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.
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 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%.
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 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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
"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?
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??
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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).
> 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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
“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”
So a fancy way to say that if you have 10 dollars?
I'm not paying crave anymore.
> 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.
And if you are paying… you’re still the product as well.
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.
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.
HBO was the first offering that didn't have ads during the show.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
I don't follow... it certainly improves the grocer's margins, but how does that do anything at all for the consumer?
They have also advertised for the Starbucks in thr Target stores long before when you go to pickup something.
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.
They’re going to sell to marketers for ads I don’t watch?
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Dead Comment
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.
I would be more surprised if they kept peoples privacy, as even your credit card company sells the purchase data. =3
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-...
I can't imagine any depth they wouldn't dive to, in order to get a morsel to feed on.
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".
> 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.
I’ve got it on less than 6 months.
> 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.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/d...
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.