| ▲ | Frieren 6 hours ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | the_giraffe 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | dylan604 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Why the website instead of the ad provider? The website didn't server the ad. The ad provider did and should be the responsible part to ensure what it provides is not malicious. Attacking a single website does nothing. If you bankrupt the site, there are millions more sites. If you attack the ad provider, bankrupting it, and shutting it down, millions of sites are now protected. Your logic just doesn't compute | | |
| ▲ | autoexec 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Ideally, you'd sue the website because the website is responsible for everything that shows up on the website they control, and the website would turn around and sue their ad provider because they paid that ad provider for a service that wasn't malware delivery and as a result of that ad provider's crimes (or negligence) the website now has legal costs and harm to their reputation. It shouldn't fall on the person just going to a website to track down the vendors and third parties the website contracts with. | | |
| ▲ | axus 16 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The lawyers should name everyone involved with unauthorized access to your computer as defendants , the obviously innocent parties can be dropped before it gets to trial. |
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| ▲ | thfuran 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't understand how you could arrive at this perspective. If you're doing business with ExampleCorp and one of their subcontractors malfeasantly mishandles things, would you say that ExampleCorp had nothing to do with it? If not, why does that change when the interaction happens via example.com? | |
| ▲ | ndriscoll 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Seems to me the website is negligent and the ad provider is an accessory (e.g. helping to select targets for fraud), at the very least. | | |
| ▲ | dylan604 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The website is signing up for a service. You could say that a website continuing to use the service of a known malicious ad provider is problematic, but are there any ad providers known to have not served malicious something? I think you're also confusing multiple malicious activities occurring on the web. Data harvesting is another thing that needs to be banned into oblivion. Rarely are sites doing that natively. It is being done as a second part of service the site wants. A site/app wants naturally wants to seen analytics about how visitors are using the site/app, so they include some third party tool that provides that data to an extent at the cost of collecting/keeping that data for their own use. Want to make it easy for users to interact with social platforms regarding your site/app, they now get to collect/keep that data. That's a different thing than being served malicious ads. | | |
| ▲ | ndriscoll 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The website is partnering with another business, often as their primary or only means of revenue. That is their entire business. This is not you signing up for a service like Netflix. It is a B2B partnership, and in fact, if you look at the direction money is flowing, they're the ones selling the service (surreptitious access to users' computers). It is their responsibility to choose their business partners and what ads they'd be running. If they're not doing any examination of what they're inflicting on their users, and just letting whomever's buying send whatever payloads they'd like, then yeah that's negligent at best. "I'll pay you if you run this software on your visitors' computers without asking questions" is not a "service" you sign up for. People don't pay you as a service. That's about as shady a deal as it sounds. | |
| ▲ | alistairSH an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is a general contractor who subs out the electrical also blame free when the house burns down? |
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| ▲ | ashf023 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | IMO the ad provider is fully at fault for allowing script tags and other potentially vulnerable features in ads. Why can't the ads just be static? I mean I get why they want it, but it should not be allowed, and IMO that's where the ad provider is almost fully at fault | | |
| ▲ | ndriscoll 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Websites can set CSP to not allow ad providers to serve scripts. They're the ones adding those scripts to their page, and are equally at fault. Though static ads can still point people into a fraud pipeline, and websites running those ads should be held accountable for that too. It's fully possible to individually negotiate with someone that wants to publish an ad on your site. If you choose to take money from literally anyone who wants to do so, then why would you not be accountable when they inevitably use you to target users for fraud? You chose to take their money and not even look at what you were publishing. |
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| ▲ | mrguyorama an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't think we should try to split accountability at all here. The ad platform that allows malware to be served to anyone is at fault. As is the individual website that has selected to allow a 3rd party's code to be delivered to your machine without controlling that risk, often for very silly reasons. | |
| ▲ | DANmode 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The website didn't server the ad. Sure it did. The content coming from elsewhere doesn’t change their decision to include it when the user loads their page. It just makes the decision wildly important. This is no different than the “I’m too big, can’t tell what my subsidiaries are doing!” wink Pay attention, do due diligence to do things correctly, or don’t do them. |
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| ▲ | autoexec 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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). Laughable. As countless class action lawsuits have demonstrated the victims are never made whole (https://instituteforlegalreform.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/...), the criminals get a slap on the wrist fine that is a tiny fraction of the profit they made doing crime, and the lawyers walk away with pockets filled with cash while nothing changes. (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10611-024-10170-w) Fine's and class action lawsuits don't work. Throw some CEOs in jail and things will actually change. | |
| ▲ | popalchemist 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | rationalist 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | iamflimflam1 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That would mean some google people going to jail... |
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| ▲ | yummypaint 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If such a thing were passed, it can't apply retroactively. But yes, google people would go to jail when they inevitably flout it as they are accustomed to doing. We should make this happen. People in the US have a unique window of opportunity starting TODAY (Oct 2026) in many places with early voting. I implore everyone who is able to vote in the midterms to do so. | | |
| ▲ | warkdarrior 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Which candidates support the "put ads providers in jail" platform? | | |
| ▲ | yummypaint 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You will have to look at the candidates in your area and do your due diligence. Its unlikely a given candidate will be perfect, but there is generally tremendous differences between them as far as overall posture on privacy and surveillance. | | |
| ▲ | autoexec 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not tremendous differences, mass surveillance of the people is one of the few issues that are truly bipartisan, but there's candidates better than others. |
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| ▲ | autoexec 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | None of them, but if one did I bet they'd get support from voters and less bribes from the tech industry. As long as politicians value the bribes more than the support the people will never get representation. We should probably pass laws that stop companies from stuffing the pockets of politicians with money, but what politician is going to support a law that takes their bribe money away? |
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| ▲ | tikimcfee 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Stop, stop, I can only dream so hard. |
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| ▲ | __MatrixMan__ 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| All ads are malware. |
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| ▲ | autoexec 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | And all spyware is "mercenary" spyware, at least in the sense that the creators only care about money and are willing to hurt others to get it. |
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| ▲ | dormento 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | RetpolineDrama 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | cm2012 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Its basically how all the ad platforms fundamentally work: they use conversion events to train their ad algorithms. |
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| ▲ | verdverm 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| We should make targeted advertising illegal, full stop. This would remove so many perverse incentives in the system. |
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| ▲ | unrented7977 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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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| ▲ | vaylian 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > That's the entire explanation. Not quite. Most people in society are completely oblivious to this happening. And their lack of awareness is why the exploiters don't face more public opposition. | | |
| ▲ | baal80spam 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Vast majority of people will gladly sell their privacy. | |
| ▲ | autoexec 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's true, even what they know is happening is so abstract and hidden that they don't really understand it. |
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| ▲ | ActorNightly 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | ashf023 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure, but there's a big difference between going to a sketchy, malicious site vs a reputable site that does serve ads and now being at the mercy of any arbitrary crap in the ad you didn't choose to see |
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| ▲ | monster_truck 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | This comment is meaningless without stating the unintended consequence you believe you’ve identified. |
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