[00:00:00] Katherine Druckman: Hey everyone. Welcome back to reality. 2.0, I'm Katherine Druckman Doc Searls and I are talking to returning guests, Don Marti, who you may remember. I hope you do, because you don't think that has been on a couple of times, and Don always has the down low on current events around ad tech, and we're going to, we're going to chat through them, get a little update.

But before we get started, I wanted to remind everyone to visit us at reality2cast.com, to get the supplementary links and such for each episode, and to sign up for our newsletter, which we are sending again. And I think you could do some other things on the website, so go check it out. And with that, I will turn it over to them.

[00:00:46] Doc Searls: Yeah. So, um, this again is a, another Linux Journal reunion. Don was editor in chief long before I was and much, much better than I was as he actually knew his stuff much better than I do. And, I think where we got to, how we got to where we are now in a way. And I mentioned this on the earlier show is that when I was writing the intention economy, I brought in Don, um, I think you've volunteered, Don to.

To, to help me research the history of advertising and a whole lot of stuff that advertising and gave him my access to the online Harvard library. And he went nuts with it and has become a bigger and bigger and better and more indispensable authority on advertising of all kinds ever since. And, and the reason I wanted to bring down on now is because there's like the eff has this thing about let's ban all surveillance advertising.

Um, Cory Doctorow is on a bit of a, uh, he's on a high horse about, about it. Now I've been on a high horse or several different horses of different kinds of different times, but Don knows more about all this, anybody else I know. So what did I have Monday show? How are you doing done? 

[00:01:57] Don Marti: Not so bad, not so bad.

How about yourself? 

[00:02:01] Doc Searls: Okay. This is like, this is like my eighth Zoom of the day. It's it's getting old, but this will be the best. Yeah. 

[00:02:11] Don Marti: Speaking of Linux Journal, I still have my editors set up so that when I edit C code, it's only 52 characters wide. So it fits in a magazine column.

[00:02:27] Katherine Druckman: Oh wow. Remember, those type of magazines were columns were a thing that's been wow. We're dating ourselves. Oh, well, 

[00:02:37] Doc Searls: so, so why don't we, I think we started one of two places. What is it you could give us kind of the, the state of the world is now stands. The other is we can go straight into the current efforts to, um, to, to outright ban all surveillance advertising.

Which may require a definition before we even go into that. So, 

[00:03:01] Don Marti: yeah. Well, if you'd like, I can start out with some good news and that is that, um, IAB, you know, active advertising bureau, which has long been the industry group for web advertising, um, has been steadily improving the standards for disclosing to the advertiser, which ads they're actually buying.

So, people realize, uh, not so long ago that it was really easy. To get sold on, add on one site and then have your app run on a different site, which is a big rip off to the advertiser. I would log into an ad council and I'd see. Wow. There's, there's a. That's available on the Boston globe, uh, for 16 cents, a thousand and some company out of Brazil is selling them.

And I will be, to their credit. Went ahead and came up with a couple of matching files that you can stick on your site. One is ads dot TXT, and the, which is for sites that have ads on them. Uh, and the other is sellers dot Jason, which is four, domains that are responsible for selling ads on some other site.

So you can parse them, hook them up and figure out, yes, this, this company is really. Connected to this other company. And now, uh, with some fairly minor changes to add stock TXT, you can now fully connect up your ad all the way down the chain to the actual domain that it runs on. So no more excuses for, uh, trying to buy one site and getting another.

[00:05:17] Doc Searls: So that's an advantage on the, um, on the advertisers side and, um, how, but that's, that's kind of aside from the whole surveillance thing though, right? I mean, this is, this is, this is kind of the chain of chain of custody, the responsibility between the PR, the people paying for the ad and where it runs.

Okay. What about the surveillance stuff? 

[00:05:42] Don Marti: Well, the surveillance stuff is what enables and puts pressure on both websites and advertisers to do sketchy practices. So if, if you have a. Publisher that has control of, of access to who advertises to their audience that publisher has a, a stronger market position.

And doesn't have to dig into as much of the sketchy stuff. So it's, it's interrelated there. Isn't going there. Isn't going to be a for replacement for the surveillance advertising without, uh, without making sure the system is honest.

[00:06:38] Doc Searls: It's interesting. So, I mean, in other words, in order to keep the system honest, we have to have surveillance. Is that what I heard? Oh, 

[00:06:46] Don Marti: no, no, absolutely. Yeah, we absolutely do not have to have surveillance. And the problem is essentially a race to the bottom by websites that would do better in a totally surveillance free environment, but because they're same audiences available elsewhere by surveillance, they can't unilaterally get out of this.

So I, I see a lot of, of surveillance ad people making a lot of noise on Twitter about, oh no, what are all these bad things that were, that are gonna happen to us or that things that we aren't going to be able to do when surveillance advertising goes away. But I think we have, have the responsibility to tell a lot more positive stories about what does advertising look like after surveillance.

And I think it makes the whole business, um, a lot more, uh, appealing to the next generation of people starting out. And it makes it more rewarding for the. 

[00:08:08] Doc Searls: I, I, I want to get to the eff, um, band surveillance, advertising thing, but I like what you're saying about the question is what happens after surveillance advertising. So maybe let's go, go there for a second.

And I'll ask, cause you know, the industry better than I do at this point. Does the industry, all of the, all of the operators that are in the entire ad tech ecosystem, do they contact. Non surveillance advertising, or are they very, very committed to it because I've talked to so many people that seem very committed to it.

Like we're never going to get rid of that. Of course they don't call it surveillance, but it's basically they're pro tracking. They want to keep tracking alive in some way. Oh 

[00:08:52] Don Marti: yeah. Yeah. Verus those, um, all, a lot of concern that if surveillance advertising goes away in one medium than ad money will move to places where surveillance advertising is still possible.

So for example, if we fix some of the privacy properties of web browsers will more ad money go into native apps, and that makes, uh, that makes a worse experience for everyone. Or if we fixed surveillance on. Pendant sites. Does that mean advertisers ended up giving the world's creepiest PHP programmer more money for genocide.

Um, and that's, that's a, um, a, a highly risky timeline to go down. 

[00:09:57] Doc Searls: Wow. Um, so I was thinking also like consumer reports and I noticed when we bought, we bought a flat screen TV last fall, um, and consumer reports has a little rating. One of them is for privacy. They don't give any of them a good mark for price.

I don't think if you can't, because, because they all are basically in the surveillance business at some level, and they have different ways to some, like, we have a, a Samsung at our house where you can go in and you can actually, or list I checked anyway, like turn that off. I don't want any, I don't want you to, they have a fancy name for it, but basically watch us, um, in order to improve whatever.

Um, but with the TCL we have now, there's not even a setting. There's nothing, there's nothing there. It just, all 

[00:10:49] Don Marti: you can do is get it on your neighbor's wifi. Yeah.

[00:10:57] Doc Searls: That's great. Yeah. Well, we're not we're on our own, unfortunately. 

[00:11:01] Katherine Druckman: Uh, on the topic of consumer electronics, it's a little bit of a tangent, but I wonder, were you involved in the Mozilla, um, privacy by design site at all, where they kind of rate consumer devices based on their creepiness scale? 

[00:11:19] Don Marti: Yeah, no, I wasn't.

I wasn't involved with that, but realistically, a, a consumer device is a Linux server and keeping a Linux server up to date with all the necessary software updates and system administration and configuration that's, that's a lot of work and that cost me. Yeah. And nobody can afford to maintain a $20 internet toaster to the standards of an internet connected bastion host for 20 years.

That, just that, that just doesn't pencil out budget wise. 

[00:12:09] Doc Searls: That's interesting. Cause I, I know I said, okay, so our one K Sony Bravia TV, which is in our, uh, lower floor, but we use a lot still. Um, and I know has a Linux box in it. Cause it came with the GPL printed out. We have to include this because we don't know what it really means, but we have to include it.

Um, is that busy being updated now? I mean, it's, it's probably an old curtain ladder. I don't even know how to go in and check what's in that thing.

[00:12:47] Don Marti: There's a lot of old kernel versions out there. And a lot of people who keep track of which kernel versions are vulnerable to, uh, which CVEs. So I'm, I'm, I'm somebody, I'm somebody who has been maintaining Linux boxes as a CIS admin, either professionally or for the family mail server. And it's, it's a thing you ever see the movie Christmas story.

[00:13:23] Doc Searls: Probably a long time. Oh yeah. With the leg 

[00:13:26] Katherine Druckman: lamp and 

[00:13:28] Doc Searls: know, shoot a Jean Shepherd one set in Hammond, Indiana. Right? 

[00:13:36] Don Marti: Well, I'm, I'm the dad who goes down and fixes the furnace with the Linux server. So there's clouds of smoke and cursing and, and you have to keep these things up to date and, uh, and expecting.

An inexpensive device to be a secure internet host for as long as, as somebody uses it. That's, that's a big 

[00:14:07] Doc Searls: deal. Yeah. I was thinking there are light bulbs that have been on for like 50 or a hundred years, but these are, these are different. Um, 

[00:14:20] Katherine Druckman: so basically what you're saying is if you have a device that's connected to the internet in any way, it's just, just give up at that point.

Don't even bother checking the little Mozilla site that I always recommend to people. It's just accept that. It's it's going to be creepy no matter what, I think that's kind of what I'm gathering. 

[00:14:36] Doc Searls: Well, it could be, I think, 

[00:14:39] Don Marti: well, I have a smart TV. So the, the monitor that I'm using for talking with you right now is a smart TV.

I've just never given it the wifi password, my own, the neighbor's anybody's. 

[00:14:54] Doc Searls: You just have a, you just have a TV monitor this feature basically. Yeah. Yeah. It's got, 

[00:15:00] Don Marti: it's got HTMI one hooked up and that's it. No other, no other network or anything. 

[00:15:08] Doc Searls: Yeah. Yeah. Uh,

I want to go back and talk about the industry again, because there's a couple of assumptions that it makes, which is one of which is we just visited this one that the, the best advertising is the most personal is the most targeted. You can't beat that. And you were the one who taught me, you know, 12 years ago, actually that's direct marketing and that's the, that's not necessarily the advertising world, but the advertising world is sort of adopted.

Um, and there's this other kind of advertising, which is what people pay millions to put on the super bowl, which are aimed at very broad populations and, and send a strong economic signal that, ah, this beer is good. This truck is tough. Um, you know, so you know what that is, you know, you see the Audi ad, you see people driving into desert and, and do you know what that's about?

But I, but I wonder, I mean, I, I suppose, I mean, direct marketing will be, I suppose it'll be on earth after the sun gets hot and, and will be with us forever, but I'm not sure, I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure that that's a correct assumption that people have to have to have that when I, and w let me go a little further with this.

I'm not doing a very good job of it. I think the kind of advertising that Google makes most of its money with, which is search based advertising is search the height of Mount Everest. And you get, uh, an ad for a hotel in Nepal, um, is different than the Facebook ad where, uh, you're going fishing in Montana and somebody who's selling fishing tackle to.

You know, people who fit these particular profiles going to Montana, um, we'll fall into that. It's not necessarily personal, but you're in a small box. That's highly targeted at that box. That's also different. Um, and then there's the, and, and then Amazon, for example, Amazon has, I've heard when Amazon makes so much money from advertising on its site.

Well, of course, but that's different. Everybody's already buying there, you know, you're, you're already there for the purpose of buying you're in the store. It's like a point of sale display. It's different in kind again. Right. But Amazon is also out there follow you around the web. Right. So, so, and they're advertising elsewhere as well.

In some cases, they get co-op or kickback money because you, you already bought the washer from, from Amazon, but now you're seeing the ad for the washer when you go to some other sites. Right. That's anyway, these are there there's events between these is there overlaps, but they're very different in kind.

So maybe you could do a better job than I just did a pulling these things apart because we need to know what we're talking about. 

[00:18:12] Don Marti: Yeah. Yeah. And, and the first one that is dramatically different from all the others would have to be those Amazon ads, because Amazon is not just a site on which the ads appear.

They're also the makers of the competitive product. So, um, I, I like, um, Logitech computer mice. And so a while ago I went to Amazon and did a search for watch a tech mouse and it said, oh fine. Computer mice by brand on logic tech there. Yeah, exactly. Find computer mice by brand click Logitech. And so I typed in logic tech mouse.

I clicked watch attack on the list of categories where there's a search result and I go through to a page. And so I'm expecting, I'm going to see the whole logic tech mouse line, whether it's organized by price or some algorithm or whatever, but no first mouse on the page, Amazon basics mouse. Okay. Okay.

So. When I did the same search, just recently click, I come through to a page. That's got more Roger tech art on it, and it's logic tech quote advertising. But, well, why don't you text pain for is get that Amazon basics mouse out of our search 

[00:20:05] Doc Searls: results. Uh, uh, oh, that's interesting. That's a shakedown. It's an interesting shakedown on the part of Amazon.

[00:20:15] Don Marti: Oh yeah. 

[00:20:17] Doc Searls: Wow. It's like, Uh, it's it shelves it's it's shelf space stuff. It's the new shelf space war. Right. In other words, Amazon owns the store. They saying we're going to put Amazon basics on the end cap for everybody who comes through, but for you, we'll take it off the end cap and take them straight to we'll make the whole aisle nothing but your stuff if you pay us.

Right. Sure, 

[00:20:43] Don Marti: sure. The better position you pay for the worst position relatively the store brand ends up with and the grocery slotting model is, uh, is certainly a good example of that. 

[00:21:01] Doc Searls: So, okay. There's that, but Amazon is also busy follow year round they're into surveillance, business offsite. You know what I look at?

We've had, uh, Augusta and Fu on here a couple of times. And, and he has this thing called page x-ray that takes a look at what, um, what what's, what, what your browser is getting infected with it at the moment. And, uh, what's got to fingerprinting and what doesn't, but, and there are lots of the usuals there, but Amazon is one of the many cookies that you're getting that just going to put a show up elsewhere as you go about the web.

Right? So I I'm not as an Amazon shopper, I'm not aware that. Anything I'm seeing on their site is any different because of that. But I suppose that's part of the idea anyway. 

[00:21:54] Don Marti: Yeah. Yeah. They don't, they don't make it obvious that a particular thing is following you around because stuff following you around is the thing that makes people turn on privacy tools or ad blockers.

So it's, it's why it's widely done that. You don't make it look too good, but I'm actually going to go back to one of the things that you said before, which is that you said that surveillance ads are always going to be with us and 

[00:22:29] Doc Searls: I'm speculating about that. Just really believing it, but 

[00:22:31] Don Marti: yeah. Okay. I'm I'm going to say no.

And I'm gonna, I'm gonna look back at the history of, um, People's interaction with the element led and we've used the led for so many things in history, right? Lead pipes lead, um, lead lead, solder, lead paint, like stained glass windows, have a little led, um, section in between the panes of glass, um, lead bullets, of course, lead fishing weights.

There's so much, so much lead. And, um, your old timey radio has that, that warm radio smell, which how, I don't know how much of that is lead fumes. Right. 

[00:23:25] Doc Searls: Um, but 

[00:23:29] Don Marti: yeah, but what happened in the 20th century is that we got. Really good at pumping a lot of lead into people at extreme scale. Um, Tetra, ethyl lad was invented.

It was put in all the fuel 

[00:23:56] Doc Searls: and 

[00:23:58] Don Marti: everybody who, um, the more, the more internal combustion engines you had around you, the more of led you got into your system. And 

[00:24:10] Doc Searls: we. 

[00:24:13] Don Marti: We ended up not just getting rid of leaded gas, which came about through a convoluted series of events where it turns out, oh, the weather is bad for the catalytic converters.

Well, we've got to take the lead out. So the catalytic converters work better. And now it reduces the lead in our bloodstream and that's got health impacts. So we've got another reason to get rid of lead. And now there's a whole, let's get rid of led momentum going on and we don't just get rid of leaded gas and lead paint and lead pipes and all those big obvious.

Sources of lead in the environment. Now we're going out and tracking down lead solder or lead pellets and shotgun shells or all those little niche uses of lead. And so what, what we've seen with surveillance marketing is it kind of started off with, um, in effect the, the lead pipes and lead bullets level of exposure, where you get catalogs and direct mail and people kind of tolerated that.

But then when with the internet, it became possible to constantly expose every one to massive quantities of surveillance, marketing all the time. That's when the. Um, the cause of we need to ban this stuff, uh, gets fired up and that, um, that pause isn't going to stop with just banning the large scale, extremely toxic uses of, uh, surveillance, marketing.

It's going to, it's going to keep going. It's going to be fair and it's going to go out to its logical conclusion. 

[00:26:27] Doc Searls: So it's the letter, the asbestos of the internet. 

[00:26:31] Don Marti: Well, it's the what? It's, it's, it's a mental, um, it's an informational. And I'm a log to lead. Yeah, you can think of it that way, but, 

[00:26:44] Doc Searls: but are, but I think your point and correct me if I'm wrong is that there's a, there's a, there's a ground swell of intolerance and antipathy toward it.

That is going to obsolesce it. Um, regardless because people are just, people hate it. They don't want it. There's no, there's never been any demand for it on the user side at all. Um, and, uh, and it, and it's seen as toxic at this point, I think, well, we can't afford it. 

[00:27:15] Don Marti: We can't afford it 

[00:27:16] Doc Searls: right now. 

[00:27:18] Don Marti: Right now.

We've got the legit brands that are users of surveillance. Um, they go on social media and they only want to buy people who are young and wealthy and, um, and within their target demographic. And what that mean is as legit marketing money gets more concentrated in the, uh, higher socioeconomic groups. You end up with the eyeballs of everyone else, uh, becoming available to, uh, foreign disinformation, uh, run of the mill scams, um, all the, all the worst stuff you might have, you might imagine.

So, so the fact that, um, The fact that, that legit fashion brand buys ads to young, hot rich people means that, uh, um, old broke, ugly people get a lot of, uh, of really toxic stuff 

[00:28:45] Doc Searls: and they don't like it. And they'd like to have laws that ban it. And, um, you know, but you're saying that toxic stuff goes away too.

Is that right? Or you're just saying we'll always have that. 

[00:28:56] Don Marti: Well, the, the toxic stuff, the toxic stuff is, um, Is going to people are going to try to get it out one way or the other before the internet, people would put KKK flyers in the stalls, in the men's room. Right. So they're going to try to get it out.

So the same, the same guy who used to be putting a KKK flyer in the stall and the men's room can now get on social media and reach way more people way more effectively, because he's got a giant data center, uh, trained up on machine learning to find the people for his message. So that kind of, that kind of toxic communication is still gonna be out there.

People are still going to be trying to make it, but without the surveillance marketing apparatus to draw on, it's not going to be as amplified. It's gotta be back to. Flyers and men's rooms. 

[00:30:02] Katherine Druckman: So we haven't really talked about Google topics, which I think we had talked about. I thought about talking about, sorry.

I know I've steered it back there. You know, we had a, we had a conversation. Actually got, it's been a while back when Drupal, um, added block a flock, a flock blocking by default. I don't, we haven't really talked about any of that initiative since then, because topics is, I guess, the successor to pluck. And I wondered, you know, it's at first that, they're, they're trying to present it as a more private alternative replacement and really that's problematic.

And I wondered if you could talk about that a 

[00:30:47] Doc Searls: little bit. 

[00:30:47] Don Marti: Yeah. So, um, Google topics, API is like you said, the replacement for flaw and it has some. Um, mathematical privacy properties that make it less useful for fingerprinting than flock was the big problem. The biggest problem with flock is that it's a bunch of, um, uh, in pen, horrible fingerprinting bits that follow you around everywhere.

And nobody can really tell exactly what it means. It's just more data to help identify you. So kind of, kind of, um, uh, it, it was definitely seen as, as something that is, um, a big privacy risk. So what topics does is instead of one, Flock cohort ID that goes with you everywhere. It will leak a sample of some of the categories of sites that you're interested in.

So if you go to sites about, uh, 

[00:32:20] Doc Searls: fishing 

[00:32:21] Don Marti: and boating and yacht rock than, uh, you don't know which of those interests are, are going to get shared with, uh, each of the sites that you visit. But if you visit the, um, car and drivers site and the road and track site, then those two sites might get a different topic for you.

So they can't use topics to connect you as the same person. Um, Across the two sites. 

[00:33:02] Katherine Druckman: Okay. That makes sense. But, so what I mean, do you, what do you think, are you, uh, any less concerned about topics than you were about FOC or do 

[00:33:14] Don Marti: it's it's still a problem. And the big problem is that we've still got too many ad tech intermediaries trying to monetize too many problem sites.

And, uh, I'll share a link with a ship with, for the show notes for a couple of stories of, um, uh, problems with, uh, in, in this case, Google, but it's, it's true of a lot of, um, uh, of ad intermediaries. Uh, they will actually. Uh, obfuscate, which ad the site is, which ad which side an ad is going to appear on by tagging yet as quote is confidential.

And so all of those is confidential. Um, uh, sites could end up being something that's brand unsafe or even under sanctions and those brand unsafe, those brand unsafe sites or confidential sites or sanctioned sites end up getting the same exact information out of, um, uh, out of Google topics as any other site camp.

[00:34:33] Katherine Druckman: So that seems like a, yeah, that seems like an opportunity there for bad things to happen. Um, Yeah. That's like, I I'm just, you know, I wonder, I wonder if this is just going to be a series of, you know, is it, will there be enough pushback that Google just continues to propose new things and pass new things until, until it's it's whittled down?

Or is it, are we just going to have to give up at some point and accept that this is, or just not use Chrome? I guess? I don't know. 

[00:35:08] Don Marti: Yeah. The, the not use Chrome, um, uh, path is frankly looking more and more viable. There's some, there's some really good progress being made by the apple safari, uh, people on support for, um, Uh, obscure CSS properties and other compatibility stuff.

And so, um, safari is, is not necessarily a, a big enough step back browser features wise to continue to make people switch to Chrome. Of course, there, there are Google sites that are, that are trying to get you to switch to Chrome. Like Google maps. You get, you get a, uh, a little dialogue saying, don't you want to view the site in Chrome?

And it's easy to get nudged into it by one of the Google properties, but, uh, staying, staying away from, from Google Chrome is a certain way. Um, um, certainly getting, getting to be a, uh, an easier choice. What's 

[00:36:32] Katherine Druckman: what's funny slash weird is I was there, you know, in Chrome, Chrome was, it was practically a non entity.

And I still, I feel like I, how did Chrome get to be the browser? Like, I mean, again, I was there, I watched it happen and yet I have trouble. And I understand there, you know, so many small nudges built, you know, add up to a lot of notice. Um, but I still, you know, Firefox was always a really good browser. 

[00:37:02] Doc Searls: It was iffy.

I mean, what I remember about that time was that the Google had a really compelling. Um, comic book, I'm like a 20 page comic book explaining, um, I mean it was online, but it page like a comic book that explained why they had to make their own browser. So it was basically saying we support a firefighter. I mean, the subtext was we supported Firefox, um, is not doing what is too slow.

It's not doing what you want it to do, their design issues with it. We're gonna design a new browser from the ground up, but it wasn't like we're going to take over the world with it. I think that, I don't know if they wanted to at that point, but they, I recall when it came out, it was so much faster than Firefox, at least on what I was using.

And that made a difference. They have process per tab, so right. Exactly. Every pet tab has its own process. Very different. 

[00:38:00] Don Marti: Yeah. So if you have, if you have an SMP machine, then you're not, you're not. Bottlenecked on everything running through one process. And so it definitely took Firefox a while to catch up on performance.

So the, the, um, the reasons to switch browsers are a surprising number of people have more than one browser and something breaks. They tried in another browser and if it works in the second browser, they're more likely to switch full time. So browser browser, uh, switching is driven by, um, Hey, this doesn't work.

Can I 

[00:38:46] Doc Searls: try it in another browser? It works, right. I mean, I, I use a bunch of different browsers for different things. It's easier for me with my four different. Flicker and, um, and, uh, Twitter accounts to just have four different browsers to use them with, rather than go on one and switch between them. I know there's ways to do it, but they're all different per browser.

And I didn't want to screw with that. Right. So it was just easier to run these different browsers all at once. Um, And also like, I've got enough, I've got a 40 tabs open in this browser and I've only got five on that other one. I'll go to the other one because you know, like for the other podcast that we do, um, I just use brave for that.

I don't using brave too much otherwise, but I use it for that, you know? And there are other things I just use Microsoft browser, you know, it's, uh, those that broke, I've been in a while, someone wrong with it and wanted something. And I didn't know what to do with it today, but that's the point. I mean, you have, you've used a bunch of them already.

You just give up on one, but let me ask about the EFS thing about, let's just ban all surveillance advertising, cause run just an advertising theme episode. Um, where do you stand on that? I mean, have you studied it? You looked at it, do you think it's a good idea? Um, 

[00:40:13] Don Marti: I am I'm 100% for a surveillance advertising law, uh, surveillance, advertising ban.

Um, if it can be done fairly, um, the risk of a surveillance advertising ban that gets rewritten. At the last minute by midnight lobbyists to exempt one form of surveillance advertising is incredibly high. So there's a, there's a band surveillance advertising bill right now. That's, um, uh, that's been introduced in the house of representatives and that bill has a big, scary loophole in it.

And I can send you a, uh, blog thing that I wrote for the show notes. Um, That surveillance advertising ban would examine some of the most dangerous practices that the big, uh, companies particularly Facebook use while banning the, the ad, the con the conventional cross site tracking based ads on a lot of independent sites.

So the sh the short term effect of, of that particular surveillance ad ban language would be, um, all the ad money goes away from all the legit sites, and it goes inside a. Uh, social platform that aggressively hides what's going on ad wise, which would be, um, uh, a civilization level risk. Put it that way.

Wow. 

[00:42:17] Doc Searls: So at the very least it's a ban Facebook competitors, um, uh, law. Right, 

[00:42:27] Don Marti: right, right. You get, you get a lot more safety in banning surveillance advertising. If you could ban the large systemically risky platform companies first.

[00:42:48] Doc Searls: And how do you, could you do that? Cause there's sort of different in a way that they, in the ways they approach advertise. 

[00:42:55] Don Marti: Well, part of it, part of the answer is. Um, treat of a surveillance advertising problem. Like we treat certain categories of, um, of environmental problems and start with, uh, reporting and taxation.

So instead of starting with a surveillance advertising ban, you'd say, ah, there's now a tax on the, on any database table containing personal information and it's skills as 

[00:43:40] Doc Searls: say an log 

[00:43:41] Don Marti: in. So if you have. Um, a hundred thousand people, you pay a dime. Each, you get a million people, you pay a dollar, each 10 million people, you pay $10.

Um, use, use the, what they call it, the gloving and tax, which is, uh, a nice piece of, uh, of market design. I use a per user per Gavi and tax to make extremely large systemically, risky, uh, PII databases, um, uh, economically and feasible.

[00:44:17] Doc Searls: That's interesting because that would, they would end up, I mean, if you've got, I mean, I'm trying to think of entities that have large PII personally identify personally identifiable information, but aren't advertising. Would they be taxed? 

[00:44:34] Don Marti: I think they should be otherwise, they'll just go into the surveillance ad business with their existing 

[00:44:40] Doc Searls: and make some money just anyway.

Right. We'll be examples of that. I mean, it would be, I suppose, every customer's getting company doing customer service, they have lots and lots of records of people. They would be taxed for the, for having those records. 

[00:45:01] Don Marti: Yeah. Your utility companies like, um, PG and E or con Edison would have a lot of records.

And the, the problem with big databases on with big databases about people is that the risks of being in the database are on the person in the database and the benefits are on the owner of the database. So 

[00:45:29] Doc Searls: if you really interesting. Yeah. So, so you're saying, I mean, a subtext of what you're saying or somebody that just isn't said yet, and we can say it now is that, um, the utility companies, um, any, any large company has lots of personal records is probably already in the surveillance advertising business, because there's a market value for those, for the, for that data.

Is that right? 

[00:45:59] Don Marti: I have state departments of motor vehicles are in the business because they've got, uh, they've got driver's license data. 

[00:46:05] Doc Searls: Right. And, and the phone companies are in the business because they're busy selling or giving away data to their partners. Oh 

[00:46:13] Don Marti: yeah. Yeah. For data, for data privacy day, I tweeted some of my Verizon data.

They've got, uh, they've got some interesting, uh, because that's an interesting call on me.

They've got a score assigned to me that rates how likely I am to be an online influencer. So I don't know what it means. 

[00:46:36] Doc Searls: Uh, well, it means you are. I can tell you that right now, it's too bad, but you are there. You're here, right? 

[00:46:46] Don Marti: Exactly. I need to get a bunch of others. I need to get a bunch of people to go get.

'em go, go to a CCPA. Right to know, or your Verizon data, um, and see what your influencer score is and we'll, we'll compare them. We'll see. Who's the mightiest influencer. 

[00:47:06] Doc Searls: I think it's a really good idea. I should do 

[00:47:07] Katherine Druckman: late with the California, all old doc, you have a California address. I do not. I wonder, can I get, 

[00:47:12] Doc Searls: I do know that I have, um, uh, but I've, but I haven't for T-Mobile I'll be interested to see if T-Mobile has that.

Um, they probably do, but I, there's a really interesting point though. I want to make it as clear as possible because it's a new thing for me. Uh, that first, that. Any, any large company that already has a lot of customer or personal data is likely to sell it and is already in that, in the surveillance business, either as a director indirect participant and a possibly better way.

And this is the original thing I'm hearing from you, especially originally anyway, is that a better approach than just coming up with a law forbidding? It is simply taxing it, well, it was an economic cost to them for having this in the first place. Yeah. 

[00:48:06] Don Marti: And, and usually, um, usually if you come out and say, we're going to ban this thing, then people carve out a bunch of exemptions to it.

And, um, there are of course going to be people who try to get exemptions to. Attacks, uh, they might say that, oh, health data doesn't count because health data is under this other law. Or, um, or if it's related to airline passengers, then we can't do it because of federal, uh, because of some, some aviation treaty where a party to that requires us to do this with passenger data.

Right. So there's, there's gotta be people who come out with, with exemptions to it. And that's probably okay if we start with the tax and, um, and let the, let the market fix the uses of, um, surveillance data that are on economic first and then take another, another whack at another batch.

[00:49:16] Doc Searls: That's really interesting as an approach, um,

I'm wondering, does that mean? So, I mean, so being in the business of selling personal data to marketers who are then going to use it to personalize ads is a thing, but there's, um,

there's what, there's the efficiency of that market just for doing what it claims to do. Like does it actually sell something and might we fight this by simply coming up with better ways for demanded supply to meet each other that will obsolesce the whole guesswork thing. That's what I've wanted for like ever.

So I'm just bringing it up again because I'd like to think it's possible. 

[00:50:07] Don Marti: Yeah. Marketing departments. I think I've mentioned, I think I've mentioned this before, but marketing departments have two jobs and one of them is try to sell goods and services to the customers. Uh, and the other one is sell the marketing department to a company management.

Right. And if the marketing department is going on slower, moving harder to measure metrics like brand lift or brand equity, um, or, um, or anything that, that moves slowly and is harder to measure, then they're not going to be putting up as good a case for themselves as if they can have a faster moving faster to measure.

Metric and marketing is an extremely long chain of principal agent problems where everyone, whether it's the, the code, the DSP, the agency, um, the person on the client side who hired the agency, um, on, up through company management and ownership, every level has to justify itself to the level above using numbers.

Right. 

[00:51:41] Doc Searls: And in addition, I mean, one of the cases I've often making, or the claims I'm making, it's not a case as much, um, is that it's very early in the history of where all this goes, where we've only had the folding, a digital living for the, like my generation or so. I've only been at a world where phones are getting data pretty much everywhere.

Um, that wasn't the case just even a few years ago, I was at Pete's coffee this morning. And, um, and the, my phone said, Hey, do you want to get on Pete's wifi? And I'm sure we got it. It's like, it's got like three megabits down and 80 kilobits up. And I turn off the wifi and I'm getting like 50 down in 50 up from T-Mobile if you know, so, but, and I could just sort of trust and list them off in the woods somewhere that I'm going to get.

I'm going to be on the internet anywhere without thinking about it and that's, but that's new. That's still relatively new. And I sorta think that. In time, we're going to just find better ways for demand and supply to signal each other than we're getting right now out of a guesswork on one side, that's kind of holding all the cards.

[00:52:54] Don Marti: Yeah. Yeah. And we're going to see that some of the parties that take advantage of what, uh, surveillance advertising offers are, are so actively harmful that we have to cut off the supply of data in general. Um, I think we've, we've seen some of this with, um, with. Use of, um, of surveillance data for, uh, targeting of weapons, but there's a, a really, uh, concerning paper called micro-targeting is information warfare that I think we really have to look at and say, um, Hey, wait a minute.

We can't put these assets of our civilization in such a vulnerable place. 

[00:54:13] Katherine Druckman: Micro-targeting warfare. I think that might be the title 

[00:54:17] Doc Searls: of shit. 

[00:54:20] Don Marti: Micro-targeting as information warfare is the name of the paper. 

[00:54:24] Doc Searls: Yeah, I was already looking it up. Um, there's another one I just ran across today about how. Europe wants to do facial recognition for everybody, presumably for just, you know, I'd, you know, easing ID creep through the sphincters of commerce and travel and the rest of it.

But we really don't want that when the, um, when the killer bots want to come shoot you in the head. Right. You know, because they see your face. 

[00:55:03] Don Marti: Right. Right. And the author, the author of the paper is professor Jessica Dawson. Okay. So, um, that's, that's something that, that, um, PRI privacy nerds and national defense nerds don't, uh, converse as much as maybe we should because there's, um, there's a, there's a lot of overlap during, during world war II, private sector companies would paint, uh, fake roads and bushes and stuff on top of aircraft plants in order to protect, uh, the country's productive capacity from, um, from bombing.

And we haven't gotten to that level of understanding the, the risks, 

[00:56:07] Doc Searls: um, And 

[00:56:10] Don Marti: the, the more that, the more that the consumerization of weapons systems, uh, is a thing, probably the more that we're gonna going to see, um, um, we're going to see information transfer in that area.

[00:56:34] Katherine Druckman: Um, probably coming up, are you about,

[00:56:41] Doc Searls: we can keep going. Joe Rogan goes three hours. So schedule 

[00:56:46] Katherine Druckman: a take two next week, or sorry, a week after next, not next week, because next week is your conference. But, um, yeah, this is interesting stuff. That's interesting. The overlap between national security and privacy, I feel like, well, I mean, this is overstating, the obvious, but government agencies really should, um, communicate a little bit better.

I feel like there are so many conflicting interests and various segments of the government that, um, I don't know, their interests seem at odds, which just is not super efficient for the rest of us. But yeah, I feel like on one hand you have governments out there trying to undermine encryption on the other one.

They're like, Hey, but wait a second. Security and privacy are related. And all of these things lead to bad things. 

[00:57:39] Doc Searls: Anyway, I think something else going on is just that, um, There's there's just a shitload of information out there and everybody's overloaded. The more curious you are, the more of a wound you get as well.

I mean, it's, I mean, there's a corollary to that, which is boy, this, this information is really tasty and I can just, I can hookup with my cohort. I find a whole cohort around us, just disinformation, which looks like information to me. It's like religion. I mean, you know, I've just, I've got, I belong to this now, you know?

And, um, And I don't have to, I could just study stuff that, that please that tune, you know, rather than just be curious, but everything. Um, I mean, if 

[00:58:27] Katherine Druckman: I need to read this paper for sure, but, okay. So on one hand you have, you have this, you have this type of research and people are obviously very aware of the dangers of micro-targeting, but on the other hand, um, law enforcement buys marketing data to skirt the fourth amendment.

So maybe those two should have a conversation, you know, like, come on guys. Like 

[00:58:51] Don Marti: the best thing that we could do for privacy in this country is for ATF to start doing surveillance, marketing for enforcing the firearms.

[00:59:06] Doc Searls: Well, 

[00:59:08] Don Marti: if that, if that happened than a lot of people would insist on a lot of fixes to a lot of systems that haven't been made yet. 

[00:59:24] Doc Searls: Wow. That's interesting. Yeah, 

[00:59:27] Katherine Druckman: that is kind of an interesting checkmate there. Isn't it? Um, I don't know how we can talk that 

[00:59:33] Don Marti: and it could be, it can be combined with any other federal agency, as, as, as long as private sector organizations can do things like go out and buy.

Uh, data, um, for, uh, the whole Catholic preached story. I'm sure you're familiar with that. Um, 

[01:00:00] Katherine Druckman: I'll link 

[01:00:00] Don Marti: to it. Um, and there are other extremely controversial laws where, um, Texas is letting you get 10 grand. If you can learn somebody who had an abortion and the easiest way to find that is by that data.

Yeah. Yeah. Those, those, those bounty hunters are out there and, um, bounty hunters are out there. Foreign adversaries are out there. Um, surveillance advertising is not. A big enough deal to the economy to be worth preserving at the cost of, uh, exposing ourselves to those risks. 

[01:00:53] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. I, you know, the, the day that the, the, you know, basically abortion vigilante law came out in Texas.

I, you know, I'm sharing and posting to Facebook nonstop, like, Hey, you know, linked to eff surveillance. Self-defense every woman I know needs to, you know, I don't know what your reproductive health situation is, but ladies pay attention and go, you know, cause it's, serious, serious stuff.

Well on that pleasant note, maybe that might be a good place to wrap it up or at least into until the next, the next time we get a chance to talk and then we can keep it going. 

[01:01:34] Don Marti: Yeah. And it's not it's, it's definitely scary. It's definitely, um, there are definitely a lot of things that need to be fixed, but, um, I'm, I'm optimistic with, uh, with, uh, IAB making those, uh, transparency changes with some of the positive movements toward, um, uh, antitrust and, uh, and at least starting to talk about how are we going to, uh, get rid of surveillance, uh, uh, surveillance advertising.

We're we're making progress.

[01:02:13] Doc Searls: That's great. Thanks, Tom. Awesome. Yeah, that's great.