What’s your problem?
- I shouldn’t see ads at all unless I am shopping. It’s MY phone, not theirs! I’m OK with ads when I’m looking for something but not until.
- It has to be based on my interests and companies who advertise must expect NO FEEDBACK OR TRACKING since that is automatically a security violation.
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How do you envision an advertiser knowing your interest without providing feedback from you for what those interests are or tracking you, or other people that have consumed what you’re looking at and considering becoming a consumer of, to observe what might be of interest to you?
Ads for items that other people bought that also bought the item being looked at com from tracking and correlating sales.
There are 2 ways:
- Context related advertise - you are searching for “chairs” and will get some ads that matches this search. It’s also better to see chair ads right now, when you are looking for it instead of the next week, when you already bought it.
- Special channels where you can get information to products. This can be a YouTube Channel, a news paper that focus for example on tech devises and software or any other topic. And I’m fine with it since I expect to see some form of ad there … that’s normally the reason I visit such pages.
Both forms don’t need any feedback to give interests related advertise. I mean, Purism could sell me a product (L5) while I never heard about company and their pocket PC before.
I don’t wish foreign parties to know my interests at all. I have nothing to show them.
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Like @spazmodacular pointed out, any transfer of information that is not approved and contents known is a no no. But that is just for starters. The quality of information (accuracy) is problematic, as there are other things that can be deduced/inferred from that - information can always be used for other things as well and often it’s used badly (for thing it was not collected for, so the context has changed). Anonymization is hard and combining information from other sources is problematic there. And then there is the whole, quantity of information thing which gets worse over time - that information is you, but mostly you have no control over it anymore (think, you want to change your life from sports jock to techie but the old choices still bring up only football commercials in your searches in stead of Moneyball and python classes).
So, privacy and security covered. Then there is the psychological and lifestyle choice thing as well for me. I consider myself to be fairly analytical (mostly critical) of any interaction and attempt to influence me, so I kinda automatically try to avoid that. If anything, advertisement that I deem targeted gets my proverbial hair standing and I’m less likely to thing favorable of them or their product. On the other hand, if you have a good product, I will find you and your donation page. Although, I’ve noticed that some donation services do not fill my privacy and security needs, so that was that, unfortunately. I did once come across a coffee themed service (as in, “byu me a cup”, figuratively) that I objected due to the fact that I don’t like the stuff - yes, it’s weird.
The idea, that there should be a hose somewhere in the system that leaks any information seems bizarre to me. Sure, there may be some benefits, but they come at a cost that is overlooked or not recognized. One is the efficiency aspect. It costs money (electricity, servers… nature) and time (loading, clicking). I don’t want to spend that. It’s also a burden mentally. All those may seem insignificantly small things but a single transaction is not the thing here - let’s think x1000, x100000 and even x100000000 (global).
But coming back to the original topic… I don’t think advertisements should be the issue. They are annoying and to make them less annoying at some level, I wouldn’t be ready to sacrifice the other points I listed. There are some specific ways that could be used to convey information in a controlled way that probably could be considered but that’s probably what is not wanted here, because it does not allow for monetization or spreading of the information further. But shouldn’t the real question be, how to get money from patrons/customers to developers/companies (of open software)? I’m not against paying for a good product.
This all looks to me like someone is trying to set up a monetizing environment where one is not wanted. It’s like wanting to build a new google to a place that has been specifically build to avoid it.
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Hmm 
engage my exercise with humor and good faith 
Since we never chatted before, I am a foreign party 
You are interested in ad-free GTK apps that fit well in your Librem 5 screen size and system style, plus you are interested, even willing to pay to get rid of tracking and intrusions at your attention.
Using my AI in my data center filled with super computers I predict your interest in this offer:
An ad-free, fully native, copyleft and offline app that enables you to just install, turn on a toggle in the app, and forget about ads and tracking servers forever, in case you are into technical details: it does so by adding lists of all known tracking and ad serving servers to your host files as 0.0.0.0.
Straight from Flathub, yours for just $3 
It blocks stuff in browsers and in all other apps too, makes your device completely clean, unintruded, forever.
You can even tap toggle to turn on auto-updates of these lists so they never get stale and ads poke through it! 
(updates require internet access)
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| Freezewall |
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I don’t. I envision ME AND ONLY ME owning those filters. They don’t even get to know what I looked at. Once again, the phone is mine. The data is mine. PERIOD. If you want to show ads on a high security phone, this is how it has to be. On the bright side, this is an ideal phone for those seeking privacy such as celebrities.
The OP should change his paradigm. Each and every one of us is a dissident who will be tortured and murdered along with our families if either governments or corporations can figure out who we are.
He should start from there. THAT is who he is building a phone for simply because that is how private all phones should be. If you actually got yourself into that kind of trouble, say in Iran or some other dangerous place, your phone should not betray you. It should be something you can rely on when the chips are WAY down.
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Eeeh I think you went a bit too far with this one 
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Also, to said person, I would never handle her a smartphone, not even a linux one
Allow me to put it more simply then. No one will buy a secure phone that isn’t. I like your ideas. I think your phone has potential.
OK so maybe we need to meet each other in the middle. Your customers are going to have a variety of security needs. There might not be enough people who want my phone OR your phone. Why not make this adjustable? Windows fakes it but why not actually DO it?
It seems to me, from this thread, that a nice compromise, considering a “purchase” option is not available, not ideal or not the focus of the experiment in case it still is an experiment, that tracking that does not gathers individual data and just evaluates general response, would be effective and privacy respecting.
Illustrating the idea: Place a “Click here to see more of X” in an app, then seeing how many clicks it get, then testing three month with “Click here to see more of Y” and comparing click results… I cannot figure out who anyone is, but I can tell an ad’s effectiveness.
About relevancy, I get that it would be only acceptable if super relevant to where it shows, like referencing other calculator apps in a calculator app or other books of the same subject in the end of a book.
About intrusiveness… where exactly to place the ad? Cannot be buried behind three screens and a scroll, else nobody will ever see, but also cannot be those infuriating interruptions else one will throw the phone in a wall…
If you gather enough information about a combination of a person’s interests, you can use this to narrow things down to that person’s identity. What I’m saying is make this adjustable so that I have the power to control with fine resolution what my phone does. Maybe a selector switch with 20 points on it ranging from “Average phone” to “Purism Secure”.
For the record, I don’t own a single app that advertises and even if the app has advertisements in it’s free version, I will assume it is unsecured and not buy the app.
We always speak about privacy when we speak about ads. I want to point out something else.
Like JR-Fi already said, ad costs a lot. As very minimum a huge amount of energy - which we shouldn’t waste in times of climate catastrophe. It also costs so much life time for people who create it (increases world working load), it steals time of users and we all have a very limited amount of life time and should use it for something better.
Also think in therms like “what nice pictures could be on busses, if there wouldn’t be ugly advertise”.
Even if you buy something because you saw its ad before, you make economy not stronger because most of us have a budget limit. What you buy because of ads, you don’t buy somewhere else. And this way it’s only a very egoism business where few companies can grow up on costs of all others. And this way it makes economy even weaker, because its easier to attack a single point instead of hundreds of points.
And you know, on top come privacy problems. I think advertise (with data collection or without) will make our life worse - if we feel it or if you don’t see it in any way.
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Ads have their place, but it is definitely not inside apps. The store may display ads. A dedicated ads post may display ads (and such posts should be few and far between). Everywhere else ads are inappropriate.
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I think a “visit our sponsor” link or picture would be OK in an app splash screen.
I should have clearly addressed it to the OP.
I don’t think this thread really warranted any discussion.
I think it does.
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