So how to combine 1. and 2.? What are some of the criteria a humane ad policy should comply to? Well… just brainstorming a bit:
My suggestion is to redefine #2 and then 1 and 2 are easy to combine. I believe user data is the strawman economic value, meaning it is a misdirection away from the actual value, which is our attention.
This does not mean that there could evolve a data “attachment” to the value of our attention, which could increase its base value.
Right now, without publishers or brands making any adjustments to their current media buying habits, we can measure the value of attention on the internet, quantifiable down to seconds, so it is also easier to measure and issue value.
- Mutual beneficial : Benefits the advertiser (promotes/sells product or service), benefits the social network (advertisement income), benefits the user (is something the user might need, and complies to humane criteria)
Absolute agreement, with some clarification.
The ecosystem has three main stakeholders and I can list each’s unique concerns and problems
Publishers/content creators
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Reach problem: Each publisher (with few exceptions) cannot reach their own audience to any significant degree with any singular piece of content. This relates to another problem listed below, one product that does reward publishers and advertisers love is sponsored content, where a publishers writers will create branded content, native to the platform, around a brand narrative.
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core design flaw: ads on page like magazines or newspapers. the early web literally adopted the same sensibility as old media.
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third party ad networks: usually the ones applying the data, and keeping the margin for themselves while buying remnant (low cost advertising in bulk) from the publisher.
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Continually de-escalating revenue from third party ad networks: which just increases the problems listed above, now pubs have to run more ads on one page to make an aggragate eCPM, which requires more third parties dropping cookies, which pisses off more users.
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Facebook: Content shared on facebook makes a significant majority of most publishers audience acquisition, but difficult to monetize because of Facebook Pages, keeping the users in Facebook and away from the publisher.
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ad blockers: in response to all the issues exasperated above, some publishers are actually losing 90% of their monetizable audience to ad blockers (especially tech blogs)
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IAB and any internet advertising guidelines, which have set the standardization in ad tech mediation platforms for various ad products, all of which create the above, while preventing innovation from coming inside the system because everything has to conform to the standardization.
Brands/Agencies
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Channel control: Just where in the hell are my ads showing and why are they next to YouTube child porn videos??? to name a common complaint.
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Viewability: How the hell can I tell if anyone even saw the ad that I paid for them to see?
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Bots: “How much more money do I have to dump into click farms for publishers to meet their delivery requirements???”
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Direct to publisher reach: “We finally found a product that works, we love sponsored content, how many views Mr. Publisher with 10M MAUs can you get us on our sponsored content article on your website? Really, less than 1% guarantee? That’s it?”
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Direct to publisher communication: “I want to be able to work directly with the publishers!”
Internet Users
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FU we hate ads. “The only ad I can accept is an ad that I can barely notice.”
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Wasted attention: “Hey Youtube, I was fine with the five second video ad that I could click away from, until I found out that the content creator made $0 and you also made $0, why are you wasting my time for no money???”
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Tracking: “Stop tracking me, I only like it when its what I want to buy”
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WASTED TIME: Fake news/clickbait: “Wow! that’s so interesting that hillary clinton eats babies, feed me more! Yes, I will click on pictures of big boobs without thinking twice, and anything kardashian.”
*** Transparent : User should be able to see which personal data led to displaying the ads to them. Should be able to easily browse/control any personal data that the social network has access to.**
Transparency across the ecosystem, same issue, brands dont have it and sometimes either do the pubs.
- Ethical : Where ‘ethical’ in a For Ethical Use Only open-source software license is very hard to define, for an ad policy this should be much easier. It should be part of the Privacy Policy and Code of Ethics of the network
Right now, the major third parties agree that porn, violence, gambling, 420 and alcohol are boundaries. Ethics probably alter per publisher. The ability to buy audiences for super cheap works great for affiliates who sell scam products.
- Enforceable opt-out policies : If I don’t like certain ad companies, or even do not want to have the social network use it anymore, I should be able to retract the data, make it inaccessible / unusable
Which data type? Some data is shared, like how long you spent on a page for the publisher, or how much fo a video you watched. That data can just be linked to an IP address. This is why data is so difficult because the demarcation gets blurred over what is reasonable and what is invasive.
- Enforceable data resales policies : As a user I should be able to choose how my personal data is traded to 3rd parties:
Personally, i view a set of our online data as something we have ownership stake in, so in principle, I dont believe there should be any transaction that the user is not compensated for.
- Forbidden : The default setting (other policies are opt-in). This will cost revenue to the social network, so they may have to incur a subscription fee to me
Not sure what this means specifically?
- Free : Do what you want with it. The current practice. The social network could offer me added benefits for this.
But doesnt that still open up the same problems with social media such as targeted harassment, misinformation, etc?
- Selective : Only allow certain 3rd parties of the users’ choice.
Remove the third parties all together 
- Further restrictions might be applied, like 3rd party does not get full ownership of data it buys, is not allowed to resell to others (hard to enforce)
Remove the third parties all together
- Data is managed / controlled by the user and encrypted by default
- When opting-out it is encrypted with a different key, which the opted-out party can no longer decrypt (existing data that was previously supplied could still be illegally used, so regulation is necessary, or smarter encryption methods… I am no expert in this field)
- Regarding resales: the 3rd party could receive the data in encrypted form and only while providing it to social network applications and apps that have my consent, can it be used to show ads to me. This would enforce a policy where it does not get resold without restriction
We can get there like today if we remove the data value and attach it to the attention value
I’m going to read the rest of this thread now…great work @aschrijver
thanks for posting this discussion!