browser development, bigger problem, workarounds

Posted Jun 16, 2025 7:39 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
In reply to: browser development, bigger problem, workarounds by nim-nim
Parent article: Covert web-to-app tracking via localhost on Android

On the other hand advertising in the last century was responsible for a lot of other problems in our society.

Basically you can blame a lot of drug use (including alcohol and tobacco and prescription drugs) on advertising, a lot of health problems from bad diets, climate change from advertising of fossil fuel, automotive, aviation and travel industries,...

And that is not even accounting for the horrors inflicted upon humanity by political advertising (usually referred to as propaganda when seen in a negative light).

But true, the targeted aspect adds things like the building of a world-wide surveillance capability that surpasses most intelligence agency's wet dreams.

browser development, bigger problem, workarounds

Posted Jun 16, 2025 8:20 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

It’s not just intelligence (as in passive information collection). Targeted advertising waits for the moment one of your activity patterns is symptomatic of a vulnerability to conversion, and then feeds you the exact garbage that enabled this conversion in others. Given no one is superhuman without any moment of weakness it will eventually succeed.

Traditional advertising relied on brute force and brute force is obvious enough society as a whole can decide if the messaging is acceptable or not.