Why the FTC obsession? You are wagging it like it is a deity, and this is not the first time.
And it applies only to USA anyway, how should the users be aware of non-US blogs? How can they figure out easily that the blog falls under US jurisdiction, and not UK or Uganda? And what determines it anyway - nationality of the poster, hosting service location, something else?
Isn’t it easier for the users to just be skeptical a bit? The suggestion can be biased for many more reasons than just a link being affiliated, and the link may not cause a bias anyway. If I like something, and don’t have an affiliate account, I can make it a friend’s one, or a friendly blog’s one, and give the profit to a friendly entity and not benefit myself; they may not even be aware of it. Why? To not waste the commission.
I think it takes more than a few posts on BB to count as obsession, but I mention the FTC guidelines because they seem pretty reasonable. They are best practices to prevent consumer confusion. I’m a consumer. I consider myself to be pretty representative. I was confused. I still am about which outbound links are affiliate links because BB doesn’t disclose them individually. I think BB should, and that would be consistent with BB’s general position on openness and transparency when it comes to other people.
I was caught off guard by Mark’s use of an undisclosed affiliate link. How many people who read the post, including non-regulars, do you think knew that folksy post was a paid endorsement? I didn’t. And, until looking up the FTC guidelines I’d only vaguely heard about, int never occurred to me that an affiliate link really does make a recommendation post into a paid endorsement, something for which their are rules. The guidelines are not the law, but following them is a way to avoid breaking the actual law.
Clear and conspicuous disclosure is easy to do - just add the words “Paid Endorsement” to the head of the post, or “(Paid Link)” next to the link. And the only reason not to, IMO, is because you want to hide something to keep the click throughs higher. I’d say “openness good, sneakiness bad”. Shrug.
I was not. I just assume all the links are affiliated when they can be, because with this amount of readership it would be dumb not to.
Naive.
Whoever has the faintest idea about economy of linking and blogging?
The Bureaucrat will make rules for just about EVERYTHING. Screw them. They are more confusing than when they aren’t there, because of their local scope on the global web. So you have a patchwork of complying and non-complying sites, and it’s even messier than before as you don’t have just unlabeled links where you have to be aware but a mess of labeled and unlabeled where the labeled ones lull you into false complacency.
If it is So Important, what about a browser extension that would label such links? Would work on any supported link (and given the relatively few affiliate sites of significant size you can cover most of cases fairly easily), with global scope, without jurisdiction issues.
Or, we could just cut to the chase, no new futzy technology needed, and just label paid links as “(paid link):”. Trivially simple. Consumer confusion resolved. No cost.
Doesn’t seem to work with NoScript on, but that could just mean the ability to automatically display the results of the iP leak on my browser is broken, not the IP leak.
I tested the Chrome method using Chromium a few weeks ago and the retest suggested that the information that the browser had previously been disclosing was now muted completely.
I’ve updated that browser several times since then but retesting tonight still suggests that it’s blocked as expected.
The same applies to the Firefox config change that I made as per the instructions there. This is for 64bit Windows. I haven’t rechecked Linux yet and I don’t have Apple devices to compare it to.
Privacy issues aside (doesn’t everyone already know that we’re all being monitored via ISP’s?), if I were looking for a VPN for security purposes is VPN Unlimited an okay service for Android used solely on the NA continent? To you know, keep hackers out of my email etc…
