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Frieren • today at 3:31 PM • 11 replies • view on HN

Ads providers should be held responsible for delivering malware. All the tracking (that includes fingerprinting for clients that do not want to be tracked) should also be illegal.

How is this acceptable for society goes beyond me. And then corporations blame individuals when they get scammed. It is your fault that we have all your information and leak it everywhere, when it is not just directly sold.

And add jail time to fines. Fines means nothing for the rich.


Replies

the_giraffe • today at 4:56 PM

I think it would be nice for them to be held accountable but I get the feeling this is part of a wider nation state intelligence apparatus and I doubt that they will hold themselves accountable.

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ticulatedspline • today at 4:44 PM

nah, you'll never get there that way. Even if there was willpower to do it legislating these things is too hard.

What we need is some greedy lawyers and civil liability. Find a campaign that infected enough individuals, fire up a class-action lawsuit against the website on which the ads where actually shown (not the ad provider).

If they win the landscape will change. It would set a precedent for civil liability for infecting your users even when it's not your content directly. That would likely spook the shit out of the market, security becomes a feature.

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rationalist • today at 5:54 PM

It seems like ads already violate the law via whatever that "unauthorized usage" law is that the government likes to throw around.

Too bad no one has the guts to enforce the law that way.

iamflimflam1 • today at 3:58 PM

That would mean some google people going to jail...

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__MatrixMan__ • today at 6:52 PM

All ads are malware.

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dormento • today at 7:27 PM

> And add jail time to fines. Fines means nothing for the rich.

This, pretty much. Money removes consequence form your actions. If every time you screwed up, instead of being fined you had to wear a silly hat, go on TV and apologize, or get some time behind bars, even if it were 1 or 2 days it would be very effective.

RetpolineDrama • today at 5:35 PM

The default setups are also _crazy_.

So you search for company A wanting to buy their product. You check out. Basically every setup I've audited has every tracking product ever for everything.

So you buy X, and the company sends that purchase event with your information to Meta, Google, TikTok, Applovin, Klaviyo, and 10 others.

This idea is hopelessly entrenched in every marketing department, who has leadership's ear: We HAVE to send EVERYTHING to EVERYONE otherwise our ROAS will go DOWN!

Every platform works this way, they're all set up to put giant red banners on your marketer's dashboards

"You could be getting 50% better results if you sent <customer_2nd_grade_report_card>!"

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verdverm • today at 5:04 PM

We should make targeted advertising illegal, full stop. This would remove so many perverse incentives in the system.

unrented7977 • today at 6:48 PM

> How is this acceptable for society goes beyond me.

Easy, when your society glorifies and deifies greed, you can excuse literally any act so long as it makes enough money.

That's it. That's the entire explanation. It's capitalism and greed.

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ActorNightly • today at 6:07 PM

This is not the problem. You visiting any website can lead to your computer running the same code.

The main problem is that the exploits from js to code execution or data exfil are possible in the first place. The issue is that you have JS, which is generally pretty isolated, able to talk to bundled libraries (like libwebrtc), which often contain the exploits and share the same memory space. There needs to be a intermediate layer between JS talking to any such library, like process isolation with IPC for communication.

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monster_truck • today at 5:00 PM

I'm not sure you understand what you're asking for, or if you do you have not followed the results of this to its conclusion

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