I'm in the middle, cameras can be useful in a crowded society as we see with body cams on cops. The can show truth really well, helping innocent people also, but there needs to be serious guard rails and criminal ramifications for misuse by users and companies itself so this is treated very seriously.
I am different in that I would be fine with these BUT only if there is super strict guardrails with real consequences for misuse:
- Super strict rules around information storage and access.
- Ensuring access can only be for an active investigation where there is direct reason to look for a name, face, number plate etc.
- Ensure there is reasonable crime threshold for use so cops don't have the right to track someone because they jay walked or something frivolous to justify use.
- Add a requirement any person looked up then they must be informed within ~6 months with reasons why (or a judge warranted delay every 6 months).
- Legal use only and the data can never be sold for general commercialisation.
- Require human verification of hit if police are going to take action on data so there is clear ownership of incorrect actions.
- Some level of data deletion, after a year type thing.
With something down that route, and naturally more than my quick comment, I feel it could balance benefit vs cost. Without real guardrails and consequences it's openeing a risky path for totalitarianism misuse.
I feel it would be good to bring in (or back) compulsory partnership structures for key professional businesses like GPs, dentists, pharmacies, vets and accountants.
The PE buy-up of these core local businesses isn't great for society generally, service delivery and the existence of a middle class.
The other thing I feel gov should do is force a separation of distributors and point of sale, with rules that allow smaller business to buy at the same pricing as larger.
People seem to forget a key requirement of capitalism is for government to create a level playing field for business. I cant see a better way to do this, and I suspect it would be very beneficial to the bulk of society if gov made some changes down this line.
Effectiveness can vary a bunch but the majority of the time bad results are correlated to the setup quality.
There are definitely industries and situations where ads are difficult to make perform, things like a single business working against aggregator heavy environment or markets where growth is more important than profit, but overall there's reason for hundreds billions spent on online ads, this when most business can track ROI results.
One of the bigger issues I see is even 'experts' hand over control to the ad platforms to optimise their spend. For better results often you need to manipulate the systems to work in your favour, which platforms try to limit but you do what you can.
One change I feel we need is for regulation around controls and data on ad platforms to stop this ever increasing 'give us your money and trust us' type behaviour.
> advertising isn't nearly as effective as advertisers let on
Most marketers should know exactly how effective their ads are by measuring to the end of the funnel. This is standard for most business and while bots are a problem, if you're judging online advertising at the front end of the funnel that's to a large part on them for a bad setup and/or optimisation.
If the marketer is an employee or a consultant, is it in their interest to show that the ad-spend they are controlling is high ROI, or low ROI.
Maybe this is a cynical take, but, if they get to the bottom of things, and show their boss/client that the ad-spend is not returning so much, it seems it would portend bad things for the marketer.
I really don't know, and it seems like a very hard problem.
Maybe this is the time for that Upton Sinclair quote:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,"
That's not how ad performance is measured. Your ROI is based on end conversions. You need to know if your leads are _good_, not just plentiful. A company that doesn't do this at the start will figure it out pretty quickly.
Ideally that would be the case that all ad-spend can be tracked through end conversions, and for many businesses it can be. But for much of the corporate world, you don't know where your end conversions come from. (Think Nike shoes, etc)
It's estimated about that 35% to 45% of all digital ad spend goes to brand awareness, video reach, and other upper-funnel methods where direct conversion tracking isn't possible.
I feel the opposite, the more chrome abuse their dominance the closer they move to a tipping point where enough people become browser interested to return to browser wars. It's likely one of those things where it has to go to far, then change will happen fairly quickly.
The owner would travel around Europe finding amazing cheeses.
If you enjoy cheese and ever get the chance I'd highly recommend visiting. I've never found another store of similar calibre.