Thread · 11 tweets · 30 Mar 2019

This is such a simple and such a good idea for so many reasons that I'm going to need several tweets to tell you how good it is and why we should do it right away. 👇

If you're too lazy to read the article, the idea is to get all ads, worldwide, all the time, into a common public archive. At times the article seems to focus on social media ads but it should really be all.

In case you're wondering: yes, that's a lot. But a tiny fraction of what is lost to ad fraud could pay for @brewster_kahle and the @internetarchive to run it. Publishers would not run ads unless they had an integrity hash matching that public record. It would be illegal.

First, as described in the article, it would help protect democracy. Political ads should certainly be a matter of public record, as they happen, especially if targeted. But defining "political" is tricky so doing all would be simpler.

But the benefits don't stop there. The levels of digital ad fraud out there are nothing short of staggering. Even if you know it's bad the numbers are worse. Adtech is primarily a way for respectable brands to discreetly finance criminal enterprises.

Enforced, cryptographically-signed public traceability over which ads actually ran where would put an end to enough fraud that it might just save local journalism.

It would also provide a public window into which brands care about your privacy and which will go to any length to target and track. Right now they can hide in the general chaos and opacity of the adtech world. A bit of actual transparency would change the industry.

There are some difficulties in implementing this. The scale is, surprisingly, not a problem. Open programmatic bidding providers handles tens of thousands of transactions a second, each in milliseconds. If any industry can do this, it's adtech.

Capturing which audience is targeted is not straightforward, at least not in a privacy-safe way. But a sourcing lineage and truthful description would already go a very long way.

Is this an unfair imposition on brands that advertise? Not really. Ads are supposed to be public. They've been public forever and only became obfuscated with the Web. In French they're called "publicité" - publicity, for obvious reasons.

It's an idea made entirely of locally-sourced, organic, in-season upsides. Let's do it.