Countermeasures?

[shelby3]

And what to do when Facebook puts the “Sponsored” text in the image?

And what to do when Facebook puts “Sponsored” text on other content which the user doesn’t want blocked?

And what to do on Facebook’s mobile app?

[storey]

As we discuss in our paper, one way to deal with "Sponsored" text in an image is to use OCR. It is still at a relatively early stage in terms of performance in Javascript but was successfully used to identify "Adchoices" text.

Putting "Sponsored" text in other content falls into one of two categories:

1. The "Sponsored" text is in the non-ad content but not identical to the way it is presented in the ad content, in which case we just need to run check for the specific version visible in ad content.
2. The "Sponsored" text is visible on non-advertising content in the same way it is visible in advertising content, in which case the "Sponsored" text is no longer performing its legally-required function as a marker of ads. This would be confusing to users, and Facebook would either have to add another disclosure method or risk being in violation of the law.

We did not address mobile platforms within our paper, but presuming the ability for extension to run, the idea would be broadly the same: find some marker (not necessarily the "Sponsored" text) that appears only in ads and then block using that marker.

I hope that helps!

[shelby3]

The "Sponsored" text is visible on non-advertising content in the same way it is visible in advertising content, in which case the "Sponsored" text is no longer performing its legally-required function as a marker of ads.

How do you we as a community prove what is an ad and not an ad? Facebook could issue tokens to users and deduct a small amount from this balance when displaying content from other users on the timeline where ads normally appear. In this way, users are paying to advertise their updates on each other’s timelines.

If blocking ads ever threatens Facebook’s economic existence, then they have an incentive to attempt every trick they must in order to survive.

Perhaps more importantly, Facebook could possibly argue in court that the intent of the law was never intended to enable customers to violate the Terms of Service. By running the ad blocking software, the users are presumably breaking the law and Facebook must take reasonable counter measures if they are unable to obtain protection within the law. Users should have only two options: 1) accept the ads as clearly marked, 2) not use the site.

Using the law against a company by breaking the law doesn’t seem to me to be a winning position.

I naively presume the judge will have to decide that Facebook is not bound by a law that compels Facebook to be an accomplice to breaking the law. It will get thrown back to the regulators and lawmakers to adjust the law so that Facebook can comply without breaking the law by being an accomplice to breaking the law.

We did not address mobile platforms within our paper, but presuming the ability for extension to run, the idea would be broadly the same: find some marker (not necessarily the "Sponsored" text) that appears only in ads and then block using that marker.

Security on the walled gardens of mobile should prevent an extension or app from interfering with the display of another app. I was referring to Facebook’s mobile app, not accessing Facebook in the mobile browser.

Which is why Facebook will probably tolerate (making it a cat & mouse chaos for ad blocker users along the way) the ad blocking on the web for as long as it is a dying phenomenon and their mobile app usage is growing faster. But at some point in the future, if a showdown becomes necessary, the ad blockers might lose. I bet Facebook is already aware of the strategies I thought of.

[storey]

The basis for the broad idea behind this tool working is indeed that Facebook observes current law and does not attempt anything too disruptive to users, such as pausing access every 15 minutes, having them watch a 1 minute video ad, then making them answer questions about the video. So certainly Facebook ignoring the law and making advertisements indistinguishable from regular posts, or the advertising laws themselves being changed, would make it harder (if not impossible) for ad blockers. Of course, there would likely be major public outcry (and bad press for President Zuckerberg) associated with either of these moves, as there would be negative impact on the 80% of users not using an ad blocker as well as the 20% who do, and there is generally a lot of anxiety over Facebook, privacy, and user control.

And although desktop usage is shrinking, it is still in Facebook's best interest to keep desktop ads up and running; even though desktop usage shrunk last year, their move to prevent ABP from blocking their desktop ads brought in something like 10 figures worth of additional revenue.

[shelby3]

Okay thanks for the discussion.

Threadjack follows, but I think perhaps y’all are interested because of this related research (which Byzcoin didn’t resolve, but I have found the solution!)…

^{_{Btw, the reason I took an interest in this is because I have a new decentralized consensus algorithm (proof-of-the-transacting-majority) that is not PoS, PoW, nor any of the prior DAG concepts (i.e. not Byteball, SPECTRE, nor IOTA) I will be publishing hopefully before the end of this year. I’ve written a technical document comparing PoTM to all of those. Rather than trying to use Marxism to fight Facebook, I would much prefer to employ capitalism to defeat the privacy invading advertising model. I am working on a concept that I think is going to revolutionize and decentralize monetization on the Internet.}}

^{_{I need a senior developer to partner with me. I have access to funding for competitive compensation. For example, c.f. my comments about disintermediating MMORPG. Note I'm staunchly anti-marxist, c.f. also my thoughts about the James Damore’s issue. I think the professional marketing should avoid overt political stance. I mention politics because I can’t work with irrational marxists and tree huggers. I’m not going to change my politics to junk science. Please if anyone reading is interested, then contact me on LinkedIn or follow me where I’m active. Project will be open sourced and also an academic’s help on mathematically formalizing my research would also be welcome. The economics are in our favor, meaning don’t you wish you’d created PageRank (Google) in 1999?}}