add malvertising to current web harms #49
Conversation
As part of the goal of transparently admitting significant existing harms of the web, it makes sense to add malvertising adjacent to misinformation to the Introduction, per https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/until-further-notice-think-twice-before-using-google-to-download-software/ for example. Note this is a "modern" (2000s+) problem, and the term itself is clearly defined in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising (which we could add as a reference in the glossary as part of #1 )
| @@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ Ease of gathering personal information spawned business models | |||
| that mined and sold detailed user behaviors, | |||
| without people’s awareness or consent. | |||
| The acceleration of global information sharing | |||
| enabled misinformation to flourish, | |||
| enabled misinformation & malvertising to flourish, | |||
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I am uncomfortable adding this term to a document that is intended to be read by a non-native-English-speaking audience, since I'm not sure this is a well-known and natural term yet. At first, I was just going to suggest "malicious advertising", or at most "malicious advertising ('malvertising')" - but then I realized this doesn't quite fit. This isn't the only problem, or even the next-worse-problem: misinformation and privacy abuse is probably it. I think this is why it's taken me a couple of days to respond - I'm not convinced this belongs here, though I agree malicious advertising belongs in our problem definition. Can we discuss?
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(also: no ampersands, we should use "and")
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I wonder if there's a way to generalize a little, for example by grouping this for instance with phishing as well. Both problems seem to be somewhat similar in that they take advantage of the web's broad reach, as well as its general (but imperfect) trustworthiness to show deceptive and harmful content to vast amounts of unsuspecting viewers, some of whom will fall for the trick and cause themselves harm in the process. For instance: The acceleration of global information sharing
- enabled misinformation to flourish,
+ enabled misinformation and deceptive practices to flourish,
to be exploited for political or commercial gain,
+ fraudulent or criminal abuse at scale,
divide societies,
and to incite hate. |
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Our language is already too long here, imho, to be impactful. I agree malvertising is a harm, but I believe it should come in the "how" section - in fact, I'm not clear how we would directly be addressing malvertising. The most I'd be comfortable with here is adding the suggestion of "deceptive practices" after misinformation, but I still don't think that's an improvement. I'm not necessarily against adding "fraudulent or criminal abuse at scale", but I feel like that would be a separate issue.please do file issues, not just PRs.) |
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Closing this PR as lacking consensus, and shifting discussion to an issue as suggested. (Originally published at: https://tantek.com/2023/116/t1/) |
As part of the goal of transparently admitting significant existing harms of the web, it makes sense to add malvertising adjacent to misinformation to the Introduction, per https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/until-further-notice-think-twice-before-using-google-to-download-software/ for example. Note this is a "modern" (2000s+) problem, and the term itself is clearly defined in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising (which we could add as a reference in the glossary as part of #1 )