or so. Like, Polymarket's been a thing for years at this point, so what caused the sudden surge? Is it just Discord pushing ads or what?
I'd guess they know there is no chance of any push back from Trump, so they are around half way through 4 years of zero regulation change, and are making the most of it. Isn't Kushner or one of them invested?
So now instead of children pretending to be adults in Australia, to keep using social media, adults in Switzerland will want to be identified as children to avoid profile based advertising.
Cool.
Good first step; then do it for all advertising.
They should ban those generally, not just for minors.
I agree with that. If profiling-based ads were allowed, minors would no longer receive ads for booze and porn. They'd have to ask their older brother about the real internet, which is embarrassing.
Meta profiled for vulnerable, low self-esteem minors (eg by monitoring added and quickly removed photos). It was used by advisers to push ads for beauty & lifestyle products feeding on depressed teenagers. Booze is non issue compared to that.
It goes well beyond booze and porn.
Or find it themselves.
Good thing no one did that in the mid-00s. Nope. Nobody. God, can you imagine if they had?
I don’t think the mentality, “people would do it anyways,” is convincing. Just like we don’t put Playboy in Grocery store checkout there’s a reason some advertising isn’t front and center.
Considering grocery stores around here in the US are now running gambling machines I think you underestimate what grocery store operators are willing to sink to.
Playboy was always in the grocery store checkout in usa, it sometimes had a black cover over it, but that was usually only for the real porn. My first glance at playboy was in 1st grade at my first sleepover, I don't think anyone even liked girls at that point. It was purely about it being forbidden, and guess how it was obtained? Yes the older brother of course.
I often wonder how much better my life would have been had it not been for that day? /s
Its now about alcohol. Its about paw patrol.
I hope there’s a future where people learn about this and say “WTF they were profiling children?!”
The whole world should
Just keep them off the internet. What's the point?
You can keep your kids off the internet. Mine will have access to all torrents, shadow librarys, and local LLMs, ( and if I can afford it as many real life engineering tools as they can use) Let's see who is better prepared for life at 18?
As a parent my job is to install restrictions to filter ads, the "TikToks", and other assorted corporate brainrot, same restrictions as for myself, but also explain to them why. once/if they can work around my tech, I think they can handle it all.
Or they just go to their friends who's parents don't give a shit and fill up on brainrot there. Or probably even at school.
You can't raise your kids in isolation. Society raises them, if society says it is OK to feed kids Tiktok brainrot before they are 14/16/whatever age it will happen. To your kids as well.
This is exactly what government is for. Solving problems like this universally.
> Mine will have access to all torrents, shadow librarys, and local LLMs
Cool, that's not how 99% of people experience internet though. The state has to put regulations because people are cattle, I'm not eating ultra processed food but I'd still like it to be banned
That's purely your opinion, mine is that your are interfering with natural selection.
If you call humans cattle you cannot pretend some sort of patriarchal concern in the same breath. I mean your not compeltly wrong in the dynamic, but coddling people instead of expecting them to suffer the consequences of their actions will only make them worse, or is it that you don't want to suffer the consequences of their actions? In which case why advocate for making them less capable?
Sheesh, following your logic we should stop enforce mandatory schooling, any kind of social safety net, etc. that's bleak, at least in my world we take good care of the cattle
.. and then eat or milk them? Mandatory schooling wasn't implemented for their betterment it was done to make them a more valuable resource to employers and originally, the army, so yes the logic fits.
parenting doesn't work everywhere