(The latter still account for the ads I see most of the time, unfortunately.)
What is being targeted is surveillance-based advertising methods. These involve the collection, brokering and combining of user data. This data is purchasable by anyone - including US government agencies which have been using it as way of obtaining information without oversight(1). There is an expectation that other governments and bad actors are also obtaining this data for advantage.
This type of advertising is also responsible for poorly targeted ads that follow you around the internet. Perhaps you mentioned something in passing on an instagram chat, or you liked a photo from a friend on holiday.
Consumers generally underestimate their digital footprint and the risks associated with having this information available. It's more information than what we'd trust our own governments possessing in a single, or any, database, yet we let others take it without any oversight whatsoever. Additionally the information gathered about them can be wrong or invade their privacy in ways they aren't expecting (E.g. infer their sexuality or private desires) (2). Furthermore individual users can be targeted which beyond being able to prank someone(3), is also ripe for exploitation. (4)
(1) https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23844477-odni-declas... or the easier to read: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-government-buys-dat...
(2) https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/16/facebook-faces-fresh-criti...
(3) https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/roommate-makes-...
(4) https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/15/researchers-show-facebooks...
This is the value Facebook delivers (targeting and measuring), and it's about to go up in smoke.
Nobody will pay the same price for a billboard.
Or, the facebook pixel embedded in a page you (or your employer) put your tax info into.
Some examples of what I'm fine with: if I visit a hardware store's online website and am then retargeted by their ads, or I visit a hardware magazine's website and am then targeted by hardware ads.
How so? Ad tech wants to eat as much of your data as possible. They’ll use everything they have to make inferences about things you want, things you believe, things you might believe later. I think you could go as far as saying they want ALL your data and then some..
So they even build profiles of people who evade tracking techniques. I don't understand how they can think it won't tarnish their image or backfire.
It's funny because on one hand, we don't want government surveillance, but yet people criticize the GDPR or the EU or defend the advertising industry, which is probably a very efficient proxy for government surveillance.
The issue is how is that data put to use - how that affects your life and whether those decisions were made with flawed algorithms or indeed flawed data.
And quite possibly, the whole process being so opaque that nobody understands how it works, or why certain things happened.
And, in my view, a lot of it comes back to a lot of these internet businesses scale only if they leave an element of fairness behind.
For example, if you are randomly banned from youtube by an algorithm, it's not economically worth it for Google to fund a process of proper appeal - because proper appeal process needs people.
You then have a choice - dispense with fairness and justice or dispense with a business model that doesn't scale in a fair and just way.
From the press release (https://edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2023/edpb-urgent-binding-de...):
"On 27 October, the EDPB adopted an urgent binding decision ... to impose a ban on the processing of personal data for behavioural advertising on the legal bases of contract and legitimate interest ..."
Also, we are pretty broke now so get ready for looking for gold even underground...
In the meantime... these people do not do more important homework...
And the EU is in fact mainly a trade body, setting standards and categorisations, so there are likely some rules on toilets already in EU acquis on health and safety at the workplace, etc. I doubt they oblige a specific position though, you can rest in peace on the piece
Or for example they prepare a law to be able to get journalist sources (which is even illegal in my constitution!).
I do not think it is a fair position. They are increasingly telling us: you do all this and we... we have superpowers we do not need to do it.
I do not agree with that vision.
The incentives are perverted and the outcome imbalanced. The entire ad tech universe is built on false metrics, lies and fraud. Burn it all down.
I'd ask that you remember: the rest of the world isn't quite on the side of the advertiser, and nor should the relationship be abusive and one-sided.
What technical superiority? And, for what it is, i bet it's for sale.
They are more or less the only player that can do pinpoint personalized advertising with the data they already have.
So this can't possibly be about advertising on facebook dot com, to registered facebook users? It has to be about something more nefarious, such as facebook acting like an ad broker themselves and using their vast data to track people and show ads on other non-facebook sites?
I don't mind ads that are relevant, according to the context.
I mind ads that are generated based on a profile one or more companies have built about me.
Yeah, let's see ads about RC models in a forum about RC models, or ads about Bluetooth modules in a website about microelectronics. That's fine. They will still make money, and the ads would still be somehow targeted.
I don't need to see ads relevant to my Google searches about grieving, when I browse the news.
With kindness, I guess pay for the news then? In a more general sense, if one doesn't want to see so many ads then one should spend less time online, or try to visit sources that don't depend on ads. But for some reason people don't want to pay for the things they value.
Interesting choice, either give up and let them monetize my online persona, or be exposed to crappy ads.
I'll take the crappy, non targeted ads, then.
> In a more general sense, if one doesn't want to see so many ads then one should spend less time online, or try to visit sources that don't depend on ads.
That is definitely not what I said.
The issue isn't ads themselves, but targeted ads. Targeted ads rely on intensive and continuous user profiling, even outside of the sites showing those ads, i.e. there is a third party spying on every single move you make online, then selling that to others.
> But for some reason people don't want to pay for the things they value.
That's honestly funny, because I value my privacy, yet the suggestion is that I'm not entitled to it if I use online services supported by ads?
We have been seeing ads on TV, newspapers, magazines, since forever, but I have never got any targeted ads on those. That business seemed to work fine without having to profile every single consumer.
What's the reasoning behind telling someone to "spend less time online" if they don't want to contribute for free to a perverse multibillion industry, when the alternative has been there for centuries?
If the company has contact info for the user, it should send the user a notification via that contact info. Even if that means having to send a physical letter.
The company should also keep a public record of transfers, something like a page on their website listing when they've transferred data, why it was transferred, and what kind of data was transferred. That would cover anonymous users.
There would need to be something in there covering data transfer as part of what the company's business is. Maybe a list of businesses that access your data as part of the provided services and are covered by the company's terms?
Even better would be to force companies that make money selling your data to share the profits with every person they just sold data on.
I guess company wouldn't care, but I'd like to know if statistics that I'm part of is now also owned by someone else. I don't know why but it'll be nice to know.
2 1/2 years, ago they opened up a loop hole for newspapers that they are explicitly allowed to do it (Either you pay, or when you use their free version, you must accept to be tracked for behavioural advertising).
Are they any better than facebook?
Some example news sites: www.zeit.de, www.spiegel.de
More information on this:
https://www.heise.de/news/E-Privacy-Verordnung-EU-Rat-fuer-V... (german)
And https://www.consilium.europa.eu/de/press/press-releases/2021...
Look here (referenced pdf in the above url): https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-6087-2021-I...
(21aa) In some cases the use of processing and storage capabilities of terminal equipment and the collection of information from end-users' terminal equipment may also be necessary for providing a service, requested by the enduser, such as services provided in accordance with the freedom of expression and information including for journalistic purposes, e.g. online newspaper or other press publications as defined in Article 2 (4) of Directive (EU) 2019/790, that is wholly or mainly financed by advertising provided that, in addition, the end-user has been provided with clear, precise and user-friendly information about the purposes of cookies or similar techniques and has accepted such use.
Unfortunetly because European cases usually do not involve punitive damages, it costs nothing to these actors to try their hand and keep up for as long as thier turn comes becasue there are a lot and they don't risk practically nothing for being found illegal initially. Only after being found illegal they risk fines for repeat violations.
It applies to everyone. It's just a consequence of GDPR. The regulator has found, after complaints, that Facebook's handling of personal data was in breach. Anyone who does the same thing as Facebook will be in breach. It's just that so far, either nobody is doing the exact same thing, or nobody has raised a complaint yet, or they're still in the regulator's backlog.
Also, you're hearing about it because it's Facebook. If it were a small unknown company you wouldn't have heard about it.
The writing has been on the wall since 2018, when the GDPR came into effect. What's new is its enforcement. The DPAs are slow, but the law is clear, and eventually everyone will be forced to comply, if they want to do business within the EU.
It doesn't.
> The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has instructed the Irish data regulator, where Meta’s European headquarters are located, to impose a permanent ban on Meta’s use of behavioural advertising within two weeks. The EDPB states that its decision is an urgent binding instruction to enforce the ban across the EEA.
Is the same happening at the newspapers?
those that brought us the brexit and a couple more political turmoils.
I couldn't care less about personalized add for toothpaste.
but Facebook doesn't ban microtargeting political disinformation. classical newspapers do.
Facebook etc, while politically biased, keep profit as a target above their views, for the most part.
Brexit? I remember most news and ads were selling "no" yet "yes" happened. I recall the "no" voters either were of the category that wanted to vote against the political party in power, or of the type of voters having had enough to be told how to think.
As for the further turmoils you might be correct though. The lockdown ads campaign didn't go without some opposition but got sold to a large enough audience.
You can look at the cases that noyb is fighting in court and you can see that plenty of them go against newspapers.
But obviously the GDPR applies to all newspapers, and if any particular newspaper is doing behavioural advertising using the same illegal methods as Meta they'll probably get fined much quicker. But hopefully most are by now not even using illegal methods but properly asking for consent.
I remember early, search keywords-based textual Google ads still being somewhat interesting, and if not necessarily useful at least comprehensibly relevant.
Whatever slips past my adblocker these days is absolute junk. Internet doesn't effectively exist without an adblocker.
It seems we reached a high-peak in the 90's on so many things.
I am very very happy to look at all the ads and even personalised ones, as long as those are not overly obnoxious and mostly (obviously-)scammy.
If I have to scroll through endless ocean of ad with my actual priority(friends and family posting something) drowned out at the very bottom of my feed, I will naturally stop clicking any ads.
All we need is a balance, overwhelming and making my feeds/timeline flooded w/ random ads is not really helpful and as a sane person, I am very happy to text my freinds and family and create whatsapp group to keep in contact.
It is still perfectly possible to place ads in meaningful contexts.
I would add that personalised ads != less random ads.
Mapping the context to the ads is likely far superior in convertion.
But once again, fb is in the business of high margin and already figured out personalised ads based on profiling is the most profitable strategy.
This sounds like the best solution since it will not bother the rest of us who don't want to be tracked.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/fr/policies/discover-e... https://nce.mpi-sp.org/index.php/s/cG88cptFdaDNyRr
Personalised ads are beside the point. The issue is how they are personalised, namely by building a rich profile of user behaviour based on non-consensual tracking.
It isnt even clear that there's a meaningful sense of 'consent' to what modern ad companies (ie., google, facebook, amazon, increasingly microsoft, etc.) do. There is both an individual harm, but a massive collective arm, to the infrastructure of behavioural tracking that has been built by these companies.
This infrastructure should be, largely, illegal. The technology to end any form of privacy is presently deployed only for ads, but should not be deployed anywhere at all.
What is the individual and/or collective harm done here?
We should do the same with personal data. You can share it however you want but not sell them.
There are good reason why selling data can be worse socially: your data could also be about me (if it's about relationship), whereas organs cannot.
Exactly. There are places where the data is being collected without direct adverts or other visible signs being present (certain web analytics services for instance). This activity tracking gets married up to the other personal information the various companies hold about you.
> Personalised ads are beside the point.
I think they are an important part of the point, just not the whole point.
Being able to sell adverts for a bit more usually is what makes it worth a company's hassle implementing and maintaining their stalking infrastructure. Without that the online commercial stalkiness would die down an awful lot.
On the face of it some might think that this ruling achieves this, but it would not have that effect unless:
* other significant territories imposed the same sort of restrictions
* those restrictions were routines enforced
* and the enforcement (when transgressions are found) was sufficiently inconvenient to the companies
True, but even if EU bans just the personalized ads, chances are that this personal data hoarding bubble is going to finally burst and die, because the belief in "big data = big money" was powered almost solely by the ad industry. I believe ads (and outright abuse, but that's not exactly a business model) were the only use case/reason for why this data is collected and why it's considered valuable.
We'll see attempts to rapidly change the tune (possibly something about "AI", given it's the buzzword of the day) from the companies whose valuation is strongly tied to this myth/meme, as they'll desperately try to keep their $$$-faces. But, I believe, chances are, if using personal data for showing ads will be illegal in a major market like EU, many companies will stop collecting because the data will become worthless, a liability rather than an asset.
And then I have this silly dream that one day a transhuman age will come closer and I will have machinery to aid myself, personally, that would collect and store my interactions with the world, strictly locally, strictly for my own personal use - an extension of my own mental or physical capabilities (I need glasses to see, I suspect I'll need a hearing aid someday, and I have some concerns about my memory and attention spans - so, you know, From the Moment I Understood the Weakness of My Flesh.meme.txt). So every time I hear things like "we're outlawing facial recognition/conversation recording/data collection" without a "(*) for businesses" I'm kind of disappointed. Of course, my hope is that those laws will be reviewed accordingly as we'll get closer.
Thus, I believe, a ban on targeted ads alone could be a possibly better outcome than a blanket ban on data collection. But, uh, whatever works, I guess...
It is safe to assume that all intelligence agencies have taps on ad networks allowing to legally (well, not in EU anymore) collect mass of information on the cheap, which they can then de-anonymize at will by cross-referencing with other data sources.
Pretty sure it is written in the ToS. Maybe don't agree with that legal agreement and continue to sign up for the service in the first place?
If I wanted to, right now, I could build a deep profile for every single user of HN, simply by downloading the public pages, and cross-referencing comments, upvoted/favorited stories, etc with usernames. I could then create a weighted index that tells me how likely a user is to be a libertarian, gay, wealthy, etc. Then I could e-mail those users and offer to sell them privacy-focused freedom-loving lgbtq+ products.
I can pretty much do whatever I want with this database, partly because you don't even know I have it, but also because it's all public information you've posted to the web voluntarily. Maybe the ToS will say I can't, but they have to catch me/stop me. I could just hire some Russians to do it for me and collect the data later.
I'm not saying this should be allowed, but it's probably going to be impossible to stop, and the implications (esp. for political concerns) are enough of a motivator that just making it illegal probably won't end the practice. We have to consider alternatives so that we aren't stuck in some information arms race that makes the problem worse.
For example, we could say that private data should remain private, and public should remain public. Data which everyone has a reasonable expectation to be private - like the private photos you upload to Google Drive - should never become public, and thus should never be aggregated into some product (trained for an AI, etc), used to sell you something, etc. But data which does have a reasonable expectation to become public - like comments on a public forum, likes on public posts on Facebook - should remain public, and thus be used the way any other public thing can be. We already have legal limitations on uses of some public things, but we can expand that if need be.
Then we can legally define what constitutes private and public, and construct tech so that it's very clear to people what's public and what's private, and then they can decide what they will post where, or what sites they will/won't use in what ways, etc. It's already clear what's private and public out in the real world. We just need to make that same distinction clearer for other cases, like when and how companies collect data and what they can use it for. It's going to require case-by-case analysis, but we can totally get there without having to ban everything or allow everything.
However, they blew it, and now we have this law that takes away their incentive to infringe our privacy. The needle is now on the other side, but not as far as it was before. I'm happy.
I am not saying this should not be illegal. Probably it should. What I am saying is that noone should be able to track but the state can do it. Noone should be able to.
Will the EU fix Windows by banning the insane amount of tracking they do? Would be nice. The OS is literally at its peak in terms of being great, but all the telemetry, forced accounts and Microsoft ads keep the meme alive that Windows is awful, when in fact, if you remove those three things I mentioned, you have an insanely reliable and polished OS, all my issues with Windows have always come from customizing the core OS, it just doesn't quite behave the same, I would eventually format due to issues, the moment I stopped tampering and tinkering, I've stopped reformatting Windows.
Much like Apple and Linux, windows even though it always had an API for it, supports Virtual Desktops finally.
Windows Defender while not being great, at least means you don't need to start off by installing a third party Antivirus. DirectX 12 also comes to mind.
Not much apparently. The funniest: icons like chrome, round corners like mac.
edit: On the up side, Bing is actually much better than Google now.
Dark theme
HDR support
Auto HDR for many older games
Native system wide support for surround sound in headphones with hrtf
Win+Shift+S screenshot tool
It took a long time to get here, but the settings app is now better than the old Control Panel imo
If you're a gamer then HDR/surround/raytracing can potentially be huge upgrades if your hardware supports it.
Nowadays it's impossible to know exactly where some specific setting is anymore, and the settings app has been so dumbed down that most settings don't even exist anymore. Just the other day i tried to fix my dads touchpad and went on a wild goose chase through every possible setting location, of which there were too many, and kept coming back to the "settings app" in which the touchpad "settings" had only a single checkbox, fully unrelated to anything actually useful at all. The tab was there but there was no fucking settings in it. Nothing useful at all. In the end i tried driver updates, i tried rollbacks, i tried every setting app, i tried everything and the touchpad still doesnt work. You can click, you can't move, you can't scroll. The man didn't install anything, windows released an update and the single most important tool for interacting with the computer, one that is built into the hardware, was broken with no recourse to fix it, I'm simply not allowed access to the settings i require to maintain my own control over a functioning device.
That is the new settings app to me. Maybe if you stay within the ever shrinking bounds of control that Microsoft so graciously barely allows us to utilize, maybe then the buttons are rounder and the categories are better laid out. But if you need to fix anything that exists even slightly outside that toddler playground Microsoft is only ever making that more and more difficult under the guise of UI "improvements".
Night mode, dark theme, and a decent UI are things shoestring Linux distros can pull off.
Windows has had themes/color schemes since 3.0 - yes the early 90s
Ray tracing has nothing to do with Windows, either
Drawing the line between the OS and "not the OS" is really difficult. Direct X is included with the OS and DX12 is not compatible with Windows 7 so basically DirectX 12 is something you did not have in Win7 and do Have in Win10.
Yes, and no. The colour theming that has existed since at leats Windows v2 could be used to implement dark more quite easily if only your apps listened to the relevant settings (some did, many did at least partially due to the framework they were written in doing so, some didn't at all – partially is the worse option as it caused contrast problems between compliant and non-compliant parts).
> It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode.
The old theming was through system settings too. There were GDI API calls to read the values so you could make your app mirror the user's choices. Not as convenient as a single “dark mode” switch but no different other than that affordance. Many toolkits did this for you.
Dark mode being use as a short hand - pretty much all "standard" controls used to have colors and font size defined. So if an application wants to draw text - it'd use the text area background and color, likewise for buttons. Being replaced with a single boolean configuration option is just a lazy downgrade. Also I don't quite see it as an OS function - in the end it just reads the registry.
Vulcan was supported on Win7 (along w/ the raytracing) and oddly enough Win7 had a port of DX12 by Microsoft [0]. It was quite an arbitrary decision to prevent Win7 & 8 to run DX12. I suppose one of the issues is that GPU drivers (esp. AMD) do not support Win7 (or 8)
[0]: https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/directx-12-windows-7/
Even if dx12 is an arbitrary restriction to only work in w10 that’s beside the point. It’s a feature of win10 no matter how arbitrary.
There was no need for apps to ask that. Previously, apps would just say "draw this dialog box in the user's preferred color scheme" and it would work fine. The only reason this dark mode hint is necessary is because too many apps started ignoring the Windows system color scheme and doing their own thing.
The difference to windows users is that you change a switch and apps actually change whereas before you couldn’t do that.
It wasn’t Microsoft’s fault before and it isn’t they who updated the apps now so they don’t get credit for that. But the fact remains you basically couldn’t use dark mode before and now you can.
But that's about it. For regular users, Windows 7 has been the best, and after noticing how my parents struggled with the updates, nothing can convince me to think otherwise.
All the really nice bits of Windows 11 are lost to time because you don't notice them, but they all add up. The fact we're mainly worried about telemetry over anything else says it all.
(Sorry for the snark but I couldn't resist)
I don't have anything against personalized ads based on information that I willingly share. If I am following a bunch of groups of kite-surfers, I actually welcome ads for kite-surfing gears and services while browsing those groups.
If I explicitly decide to share my address on my social network profile AND, explicitly authorize the use of this information for targeting, I don't mind, and actually welcome seeing ads for carpet cleaning services from my city, instead of ads from this kind of business located thousands of miles away, WHILE I am using said social network.
But I don't want to browse the local newspaper, and having this targeting information being used outside the explicitly bounded context of that social network.
And above all, I don't want surveillance-style stuff things forced upon me to infer information about me that I never consented to share in the first place.
It is ok to me if I say, I have an interest on X, you (and only you) can show me ads based on that, and I also consent on you (and only you) using my <insert whatever personal info you may think ok> to target ads.
When I visit facebooks https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity I see that lots of places have shared my information with facebook..
I guess in my ideal world, I would hope that these businesses could pivot back to a dumber, more privacy-friendly mode of advertising? But I wonder if the corpos are willing to give that up, or if they'll just continue trying to squirrel around this and any other laws to the point of absurdity?
Everyone will get a prompt that asks them whether they want to consent to personalized advertising or pay $20/month to use the service. Everyone picks the first because nobody outside of HN bubbles and bored EU regulators cares about personalized ads (or actually prefers them).
Then the EU will start claiming that everyone should be able to use Facebook without advertising and without paying for it i.e. for free or for vastly reduced revenue potential. Eventually Zuck will get tired of the EU because visitors from there won't be worth much, and start to degrade or remove service for them entirely. New products and features won't launch there at all, see Threads for a preview of non-coming attractions. HN Euro-posters will assure each other that this is in fact a great victory.
WhatsApp before it was acquired also demanded an optional donation of 1 USD/year from each person.
That is what people will be willing to pay, and what social media should subsist on.
[1] Annual Report 2022 https://www.patreon.com/file?h=90246790&i=16020862
/s if not clear.
This massive wealth of intelligence, drive, ambition, all spent on something as useless as banner ads everyone explicitly tries to ignore or block anyway. It's insane. But money is the primordial force that allows the planet to keep rotating so inevitably someone will dedicate their intelligence to whatever cheap money they come up with. That's fine, that's good. I just imagine all that money could've cured some diseases, built better telescopes, put more powerful technology in the hands of the disadvantaged, maybe even, i dunno, fed some hungry people or something. What the fuck is the metaverse gonna do for anyone besides exploit them for maximum profit driven by distraction
It really is no wonder all of this shit has so badly corroded our social structures, given the sheer weight of the resources we've piled into it. If only we could get this kind of effort out for problems that actually need solving, instead of just endlessly punching dopamine out of unsuspecting consumer's brains.
Nothing. More dark patterns to trick people into accepting tracking. Look to how the industry reacted yo GDPR.
> personalized ads that creep on you were essentially made a load-bearing column of the Internet before anyone knew how creepy they were going to get with it
You can have personalized ads without invasive and pervasive tracking
Anecdotal observation from big-ish corps in EU: everyone started trying to look very mindful about what data they ask for in the first place, what gets stored where, what is shared with whom. In some cases, this led to actually being more mindful about those. At least in e-commerce, GDPR worked in the privacy-minded consumer's benefit to some extent, and not quite against anyone.
- Upton SinclairCould there be an issue in the future? Possibly. Are privacy laws like GDPR worth the economic and other harms? Probably not. The amount of wasted programmer hours alone has far overcome the negative impacts of big tech ad tracking.
Neither real life or the internet are anonymous. We live with other people. But Google and Meta in particular have an amazing 15 year track record of basically never leaking user data. Various national governments have been much worse in this regard.
Government risk from Meta and Google is meaningless in any case. The ISPs have all the same data and regularly share it with the government in response to warrants.
Also all the data is out there on me and you in a million databases. Just like in the 80s with the yellow books. Did you know you can buy a list of most Americans with an estimated credit score and income and other details? This is 50 year old tech.
On the other side, digital ads have a huge impact on the economy (Google and FB being some of the biggest companies in the world) because they provide a service of matching businesses with consumers interested in products. Targeted ads means they are much more enjoyable and effective at matching consumers to products they like. I've worked with dozens of small businesses that used targeted ads to survive and thrive.
It's not a good trade-off for the EU to ban targeted ads, in short.
I disagree with almost every sentence in your post, but want to point out this one as it is specifically very surprising to me. There are two ways Meta is a giant leak of user data. First, it just sells user data to third parties, and it was extremely lenient with this in the past. Maybe that was the worlds biggest leak of user data, which we now know was likely instrumental in winning certain elections. Talking about harm...
Second, there actually were cases where hackers got their hands on facebook data. My personal phone number is probably leaked by this. I made the mistake of using my phone number for 2fa. iirc sensitive data from about 500 million user accounts were leaked.
I'm not sure about google but Meta is a leaking like a sieve.
I very much doubt that this is true, and if it is, it needs a source.
I'd amend this to note ISPs also gladly share this information with... Advertisers.
Do people on HN use Credit Cards? Your transaction info is also sold to advertisers.
One of the first results of a Google search: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3555102
> Also all the data is out there and me and my family in a million databases. Just like in the 80s with the yellow books. Did you know you can buy a list of almost every American with an estimate credit score and income and other details? This is 50 year old tech.
While one could argue that this is "old tech", the main issue is reach.
Back in the 80s, there could be a way to contact someone and make an educated guess, using their credit score, as of what kind of products they may be inclined to buy.
Nowadays, these databases may include data about diet, job situation, alcohol intake, or family issues, because those educated guesses are made upon information about your searches, your Facebook group memberships, your postings, etc.
You also seem to be making the argument that, since either this data is already out in the wild, or other companies may have access to it, why target big tech specifically?
And the counter to this couldn't be simpler: two wrongs don't make anything right.
Per your specific harm:
Thank you for actually responding with a real potential harm, the first time ever in 10 years of posting similar comments on HN!
Weight loss ads (along with teeth whitening ads) are much more common with non-targeted ads, by the way. When ad targeting is bad, the only profitable ads are low hanging fruit that applies to as many people as possible.
That said, I would totally support regulating weight loss ads to only things that are proven to work though. I think other categories like gambling are also under regulated.
I see where you come from, but that data shouldn't be for sale.
Regardless of the fact that it may be valuable for some third party, if I have not given my consent, that should be enough to instantly ban any storage and processing of it. This should be the default. At the very least, we, the people being profiled, should be part of the conversation.
But we failed at forecasting what profiling and targeted ads would become, didn't properly regulated them, and now it seems that every marketer expects to get their hands on everyone's data, just because it is valuable for their businesses.
While there may not be current and widespread harm, although that is debatable, the default shouldn't be letting companies syphon data and build profiles about people without consent.
And quite honestly, I don't care if a business burns to the ground as the consequence of unethical behaviour. It should happen more often.
And beyond that, of course there is potential for harm if data is collected for targeted ads. It might be increasing the price of your flight because you've been looking at the target country several times in the past weeks. It might be canceling your insurance because you googled for headache medicine. Or it might be marking you as a person to be deported into a "reeducation camp" because of your heritage or religion thanks to data that was involuntarily collection about you (originally without evil intent, even). Most of these already happened in reality.
Your comment is rather light on information that might support your points.
It's the tracking thing that has to go.
Facebook has my age and home town, knows what many of my interests are via groups I'm in. I don't think it's wrong to say I have given them that information voluntarily and so long as they keep it on their servers only, I'm ok with them showing me a mountainbike ad because I'm a 40yo male who is in a mountainbiking facebook group.
I don't consent to them showing me an ad for a specific mountainbike that I placed in the shoppingbasket at cheap-mountanibikes dot com last week, and then abandoned there, and the reason they know is because the store has some kind of arrangement of any kind with facebook. That's the kind of thing I don't think I should even be allowed to consent to.
Why not?
I’m asking why you think that it’s a net negative that you’re able to consent to that.
Instagram in comparison sends me a ton of personalized ads and I actually really like them. I have a modified .ipa of instagram (Rocket for iOS) and while it turns ads off I actually have that setting changed so I still see ads. Sometimes I find things I really like.
> We use the combination of your Facebook and LinkedIn data plus your About Me and Photos to ensure we are building a balanced, high-achieving and diverse community. Our screening algorithm looks at indicators like social influence, education, profession, industry, friends in The League, number of referrals you've made to your network, as well as supplemental data like what groups you belong to, events you've attended, interests you list, and preferences.
Absolutely terrifying.
I'm fairly certain that if a person is highly active on social media such a system could produce a better diagnosis than most people get when they see a professional, if only because the quality of psychodiagnosis is poor since it is often seen as a scam to satisfy insurance bureaucrats, common conditions are never diagnosed, there are fads for certain rare conditions, etc.
Imagine how your tech could be used for evil and how profitable that would be. It could be a 2nd or even 3rd order effect, even.
[1] Film focuses on a college team building something they think is cool but really is a key part of a weapons system.
What I don't understand though is why do I also need to share my browsing history with faceless american corps that sell my data for profit. This sounds unnecessary for the main point (psychodiagnostic software).
What makes you so sure? (This is a serious question, not rhetorical.)
Myself I have a condition which 5-10% of people have. As a child, I had two very high quality psych evaluations for the time where people observed all the signs and symptoms (particularly the first one) but failed to draw a line between them.
Since then I saw therapists maybe 6 times in 30 years (sometimes the same one) and it was always “adjustment disorder with …” and there was some truth in that in that in each case I had some very ordinary kind of stress which was exacerbating my condition but in reality there was always a chronic aspect to that.
I’ve known numerous people who have severe mental illness (way worse than the quirk that got me kicked out of elementary school) and contact with the psychiatric system and never got a conclusive diagnosis. The first line for a lot of people is to see a primary care practitioner and get diagnosed with either “anxiety” or “depression” and prescribe the same medication in either case. A referral to an actual psychiatric nurse practitioner who is taking patients is almost impossible in 2023 in the US never mind an actual psychiatrist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
This one is more positive but is checking that different diagnosticians get the same answer
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5980511/
and if that was applied to the "Thud" experiment you'd have poor diagnosis with a very high kappa (interrater agreement)
1. "could" produce a better diagnosis. Not guaranteed. And better than what? How likely is it to really deliver a better result than appropriately trained specialists? 2. "scam to satisfy insurance bureaucrats". And you doing it digitally won't find its way to unintended recipients?
The undercurrent of this thread - and the original post - is growing awareness of the dystopian disaster that has grown out of "free" social media. So it's not surprising - to me, at any rate - that the general sentiment here is to be suspicious of any adjacent use.
.. then the diagnosis of one of their problems sounds quite trivial.
I'm not in the industry but I am very curious to know if we're already in the conditional-execution phase of surveillance/ad-serving/profile-updating: is there an idea [yet] of serving a challenge, and then both recording how/if it is engaged, with automated graph traversal to "look closer"... all offered stochastically...
The simple way to put that in part is, are we now getting A/B tests run on us explicitly, rather than merely implicitly?
(Personally, I'm 100% off Meta products and TikTok—but am leaking through LinkedIn and, regrettably, Google...)
It makes me wonder how many more things I'll never get to participate in because I've deleted/avoid social media.
I use LinkedIn. I haven't used it in years, now I'm back because that's where the headhunters are and where I can probably find a job. After I'll find new job, I'll switch to zombie mode again and won't use it until I need it again.
So yeah, the reason I use LinkedIn is to not miss a job offer. I don't have a reason to use FB thought.
Even if you’ve never had an account on social media, chances are Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. know your name, email address, age, social graph, etc. because other people have shared their address book with them. Other users also might have tagged photos with your name, after which those sites concluded “that must be the same officeplant that’s in their address book”.
I expect LinkedIn to suggest people to connect because you’re their mutual friend, for example.
But it's the best antidote to FOMO, and so it's central theme "In praise of the unlived life" is worth a mention; There's a lot of shit you'll be glad you missed out on, but felt cheated at the time...
That bullet that whizzed past your head... you missed out on.
That plane you missed... that crashed... you missed out on.
That medication they wouldn't give you ... that turned out to have lethal side effect...
These are silly examples compared to the sumptuous theme Phillips develops about how so much of our whole of lives is a set of misplaced expectations and values that are given to us by others but rarely check out in the long term. It's a very affirming to get beyond confirmation/survivor bias and retrospective rose-tinted goggles.
Being "excluded" from a group of people who are the sort who would give their details to BigTech social networks may turn out to be a blessing in ways you can't see yet.
[edit: moved, sorry I replied to wrong comment]
I'm trying to simply that with an ear for contradiction;
If P; the more group A lose -> if NOT P; the more group NOT A lose. For P -> L = some loss of privacy
(Okay it's late and I'm clutching at it a little, but something doesn't ring true)
It seems like a formulation of "network effect" on the surface. But if P => L it can't be the same L on the right hand side, no? For the group who are the exclusion of A, their L has to be a gain. Or they are not playing the game well/optimally,
Or, if you could, would you mind rewriting it in english, please?
I've been thinking about buying a new car, but I'm very aware of how much tracking/telematics they include nowadays... so I decided to search "$manufacturer disable telematics". Every single thread I found was full of people saying variants of "Why do you even want to do that lol" and "Looks like somebody is doing something illegal".
Every time I see stuff like that, I'm tempted to jump in and share a plethora of examples about how tech companies misuse your data, don't protect it properly, sell it to all sorts of dubious actors, and, most importantly, use it for advertising - which I consider to be nothing more than gaslighting to get you to buy stuff and absolutely despicable.
I have to stop myself because I know I wouldn't get through to them, and I would probably sound crazy.
Seriously, there's nothing wrong with sounding crazy. I mean look at the world. What do you have to lose?
but i don't understand how personalized ads are harmful. if you don't like the product, just don't buy it? what am i missing?
personally, i only buy products that I really want or really need, so if an ad pops up that convinces me to buy, then it's done me a huge favor. but this almost never ever happens. usually, the ads are terribly targetted and don't show any clue of understanding who I am as a person. to me, it seems the problem is they're not targetted enough, rather than too targetted.
The famous example I remember from growing up was a teen girl whose parents found out she was pregnant from a personalized (mailed) Target ad: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ... . There seem to be some skepticism in later articles that this is actually how her parents found out, but only because she told them first. They could have found out from the ad.
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/big.2017.0074 is a more detailed study of how Facebook likes can out people. It looks like the "cloaking" solution that the authors propose actually makes the model more accurate. From the article "false-positive inferences are significantly easier to cloak than true-positive inferences".
If you're the only one who knows what ads you see, that might still be okay, but if a platform can make these kinds of inferences to show you ads, they can use the same data in other ways. At the very least, they might leak this information to other users by recommending people you may know, etc. You might also reveal what kind of personal ads you get if you ever browse the web someplace where other people can glance at your screen.
you wouldn't believe how irrelevant to me, the ads i get are.
So the choice to act is not as free as you describe.
You seem to think only about cases where personalized ads are used for products but the most harm is when people use this to influence groups. the same way they personalize an ad for a product that seems to be the perfect fit in your current situation the same mechanism/algorithm can personalize a message in a way that will influence you just a bit. and then tomorrow another small bit and so you find yourself (a general self not you) hating groups of people you never encountered so far.
Intelligence or IQ or whatever rational high points you have will not protect you from this over a long period of exposure.
I'm not talking about the information they ask me to provide. That's a drop in the bucket and is also under my control to disclose or not. I'm talking about all the other shit apps hoover up without permission.
OKCupid is actually a site some people reported as being the "better kind" of dating site, because they're geared toward successful LTR rather than hookup. The dating space is actually full of different interaction and match models that sometimes people don't seem to understand.
Some of the issues around risk, identity and power asymmetry are covered here [0]
This is what we're asking for. I am refusing to divulge information about me I don't want to share. Other people are building whatever on top of that data. I can hardly complain about lack of inclusion when I am the one refusing to feed their robots.
If you want people at Cheers to know your name, you... have to tell them your name. I'm fine being anonymous. It sounds like maybe you're more conflicted.
Only in the sense that I'm mad that it's hard to get any good new technology that isn't a privacy nightmare.
I see Cool App #354 and think it looks fun to use, but I am only allowed to use it if I give up my privacy. Since I don't want to do that, Cool App #354, which doesn't need any (or at least all) of that data to do the functions I like, is something I can only watch friends use.
It "sure would help a lot" to go to such a place? Because you're constantly being bothered by total strangers at rates far in excess of the average? Because the first people police interview as murder suspects is everybody who doesn't know the victim? No my friend.
Of course now you can give out your name to total strangers many miles away, with a degree of efficiency undreamt-of in the 80s, yet not even have any fun times spent drinking with those people, so...
In an easily searchable database?
Sooo tempted to go Goodwin here and mention a nice use of computers from the late 1930s...
And, at least here, they contained last name and one letter of the first name. No information on gender/interests/articles read/ads clicked/locations visited/family/friends/devices used/apps installed/items bought/...
Forget fussy debates about morality.
There is a practical threat to society when a few nation-sized corporations operate pipelines of data collection and profile aggregation on every online citizen of the world.
Those profiles represent a massive amount of power, and that power is being let to accumulate in opaque organizations that have no explicit commitment to public benefit and extremely little accountability. That power is not yet being weaponized, but it doesn’t evaporate just because nobody’s using it for leverage or control yet.
The responsible, long-term, practical way to ensure that legitimate governments and the people that constitute them continue to have the power to shape their own society is to make sure that these techniques for accumulating power are dismantled and the already-accumulated power is dissipated.
Yes, we will lose some novelties and baubles in our online life when they can’t track you anymore. Yes, investing new power into government so that it can counter corporate profile-accumulation is dangerous as well.
But the greater danger of inaction against these corporations is that they are already only lightly-accountable and are on the verge of escape from accountability forever if they gain enough power. Modern governments, meanwhile, are comparatively slow and dumb and can still be steered as their dangers become manifest.
Take 5 minutes to imagine how political troll campaigns are targeting their audience...
If private data is stored, there's already a chance of it getting out. You may get lucky, you may not, but for someone that hates you enough, any random detail can be a weapon. Even stuff that doesn't depend on your actions, like religion, country of origin or even medical details. People you associate with, even at a superficial level, can make you guilty by association. And let's not get into stuff like porn habits...
Political manipulation can be made real easy if they got dirt on you, too.
it's more than the ads. imagine if hacker news used ML to determine what articles you see on the front page based on whatever ad campaigns they think will result in a click from you. that would suck, right?
that's what these platforms do though, and that's not okay
Using it to sell you shampoo isn’t terrible (it can be super annoying though). The problem is using that data to eg figure out who might be in the market for pregnancy related products. Or, ominously, who have stopped buying pregnancy related products early.
Or correlating interest in something they browse with voting intentions. Or interest in political action. There’s a lot of dodgy things you can do with that data. And little of this is being shared with *informed consent*.
Ads are NOT the problem. I love browsing through ads in magazines I buy. If online ads worked like outdoor ads or magazine ads, I suspect a lot less people would have a problem.
Okay, then it should be legal for me to use Facebooks/Google's 'Intellectual Property' however I want.
Why should it be legal for them to steal my data, but illegal for me to use their's?
The very ability to provide that list previously required an expensive secret police; today it does not.
This is an extremely dangerous ability for anyone to have -- human rights (such as that to privacy) were won against oppression. They aren't optional, they're the system by which we prevent those previous eras from reoccurring.
This is why i'm suspicious of the being a meaningful sense of 'consent' here -- if enough people consent, then the tracking agency acquires a novel political power over everyone. This is why the infrastructure of tracking itself is a concern.
I think there are very good economic reasons why companies don’t dox their customers. They treat data cautiously even in the absence of regulation— since it would be a loss of business value to lose customer trust.
When we call for “privacy” — what does it mean when we want to share our data? Ok, one might say that you don’t want 3rd party sites tracking etc etc. That’s fine. You don’t want data sold. That’s fine. But if we make a big fuss about privacy in a world where we want to share so much personal information, I think we cloud the issues. We want a lot more than privacy, obviously, when we are so willing to give it up. I want those other desires made more clear and not lumped in as privacy. I think the GDPR just trains people to click “accept.”
Do you see my concern?
Keeping all of the data under one company umbrella is vulnerable, target for hackers, and easy target for governments.
Your post is not correct.
There are real privacy issues here, but this kind of paranoia distracts us from mitigating the actual threats and has us jumping at shadows.
This part of your post is also not correct. What company knows everything about you? There's insurance companies, credit card companies, social media companies... they all have a substantial amount of info about you but they don't all collude to aggregate it.
No regulator will find any proof of anything though, as regular employees will not have access to such crucial data. Regulators will also can be fooled by the maze of interfaces and servers.
There is also incentive for governments to "not see" any wrongdoings of the companies, if they profit from surveillance system.
Ad business is like Palantir in lord of the rings. You do know know who is watching on the other side.
All you have is some "vague" promise from corporations that your data are properly removed.
They do tough. They know where you refueled/charged your car, hotels you've booked. Not only that, but they also know if you donate money to your local mosque/synagogue, spend just a bit too much at a liquor store, etc.
If however there were strict liabilities for data leaks or privacy breaches, businesses would collect just the bare minimum data and get rid of it as soon as it is not strictly needed.
I take your point that some level of this power exists, necessarily, within internet-based companies with online users.
But I think there's a big difference between, say, signing up to Grindr where you submit a basic form with limited information (and presumably) can retain some minimal anonymity in how you use the app --- and a system whereby the history of all your actions across your online life (banking, social media, dating apps, etc.) is collectable by a centralised agency.
With laws like GDPR, broad datasets have become a liability for companies like telecoms, banks, etc. They don't want it. Accidentally forming 'rich user profiles' based on non-annoymous data is a legal liability.
This is exactly the incentive structure needed. Rather than have companies with an existential profit motive to build mass surveillance systems.
As far as whether a relational database that takes user data from a form is different to a whole system of streaming live event databases with massive streams of user monitoring across websites --- well, I think it wouldnt be hard to write a law against the latter.
These are political, moral, legal and technical distinctions that can be drawn.
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-...
The strongest decider in the outcome of the 2016 election is that the Trump campaign spent something like a factor of three more on advertising across the board than the Clinton campaign. Cambridge Analytica was more representative of the notion that the Republicans were willing to spend money on anything that might work than on the efficacy of that specific approach.
At the end of the day, that election came down to a combination of sexism in the voting base (Clinton's gender had a demonstrable effect on turnout among non-voters to vote against her; Americans don't want to admit it but in their hearts they're still pretty sexist) and good old fashioned, well understood rules of how spending on ads can move an election by a percentage point or two. The Democratic party as a whole believed Trump to be so unelectable that they pulled money from the presidential campaign to push it into campaigns down ticket in an attempt to win a massive political coup by controlling the House, Senate, and Presidency at the same time; they underestimated the political position of their opponents and it backfired spectacularly.
Can you cite your campaign spending numbers? Wikipedia says the opposite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia... I'm searching for a source that says what you claim and can't find any: https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+campaign+advertising+o... https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+outspent+hillary https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+advertising+spending+v... https://www.google.com/search?q=hillary+spent+less+than+trum...
Is my google-fu shit? Maybe. Regardless...
> The Democratic party as a whole believed Trump to be so unelectable that they pulled money from the presidential campaign
The root cause was their arrogance. Hillary was barely campaigning at all. It would not have cost her much anything to call into the major news channels every day^ but instead Hillary was effectively incommunicado for much of 2016. It's as if she thought campaigning was beneath her.
Also, I don't know how you can break apart Americans disliking women in general and Americans disliking Hillary particularly. She personally has been a popular target for derision for more than 20 years before her 2016 campaign. The DNC may have considered Trump unelectable but they were burying their heads in the sand w.r.t. Hillary's own unelectability problem. Which goes back to the arrogance thing..
At least they've figured it out now. Nobody seriously talked about her for 2020 and nobody is seriously suggesting her for 2024.
^ Most of Trump's 'advertising' was given to him for free in this manner, maybe you're assigning some arbitrary dollar value to this news coverage to say he spent more?
It wasn't total spend; it was online campaign spend. "Chaos Monkeys" cites a Bloomberg report on an internal Facebook memo that indicates the Trump campaign ran six million different ads on FB during the campaign and the Clinton campaign ran 1/100th of that amount. So targeted ads were involved, but the targeting approach was very traditional: pay a bunch of advertisers a lot of money to hand-tune ads, see how they perform, re-tune, rinse, repeat. The spend on Cambridge Analytica as a ratio and the effect it had on the total process were both minimal; CA didn't prove to be the "voter whisperer" that the owners made them out to be, and in the long run, the fact that they exfiltrated a bunch of private content from Facebook's datastores isn't as interesting as how the Trump campaign took advantage of the data in Facebook's datastores using the tools Facebook legitimately provides.
One feature the campaign did (according to the author of Chaos Monkeys) find useful was "Lookalike Audiences," which is nothing fancier than crawling the social media graph and expanding an initial targeted ad along friend networks (i.e. if an ad seems to be resonating with you, Facebook's own algorithm, if the advertiser has enabled the feature, will try pushing the ad to your friends and so on). In that sense, the data Facebook collected facilitated a Trump victory, though it wasn't anything more dangerous than the social graph itself... And I don't think the EU is proposing we ban social media or collecting networks of friends at this time.
... though maybe they should? You can do a lot of damage with the information people voluntarily share about who they associate with, if you collect enough of it.
> I don't know how you can break apart Americans disliking women in general and Americans disliking Hillary particularly
A good and fair question. So it turns out one of the largest blocs of votes in the 2016 election was various flavors of Christianity, and they generally chose to vote for a known womanizer and divorcée (with Protestants and Catholics, in particular, voting for Trump by a wide margin over Clinton). This would be considered curious behavior, except scraping the surface only a tiny amount reveals that they are almost 100% unified against the concept of women in a leadership position; some have structural taboos against it, and to some it is an existential threat in the category "God will strike us down for our hubris" because it goes against their notion of a cosmic order. It's ugly and I wish it were not so, but I think most political pundits wildly under-estimated that effect because, as the first woman to be nominated by one of the two major parties in America, their prediction models had no data on what effect it would have. I agree that the fact she already had a political service history that could be criticized (vs. her opponent with no such service) was also a factor, but I don't think it was as large a factor as the voters who turned out with fear of actual divine retribution in their hearts due to their religious beliefs.
It would be more surprising to me if they were uniquely unable to build a working psychological profile of an American voter versus any other voter then the simpler scenario that their entire concept was technological snake oil.
Ad targeting infrastructure is expensive and hard to hide, so banning it would defeat many political manipulation attacks.
Same for government surveillance - adtech/marketing is a boon to it because they don't even have to build/maintain their own surveillance infrastructure anymore.
(FWIW I find their move into ads alarming because it threatens to ruin everything I like about them)
The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap. The government on the other hand can literally ruin your life (or even end it in some countries).
The EU is doing a fantastic job of keeping everyone distracted by pointing the finger at the "evil American tech companies" while simultaneously doing the opposite when it comes to privacy from government...which is the real threat.
I could point to many instances of this but the easiest one is the EU commission currently pushing a ban on encryption.
Thankfully, governments are incompetent and inefficient enough to prove a real threat on this matter when it comes to tech
For a terrifying counter-example do some research into how easy it is for a stalker to abuse data about their victims.
The free-for-all collection and market of data about all of us is the real problem. Anyone with a few bucks can get around the "safeguards" around accessing it. Governments, your employer, your neighbor, your opponents in an election, criminals.
Anything that moves democracy away from one-person-one-vote to one-dollar-one-vote (which you need to buy ads), needs to be made illegal.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36300410
Even when companies are only selling anonymized data, with enough money and sources, it's possible to cross-reference enough information to de-anonymize it.
I couldn't care less about toothpaste. I care about disinformation and divisiveness campaigns on topics like LGBT+, POC, workplace protection, environment, healthcare, food safety, unionization, gun safety, etc etc etc.
those are not about a little more revenue, those are about how we live, as a society. and _that_ should be a taboo for microtargeting. our ancestors fought long and hard to end feudal aristocracy. and no less is at stake than our freedom.
phew sorry for the rant.
I don't think this is a contrarian view here, look at the comments a lot of people are very negative about the GDPR and just fine with how Meta collects data. There are quite a lot of libertarians here.
> The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap.
A company could make you dependent on their services, and then shut you out. Or sell your personal info to future employers. Or massively pollute and destroy the environment and climate. Or sell important medicine for crazy margins. There are even mercenary companies waging war and engaging in torture. Selling me more soap isn't the worst I expect from companies, by far.
> The EU is doing a fantastic job of keeping everyone distracted by pointing the finger at the "evil American tech companies" while simultaneously doing the opposite when it comes to privacy from government...which is the real threat.
You are suggesting this has some vague evil hidden agenda, I find that entirely implausible. You don't have any evidence for this. I'm not even sure what you are hinting at, the possible ban on encryption? Do you seriously think this case against Meta is a way to make people somehow not notice that kind of legislation, how?
If you think that Facebook is willing to part with the sole thing that makes them competitive... is crazy.
(Mind that this isn't about Meta in particular, it's just that Meta has been found in violation of general regulations, which are now enforced.)
I would rather Google and Facebook have an financial interest in keeping that data to themselves, than having a financial incentive to sell it outright.
Also, behavioural tracking is by no means the only road to advertising. We have managed to do this for centuries with much less intrusion and risk.
They used to not build profiles... and we had the most awful ads served... and performing search resulted in pages upon pages of results we're not interested in.
Why do we have to nuke everything and sow the ground with salt, just because some paranoid individuals want everyone to suffer their delusions? Especially, when the governments have more and more power to spy on us?
But, I guess, we won't agree on this.
No, the worst thing a company can do is to influence your desires, feelings and behaviours, causing you to spend money irresponsibly, getting your kids addicted to useless games, ... All that is also what this kind of tracking aims at. It is quite incredible how people have gotten used to being manipulated on a daily basis. Advertisement used to be fact based, but it's nowaday all emotional trickery and the more the companies know about you, the better they can modulate it to your wants, needs and worries.
Targeted advertising has already changed governments, caused hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies, family trouble and breakups, and many sucides. You don't notice it anymore because it is so utterly ubiquitous, but it drains you and affects your feelings and thoughts most of the day.
They can sell/give the data they have on you to someone with real intent to harm you.
They can use their money, power and the data they have on you to ruin your life, just like a Government could. A strategic leak of private data about a vocal critic of your company is not uncommon.
They can also use their data to influence Governments in ways that will harm all of us. And they do.
I could go on and on.
I dunno if you realize this but this sentiment is by FAR the most dangerous opinion in regards to advertising one can have. Because you are essentially saying that humans have no personal agency and that every decision we make is influenced by external factors. Which leads to a logical conclusion of a society where eveyone is required by law to take Xanax and is subjected to a carefully planned life down to the minute.
>Targeted advertising has already changed governments, caused hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies, family trouble and breakups, and many sucides.
No it hasn't. Don't make shit up.
Instantly invalidates everything you said
Attributing all of these ills to better ads is just comical
This is demonstrably not true. For over 100 years, advertising has had strong roots in emotional appeal. From wiki:
"In the 1910s and 1920s, many ad men believed that human instincts could be targeted and harnessed – "sublimated" into the desire to purchase commodities"
Just look at smoking ads from this time. Claiming health benefits that didn't exist, covering up health issues they knew existed, and associating smoking with cool people and socially desirable behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising#Since_1...
Clark Stanley, a former cowboy, copied this tincture, but claimed it came from the Hopi tribe of Native Americans and used rattlesnakes, which had barely any of the anti-inflammatory chemicals as the original Chinese recipe.
More importantly, a Federal government regulation in 1906, with the intention of cracking down on "patent medicine", discovered (in 1917) that Stanley's snake oil, had, in fact, no snake oil in it at all! For this gross violation of consumer trust, Stanley was fined $20, or about $500 in today's dollars.
Wow. I guess if we ban it then, we'll be living in a perfect utopia...like we used to have in the past?
Have you ever considered that "Targeted Advertising" could be, for the most part, a way for customers with wants/needs and businesses with products/solutions to efficiently match up? And that the people who have been "duped" by targeted advertising actually just have different wants/desires/needs than you?
I think its more likely that the root cause of all the things you mention, is just normal human nature stuff.
I think you might be using Targeted advertising as a panacea boogieman instead of confronting the uncomfortable real causes for these things (from election results you don't like to family breakups/suicides)?
Neutral market speak about "market efficiency" and matching customers with issues to businesses with solutions is fine, but talking about it at the expense of acknowledging that advertising CAN be harmful is against the point the parent comment is making.
I remember Enzyte commercials on TV in the 2000s. Manipulative against manhood, people who tried the drug had to have a doctors note saying "No, Enzyte didn't make my client's penis size increase" to be "allowed" to cancel their subscription. I can't even begin to imagine the hell someone with a "has small penis" ad profile lives in with targeted ads.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/14/tech/amazon-ring-police-f...
This is reasonable.
Though knowing that the data used to serve ads has very little overlap with the information that governments are interested in, makes this move more pointlessly destructive.
Funny enough, the data that governments are interested in isn't getting restricted. There are laws about how to protect that store that data, but that data is not being restricted.
Let's not pretend that governments are going to tell companies to stop collecting data, that they are inherently interested in procuring.
You can't look at governments, but especially the EU, as a single entity. Some parts of it want to collect all data possible while others want to protect your privacy. Here is a good article on how EU courts and the Irish government for example had very different views on this topic [2].
The general pattern you can observe is some political entities and/or countries really like to push surveillance and data retention laws in the name of security, sometimes without possible understanding the amount of misuse this could enable [3]. On the other hand privacy activists and other political entities and/or countries fight back against those and push for laws protecting privacy and your data or prohibit mass surveillance [4]. Sometimes those political "battles" are pretty obvious, with a recent example being the chat-control plans of the European Commission that the European Parliament will hopefully/likely reject [5].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/12/google-android-location-tr... [2] https://www.politico.eu/article/data-retention-europe-mass-s... [3] https://netzpolitik.org/2021/urgently-needed-france-spain-pu... [4] https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/11/23719694/eu-ai-act-draft-... [5] https://www.aol.com/privacy-busting-chat-control-plans-17282...
It's the collection and dissemination of the data that is the real problem. Everyone deserves privacy and the right to remain private.
Why not both?
> The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap
No, the worst thing a company can do is to propagate the recorded data, willingly or otherwise (companies get hacked, forced by governments, etc.), to entities that won't be content with just using that data to sell more soap.
Oh, btw. Do you know who's in general VERY interested in all that sweet data such companies collect? That's right: Governments.
And politicians and governments, at least in all countries that I intend to live in, answer to the voter. Who do companies answer to?
May I introduce you to my good friend "lobbyism" ? He's very good at connecting people with money and people with political power.
In some countries the separation is unclear. Take ai for instance - regulation demands come from corporations to governments rather than the other way around. And thats happening in basically everything we do. Like in communism, the masses are employed in these massive enterprises that benefit from government money and friendly regulation, but regulation flows from corporations to governments while money flow the other way around (see bailouts and friendly policies). Furthermore politicians use corporations to influence our daily lives and to monitor our behaviour such that they know how to exploit our fears in order to gain and maintain power (see Cambridge analytica).
As such corporations are a tool of oppression, anti capitalism and anti freedom. Therefore you have to squeeze them out in order to be able to return to democratic capitalism.
In the post Snowden world it’s hard to imagine that any massive tech service isn’t hooked directly into the NSA or that it’s being used for what isn’t exactly illegal surveillance but sort of is.
Not that you’re wrong of course, but I think we should still work on both issues. Even if you look at the EU the agencies which are working to protect and destroy our privacy aren’t the same. So it’s very possible to support one and not the other. Similarly I think we should absolutely crack down on tech company surveillance. What I don’t personally get is why it stops with Meta. Let’s not pretend TikTok and the others aren’t doing the exact same thing. I also think we should keep in mind that the consumer agencies aren’t only doing it to protect our privacy, they are also doing it to protect our tech industry, so it’s not exactly black and white, but I really don’t think we should stop just because other parts of the EU are also evil.
I’m also not convinced that they are doing a good job distracting anyone. Within the EU NGOs there is far more focus on end-to-end encryption and keeping our privacy safe from governments, especially in countries like Germany.
With these laws in place, EU companies face worse conditions than US ones. They may be protecting some bigger EU companies, but they definitely aren't protecting our IT industry.
GPDR was an annoyance for Google, and a complete disaster for anyone small(think companies that can't hire a Chief Data Protection Officer to work full time)
There's a good rationale for placing restrictions and rules on data privacy, but there are also some very ignorant and destructive decisions.
Of course, there is tons and tons of legalese, edge cases, interpretations etc. But if you abide by and implement these basic principles, especially as a small company, you can be quite confident you won't run into any real problems.
If you kind of cared about your customer data in the first place as part of your company culture, its not that hard to adapt. Maybe some really careless companies had a hard time. There must have been some kafkaesque situations killing small companies no doubt, but honestly I haven't heard of them. I only hear Americans complain about it.
To me, this means the law is just right.
If you work in a B2C publicly accessible sector, I can assure you - you store more PII than you'd like to believe.
Indeed. And due to the fact that such an industry basically doesn't exist, they are able to introduce such regulation.
The more European point of view is that companies are run by greedy people on who we have no control and we need the government to keep those in check. We have control over the governments and it's O.K. to take them down by force from time to time.
Mass protests are a thing and we vote quite often on who are those "government people", what control we have over the companies? It's very scary to let some businessmen to run the the stuff that our lives depend on. Why trust Musk, Gates, Tim Cook or any other magnate act in our benefit when they all show monopolistic tendencies, profit over human lives and rent seeking?
I don't know if the Europeans or Americans are right about it but overall it appears that the Europeans are having it better despite the stats about money showing smaller amounts of it.
The US is best understood as a very flawed democracy, somewhere between the extremes of actual authoritarian states on the one hand and modern well-run European states on the other.
Riots don't necessarily need to achieve an objective. It creates a political and economical cost to politicians. It means that you can't simply ignore the minority only because you currently have a majority, so it forces them to consider a compromise good enough. That's not always possible but it's essentially what separates France from Turkey. In Turkey, Erdogan wins the elections by %51 and completely ignores the %49 because they can't win an election and can't disrupt the public anymore.
>You are naive if you think Europeans have any semblance of control
Who do you think has control?
I don’t remember electing you to represent the point of view of “we the European people”.
I hope I was able to demystify this situation. You are welcome.
> The more European point of view
Its almost like you are discussing about objective facts.
The US is one of the oldest democracies on earth.
"You can give the government infinite power, we will do a revolution, no big deal."
Do you have any idea with how much suffering each revolution has been paid for?
And remind me again how the revolutionaries overthrew Nazi Germany?
The sowjet bloc created decades of suffering and blood but according to you that's fine because we can take them "down by force from time to time"?
It's just difference of attitudes. Europeans tend to trust the government more than the corporations.
No need for ridiculous examples, for every bad politician example there exist a bad corporation example. You say nazis, I say Bhopal disaster. No need for that, at least the Nazis payed dearly for it. Corporations are unaccountable.
>And remind me again how the revolutionaries overthrew Nazi Germany?
Remind me how the Nazis are doing these days?
What a perfect comparison for how toothless corporations are compared to governments.
Americans don't think politicians are a different breed of people, they treat them differently because their position in government gives them a lot more power and impact than corporations.
> Who said anything about giving government infinite power?
Infinite power is an exaggeration but EU governments are giving themselves broad surveillance powers while directing your attention at behavioral advertising.
Being done by the government and not by a company doesn’t change a thing. Maybe except that if it was a company, they would have monetize it better I guess.
Antisemitism was and sadly is very widespread in Europe.
For some really stupid reason, but yes. We shouldn't trust our governments as much as we do.
> at least the Nazis payed dearly for it
If you mean most of Europe paid dearly for that, then yes.
> Remind me how the Nazis are doing these days?
Surprisingly well and some are even on the rise, why do you ask?
Imagine being an evil dictator, who just got to power after years of trying... what's the easiest way to find your strongest opposition? Just buy data from social networks.
I mean... look at some stuck up countries with a lot of religious nuts, and some data, that you either bought a butt plug, googled a butt plug, went to an online buttplug store or worse... and it's just a bit of plastic.
Notice how those two examples aren't restricted.
> Sites like facebook can sell your interests, google can sell them your search topics, etc.
Governments don't care for that kind of data, that's why they willing to restrict those. Even though the best reason to use Google, is because they know my previous search topics and what I clicked on.
I imagine Google filters the bad stuff, so you're not likely to actually see anything life scarring with that first search. But go ahead and run the experiment and see if anything comes of it.
A company can bar the exits, letting you burn to death [0]. A company can send private militias to force you to work [1] (or because you were sent the wrong set of MtG cards [2]). A company can improperly store pesticide, until the resulting explosion kills thousands [3]. A company can own every house and store in a town, managing your expenses to ensure you can't leave [4]. A company can bribe judges to provide them with child labor [5].
Some of these were illegal at the time they were done. Some of these were made illegal as a result of these events. All of them are within the nature of companies, optimizing in pursuit of profit regardless of the human cost. That nature is useful for improving lives, but must be carefully controlled to prevent it from trampling us all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)
[2] https://gizmodo.com/magic-the-gathering-leaks-wizards-wotc-p...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Now, for a productive conversation, I'd recommend you putting effort in as well, instead of just sea lioning [6].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Privacy_is...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-mak...
[3] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/analysis-health-insuranc...
[4] https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/07/not-again-bone-grafts...
[5] https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/poopy-lettuce-at-wen...
Systemic > Isolated instances but also harder to point out.
I doubt that this relates to the online advertising space.
Disregarding the personal data and other tracking, banning all targeted advertising is... not ideal. I genuinely would prefer to have ads that are relevant, than ads for table casters.
One thing that we should also be aware, is that ads aren't going away. They're going to be more obnoxious as a result of this decision.
I can’t vote out Google. Their customers are advertisers, not me. And I don’t know which apps on my phone send my information to Facebook or what they do with it.
No, you actually can’t, in a very real and practical sense.
You can stop doing business with Mom&Pop’s coffee shop relatively easily, just like you can move to a different town to get away from your city government authority.
But you’re practically never going to truly get away from Meta, Google, Amazon, Nestle, McKesson, ATT, and those behemoths due to their size, similar to how you’re going to struggle to get out from under the US Federal government.
I can't avoid not paying taxes to fund the catholic church in my country, that uses that money to lobby homophobic laws... I can block Google and not use them.
This is not a simple "just vote them out", unless you're part of the privileged majority that can affect the policy.
And no, they're not going to magically stop funding the Catholic church or become a safe haven for LGBT people.
If you can avoid a company, the fact that there is an acceptable alternative itself says that the market is not monopolized and so there is less chance of abuse.
In the markets where abuse is possible there are often monopolies, or there is illusion of choice like a (colluding or copycatting)duopoly or one where all the "competing" brands being owned by the same parent conglomerate etc.
It is very difficult to participate in the modern economy/world while avoiding certain companies. It might be possible but there are both social and economical costs involved that majority cannot afford.
Avoiding a company doesn't necessarily mean there's an acceptable alternative. I could use no social media and my life wouldn't be much worse or burdensome.
There's very little I can do to prevent the government from doing what it's doing by myself.
But telling a small newspaper to stop using ads for revenue, when you aren't willing to financially support them is... hypocritical.
In short - just like a lot of "this ids good for you" laws, this will definitely impact smaller companies way more than you think.
How do you know I am not willing to pay?
OK, I'll be the millionth commenter to repeat this viewpoint for the millionth time on HN: nobody has issues with online ads to support their favorite newspaper or creator, people have an issue with tracking and targeting ads.
We've had ad supported websites, forums and blogs since the 90's, but those were generic and harmless, and wouldn't track and target YOU.
So if newspapers or any other websites want to use weaponized ad-tech on me, then excuse me, but I'm gonna block the shit out of them with no remorse, to protect myself.
Because we've been there, done that. How many local or small news outlet subscriptions do you have? I'm pretty sure it's not a lot.
> We've had ad supported websites, forums and blogs since the 90's, but those were generic and harmless, and wouldn't track and target YOU.
And as a result any website with reasonable traffic, would have to put up a million ads - to just break even. Attendance was rising, costs associated with maintenance as well. Advertisers don't want to pay just to show random individuals ads that have close to 0 chance of being useful.
Generic advertising effectively excludes smaller companies from advertising space. If your advertising budget is $50k today, with targeted ads, you can effectively spend it to show your product to people who would be interested in it. Without, you have to spend $1mil on ads to show it to everyone and get results equal to spending $1k with targeted ads.
> weaponized ad-tech
Yes, yes... The "mid 20ies, IT person, with interest in HN" is definitely a weapon to take "you" down. Quit with the hyperbole, no ad tech keeps anything remotely interesting about you.
More importantly though, the real underlying enemy here has always been citizen apathy, ignorance and distraction about digital privacy (and more general about individual agency in the digital era).
Unfortunately in modern times active citizenship has degenerated into polarization and false dichotomies. Unless people are hit in the head with clear and present dangers they stand dazed and confused.
This behavior has been actively encouraged by governments worldwide for decades. E.g. they are all still actively promoting citizenry engagement in these platforms.
If a certain coalition of countries (for whatever reason) raises warnings about practices in the private sector this can only result in a more informed debate. A debate that has been largely absent so far.
BTW:
> The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap.
I don't know what companies exist in your world but in the real world a company can deny you entry to public transport, medical care, access to the financial system (banking and insurance) and salaried employment to name but a few "non-soap" issues.
Which public transport company has denied entry to someone?
> medical care, financial system (banking and insurance)
You mean the government instituted monopoly?
> salaried employment
This is patently false. No private corporation can deny you employment, outside of their own company.(at the very least, not without government enforcement)
Governments deny you salaried employment on a daily basis.
Without "companies & entrepreneurs", the government would have to build, fund and maintain their own surveillance infrastructure. This might be difficult since nobody would intentionally embed "NSAAnalytics.js" or use "NSABook", so covert methods will be necessary which are costlier and less effective at scale.
On the other hand, "companies & entrepreneurs" already built an industrial-scale, financially sustainable surveillance system that the government doesn't even have to pay for, and since it's not technically operated by the government, a lot of the legal protections against direct government surveillance also go out the window. Even better, while people may not use "NSABook" they happily do use "Facebook".
And everyone who even ever dares to come near them gets banned too, so employers don't want to risk hiring them either.
When the Nazis did Berufsverbote, that was an unusual and cruel punishment. When Google does it, that's just the free market baby!
Companies can destroy a life just fine.
EU data practices differ significantly from tech giants; they're governed by strict GDPR rules, requiring consent for personal data processing.
No EU nation systematically tracks citizens like tech companies do for ads.
It's difficult to compare the data collection practices of EU nations directly with those of large tech companies like Facebook or Google, there are some parallels and distinctions to be made.
The encryption debate is separate, focusing on balancing privacy with security.
My take (being in EU) is that with weaker encryption, the EU tries to balance privacy with law enforcement needs, aiming to curb illicit communications while raising privacy concerns.
This is false. May I introduce you to chat control or client side scanning on every device that you own?
That what is the proposal is currently. All the data would be funneled to Europol, which would have access to every text, every image , every thing you do on your messaging apps. Does that sound like consent to you?
> My take (being in EU) is that with weaker encryption, the EU tries to balance privacy with law enforcement needs, aiming to curb illicit communications while raising privacy concerns.
You can have encryption or no encryption. If the EU can read your messages, so can China, Russia, Iran and anybody else who either buys their way into the system or breaks in illegally.
> It's difficult to compare the data collection practices of EU nations directly with those of large tech companies like Facebook or Google, there are some parallels and distinctions to be made.
That's right at least with GDPR, companies have to delete my data after a certain amount of time but some governments of Europe don't have too. There is this thing called data retention:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
It's been illegal for some time now but some governments in Europe (France for example) have decided that they don't care and keep doing it. Welcome to the land of privacy.
Although I do believe that governments should be liable (is this the best word?) to people and in turn make companies liable too.
Companies are, according to some ideologies, only really accountable to their shareholders and to the law. If you want to hold them more accountable, the law is generally the way to do that.
Autocratic governments are of course not accountable to the people, and autocratic parties in democracies go out of their way to undermine their accountability.
But, the government is the solution to when business gets too much power. You can't convince a profit motivated corporation to stop doing something evil as long as it's profitable, so it's the government's job to protect people from corporate governance.
I totally agree with this. But are personalized Facebook ads really an example of this?
And what's the solution when the government gets too much power? Especially in a "democracy," when the people have implicitly given approval for this by voting in the people who are attempting to consolidate power?
Elections and courts. Compared to private entities, the government is very restricted in what it can do. When a company says, "We won't share your data with anyone," there's nothing you can do when they change their mind. But you can sue the government for damages.
The government is no more or less restricted than a corporation.
> "We won't share your data with anyone," there's nothing you can do when they change their mind
You can, you can sue for breach of contract. If the government tomorrow gets a law passed that they can share or institute a sharing system(like Five Eyes) - you literally can't even sue over anything.
> But you can sue the government for damages.
That's absolutely not true.
In government individuals carry more responsibility than "government". German government can fail to protect your tax data tomorrow and you'll have no way to sue them. You'll be pointed to the individual who'll be blamed and may even go to prison. But you'll get FA.
You have way more chances in winning a lawsuit against a corporation, than "a government".(barring some exceptions)
Companies can’t point guns at me and put me in a cage. They can’t go into my home without my permission and search my stuff. And if I don’t want to deal with a company, I can simply stop interacting with them. If I don’t want to deal with a government, I have to emigrate and renounce my citizenship.
But they used to, once upon a time, until they were limited from doing so.
> And if I don’t want to deal with a company, I can simply stop interacting with them.
Except when you can't. There's no "stop interacting" for a bunch of things in today's society. Google/Facebook tracks you even when you're not using their products. If you want a non-tech example, try stop interacting with Experian, for instance.
> If you want a non-tech example, try stop interacting with Experian, for instance.
Use cash, homestead, etc. Yes - you can, in fact, stop any data going to credit rating agencies.
There's absolutely nothing you can do to stop being of interest to one or another level of government in US, while living in the US.
I know it's a radical example, but your statement is false.
Yes:
Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health (tau.ac.il)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32938622
Facebook collecting people's data even when accounts are deactivated (digiday.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817297
Facebook test asks users if they're worried a friend is 'becoming an extremist' (cnn.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27714103
Testimony to House committee by former Facebook executive Tim Kendall (house.gov)
Both can ruin your life, that's the issue.
> "The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap."
This only works for small companies.
We should also care about government surveillance. But, in this case, we are allies.
This might be hard to grok, but we can actually be aware of both threats without minimizing the seriousness of either.
Even in good times, in countries with mostly balanced institutions, the government can lock you up in prison and throw away the key if you piss off the wrong people.
On the other hand, I can assure you the only thing Unilever is aspiring to do is get you to buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
And I know the rebuttal will be..."but stupid people (not me of course) will get duped into buying more toilet bowl cleaner than they actually need!"
While that is indeed a huge burden of responsibility to place upon all the people you think are less intelligent than you, I think they will be okay.
As history has shown, the real risk is the government telling me exactly how much toilet bowl cleaner I get to use.
Consider Oreo O's: a breakfast "food" with 11.5 g sugar and 1.3 g protein. Allegedly (according to the Wikipedia article), it was a very successful "food" and had approval from parents.
Now, if you ask someone whether it's appropriate to give your child a pile of sugar or cookies for breakfast, they'll probably tell you no, that's neglect. But somehow people have gotten it into their heads that products from Post or General Mills are acceptable, and weirdly enough now almost half of Americans are obese, and over 10% are diabetic, and how this could have come to be is a total mystery.
How did people come to the conclusion that something with marshmallows or cinnamon sugar swirls in every bite is appropriate to give your children every day? Or cans/bottles of sugar water? Something tells me the decades of endless advertising helped normalize it.
Look at the website for boxtops for education: big bold letters "YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE FOR SCHOOLS" (by giving your child sugar for breakfast). You're making a difference! You're a good person! This kind of propaganda is profoundly evil, and this is without targeting messaging to individuals.
The utter failures of governments to provide any meaningful guidance, or intentionally boosting certain product consumption.
We can have an argument on how effective that propaganda was, but in the end governments in EU and US make bad food much more available than traditional diets.
We can all rant about how evil corporations are for putting HFCS into their products in the US, but it's disingenuous to disregard the fact that US government spends billions on propping up corn production that makes HFCS more economically viable.
In the end you still choose to buy sugary cereals, but if you are in poverty - you're left without a choice when it comes to calorie sources, because of government interventions.
Maybe watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film) and it's sequel from 2020 (linked from there) for starters?
It turns out kids like sugar, incomes have been stagnant for decades, and food deserts exist. What's the cheapest, shelf stable food item on a per-meal basis that your children will voluntarily eat without a fight before work? Sugary cereal. Could any of those factors possibly be the root cause of the market success of sugary cereal? Or is it all because of the evil mind controlling advertisers tricking the stupid people (not you of course)?
The reality is, in a free society, at some point you have to give people responsibility over themselves. I know the impulse of the elite (and rich people on the internet) is always "let me protect you from your own stupidity, I'm smarter!" However, history has shown that impulse is wrong. Preventing businesses and customers with needs from efficiently reaching each other through targeted advertising is in fact a net negative for society.
We bought it in the same stores where we bought real food back then. We buy food in the same stores that have breakfast cereal now.
I haven't watched TV or movies for like the last 10 years, and I've blocked ads on my computers for ~20, so I've at least minimized the most blatant exposure, but I don't think myself immune. That's why I've done what I can to remove them from my life. But I'm naive too; like I didn't realize until recently that radio "callers" are just iheartmedia employees, or that you can just buy an "interest" piece on the news or Ellen or an "opinion" or "lifestyle" piece in the newspaper or whatever. It makes sense in retrospect, but the extent to which literally all media around us are just ads is hard to wrap one's head around, and a little unexpected IMO. I don't think it's intuitive or that you have to be dumb to be tricked. You just have to be honest enough that it wouldn't occur to you that everything around you is lying and that these people will relentlessly work to construct some Hell version of Plato's cave in order to sell you things and that it's basically legal to do so.
Maybe I'm just one of the dumb ones, but IMO ads like this[0] masquerading as national news should maybe require extremely clear labeling and disclaimers, or just be illegal. Maybe when shills on youtube say "this is sponsored, but this is my real opinion", the second half of that sentence should be illegal. Maybe they should have to say "this video is an advertisement for X, and I am not presenting my opinions on it".
The food desert idea is plausible, but the literal definition is useless (poor people can't walk 0.5 miles?), so I'm forced to be skeptical of any claims around it.
To me the plausible explanation for breakfast cereals is that people underestimate how evil these companies can be, and probably figure it must be illegal to sell candy advertised as food or something, so it can't be that bad if it's so common and if it's allowed to be advertised on TV. Surely they couldn't or wouldn't say it's "part of a complete breakfast" if it weren't at least mostly true. Surely if it's on the news, the reporter would mention if it's actually extremely horrible for you and surely the "report" isn't literally written by the advertiser.
[0] https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/oreo-os-cereal-returning-...
Sugary products are cheap to manufacture, specifically because US government subsidizes corn production for HFCS. It's not because General Mills is evil corporation that wants to hook you on sugar.
As an example from the other side - Cheap dairy products in Europe exist because the governments there subsidize the crap out of dairy industry. And will not stop, no matter how bad production of those are for the environment. They will point the finger at air travel, though...
> The food desert idea is plausible, but the literal definition is useless (poor people can't walk 0.5 miles?),
How sheltered are you? No you can't walk 0.5 miles, when there's an interstate separating you from a grocery store that can financially afford to stock fresh produce. Or maybe you should walk an extra 30-60 minutes after you come back from your second shift of the day?
This isn't just "lol dumb people got tricked". It's fraud. Plenty of apparently reasonable people take the intended (false) meanings from advertisements. These are intentional misrepresentations. And it's not one or two egregious actors. The entire industry is about deceiving to the maximum extent allowed by law, which is a lot.
Like I said the (colloquial) idea of a food desert is plausible, but there is no information on it. The stats are not looking at how many people have a highway blocking the way and you have to go uphill both ways in a wheelchair after working 3 jobs, so actually that 0.5 miles is burdensome. They tell us nothing (well, they tell us how many people don't even have to walk 10 minutes to reach a fully stocked supermarket). If you think that's the scenario being discussed when people talk about food deserts, it's coming from your imagination. Maybe it exists. It's not what the term means. It's almost like the term was chosen to be evocative and paint a certain picture of reality.
People's pockets did that. And they definitely are perfectly fine for breakfast. They're not the best, but they're not "the cause of the obesity epidemic".
> People think Special K is healthy.
What is specifically unhealthy in Special K?
> Slimfast advertising 10g protein (with milk teehee) when it's actually got 2 g protein and 11 g sugar
What does factually misleading advertising have to do with this? They're literally advertising the opposite of what we're talking about. Neither is 11g of sugar is going to cause you to gain weight.
> If you think that's the scenario being discussed when people talk about food deserts, it's coming from your imagination.
It's coming from me literally having been to a few such areas in Camden NJ, Bronx and in Baltimore. But hey! I must have imagined all of those places...
Except when they hire security contractors, and then that 3rd party assumes government powers - including police immunity - without the oversight. Which is what happens when cities ban technology uses such as facial recognition by the police - they just hire a 3rd party to do it with zero oversight. Same with large tourist events in non-tourist cities: those are not regular cops during the event, they are contractors with temporary police immunity and very little official oversight.
Similar effects with money, though at least PayPal is no longer really a gatekeeper.
Not being able to interact with a business on Facebook or on any of the other equally insignificant platforms simply does not rate.
And if a governmental agency requires you to use Facebook to interact with them, without any stipulations to bind Meta to serve you, well it's alarming that anyone would have time to say a single thing about Meta instead of address the real issue of the agency having the power to in effect force you to interact with facebook.com.
2. Facebook and Instagram are household names, so the media picks up on that.
3. The DPA/Meta situation is going on for a couple of years by now, with rather interesting statements at times (e.g. Meta thinking aloud about ceasing operation in the EU)
The article seems to use "personalized advertising" and "behavioral advertising" interchangeably, and also mentions that using location for advertising is a breach of privacy - which would prevent any local business from advertising itself to people in the same city, as I see it. Was that the intent here?
E.g., if I go to linustechtips and see an ad for cheap notebooks at Best Buy, that's pretty useless if Best Buy doesn't even ship to my country. I was just curious what the new regulation says about this.
I hate that Europe leads in regulation and lags so much in innovation. At the same time, this is a step in the right direction. True, people don't care about privacy, but it's mostly because they don't understand the extent and implications of letting companies control your data.
Can’t come soon enough. Kneecap the need to datamine users.
I totally want to see this happen even if that means they will have to charge money for their heretofore “free” services.
This would be a big win for society, in my view.
I think this topic becomes emotive because there are obviously ways to misuse data, but I struggle to see the actual harm in personalised advertising. If there's a data acquisition route that we all agree is bad, then we should ban that.
This just furthers unbridled consumerism.
I’m okay when people need something because it’s physically necessary for them. But there is something wrong when people impulse buy online just because they got some targeted ads playing with their psychological profile.
I’m convinced these operators cannot be trusted and kneecapping them is the only way out.
And no, saying "Yes, I consent to cookies and terms of use and data collection" doesn't fix this.
EDIT ---
Ok, I get it now. Personalized ads = surveillance. Fair enough.
Doesn't the whole GDPR already cover it though? You can opt out of the surveillance.
The categories are much to broad to be useful. I've been vegan for about 7 years. The internet thinks I like "food" and shows me ads for meat products all the time. Good to know I'm wasting the ad dollars of companies I think are bad, but I think it's gross and I don't want to see it.
And yet, I still think they can be harmful. Think of someone with alcohol use disorder who recently stopped drinking, or someone with BED who's decided not to keep junk food in the house. You don't think constantly seeing ads for alcohol/junk food would make such a person feel bad or even impede their progress? Why would that be the cost of them opening any website at all?
Or infomercials poping about anti depressants.
True anecdotes. Teenage girl tracked by video surveillance and profiled as being likely interested in contraceptives because she stood near the condom shelves for long minutes without purchase. With a good chance of being pregnant.
(Advertisers could mail to the household, yes. because she provided the supermarket with her address to get groceries delivered once)
A certain messaging app offered by a certain social media platform that mine personal conversations to profile users down to their emotional states. Those words you type in and send to your confident are put through real time machine learning.
Don't be too surprised you get an ad about chocolate right after you told your date about your favorite ice cream flavor, that's merely creepy. The obsene mental manipulation usually goes unnoticed.
Now I do like personalized ads and I get insane ones even though I'm anonymizing my tracks more than most.
For example I do get personalized ads trying to sell me... Private jets!
I mean: I'm maybe upper middle class but there's no way I've got the money to buy a x million private jet.
Yet I get the ads for them Falcons and Gulfstreams.
I do, of course, make sure to click these ads.
But that's because it is creepy, if the targeting is too accurate, it feels like you are being watched. Which is true, but a little bit ironic on Facebook and Instagram where people have no problem exposing their entire life to everyone.
* Micro-targeting for political advertisements (pretty bad for democracy)
* Dynamic pricing based on demographics (you can afford it, so you pay more)
* Insurance knowing too much about you (rejections based on your health, ensuring parts of the population won't be able to get good insurance)
* And just the fact that too much information being public can be harmful (blackmail, scams, etc)
* etc..
It's not just advertising, but trashy and addictive suggested content and potential for abuse by actors like Cambridge Analytica.
> I understand hating ads in general
Also this
Facebook can still show relevant ads without showing personalized ones. For example, if there is a facebook group about car restoration it doesn't take a genius to guess what kinds of ads members might be interested in.
Personalized ads mean they make a ton of assumptions about you using incomplete and inaccurate data. If you actually value advertising as a means of discovery, why would you want your exposure to new things limited to only what marketers think you should be interested in based on stereotypes, or flawed assumptions?
Relevant ads are better because there are fewer assumptions being made. Whatever content you're engaging in dictates what you see, not market research and guesses about who you are.
It's like a little camera accompanying you everywhere and you don't get to say no and it's used for anything they can get away with.
It's the whole tracking, data-gathering, and trying to optimize for squeezing the last bit of revenue out of people that I dislike.
That and the stupid amount of bandwidth and compute caused by the ad scripts on every other website. ublock makes the web so much faster, it's hard to believe.
EDIT:
I'm actually subscribed to some e-mail newsletters from certain brands/sectors that I care about, and they regularly deliver personalised ads to a subfolder in my e-mail account. I sometimes even buy things as a result. I don't mind this, because it's opt-in and by consent.
I do mind when facebook tries to infer what kinds of things I might like, which it's generally terrible at and the various "ad preferences" I can set don't seem to make any change.
Now if you have been looking for something else that you want to keep private (gay clubs, abortion clinics, or anything embarrassing) then your phone has betrayed you.
There is also a point that if the ad is more useless, the quantity of ads should decrease because advertiser will not find them worth it.
The problem with accepting being under constant surveillance to make advertisers money is that the data is never just used for ads and even if you never show your phone to another living soul that data never goes away and can end up in the hands of just about anybody.
I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet.
It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here.
Can someone explain to me what the problem is? Honest question. Thanks.
God knows what they'll use it for in the future, they'll know everything about you, who you voted for 15 years ago, what joke you make 20 years ago against the now-in-charge cast, do you sympathise with communist ideas ? Did you like or hate Musk before he becomes a dictator of the now independent Republic of Texas ? Did you use grinder ? Well too bad, homosexuality is now punishable by death retroactively. Looks like you illegally contacted a doctor for an abortion in 2027, that'll be 6 months of jail and a 30k fine ;)
You don't see the problem because you live in an abnormally quiet and abnormally peaceful (for you) time. The thing is your data is forever, the state of peace not so much
Despotic regimes have never had a problem finding plenty of people to kill. They aren’t going to be thwarted in their pursuit of LGBTQ people because they can’t get a list of people who used Grindr.
Ads are bringing so little revenue per user that I can't see how that can possibly be true. And even then people are paying the ads on the product they end up buying after.
Ads function at a macro economic level like a very inefficient tax scheme.
Here's a video [1] by a reasonably successful YouTube guitarist, Samurai Guitarist, on the various ways a professional guitarist might make money and how effective they are. It includes a section on content creators for social media.
The content creator part is what is relevant for this thread, but the whole video is worth watching if you are at all curious what a working musician who is not a big name star might make.
He gives some numbers from back when he was at around 50k followers, after two years of working full time trying to turn content creator into something he could make a living from.
He was getting $500/month from AdSense.
He was also getting about $500 for sponsored videos but he only had sponsors occasionally. He wasn't focused on something specialized gear reviews which would have probably gotten more sponsorships, so the sponsors were more general like VPN companies or game companies.
Patreon was around $300/month.
Amazon affiliate links to products he mentioned were around $50/month.
Spotify and other streaming services that he uploaded his music to were about $30/month.
He'd promote in his YouTube videos giving guitar lessons over Skype. That brought in around $750/month.
Fiverr gigs ranged from $80-500/month.
All in all a good month would be around $3000 at 50k followers.
Edward Snowden showed that global surveillance can lead to abusive system, in which there is no privacy, and everything is accessible by governments.
It is not about your personal advertising. It is not about your grocery lists. It is about creation of abusive system.
If social media have special portals for governments (at least I know about Facebook had one for New Zealand), then it opens a gateway for abuse.
- How do you know you were not abused?
- How do you know your data was not used by China to overthrow western civilization?
- How do you know that your data was not sold to Putin?
- How do you know that your data was not used by Left, or Right political party to change election results, like in Cambridge Analytica?
Companies do not have morality. They care about money, and laws (through fines). If a service does not require capture of data, then that data should not be captured.
Your ability to discover relevant products from targeted advertisement is flawed to begin with.
contextual advertising is placing ads in locations, pages, screens etc where people are likely already in a certain mindset (and potentially more likely to be influenced and buy) but the advertiser has no further information about them.
behavioral, profile based advertising is, in contrast, using (in principle) any and all information about you that they can grab and get legally away with using:
Citizen X2235X, device ID asx233e, geolocation X,Y, with $$ in the bank account, an estimated IQ of 98, with the following list of prior purchases, the following list of "likes" on social, has just searched for "weekend trip". Let the bidding begin.
Creating profiles of people has always been a very regulated affair (e.g. your credit score, insurance segments, medical categories etc). In the context of state surveillance profiling people has been the primary tool for oppression.
In the last decade somehow in the name of "innovation" all caution has been thrown out the window.
Its really not about ads at all.
I exclusively follow technical people. Devs of the software and tools I work with, PG, indie hackers, that sort of thing.
Personalized ads are a scam. They are not personalized to you. They are personalized to the imaginary profile advertisers want to see their ads. You're just the sorry victim that nobody cares about. Some of them are outright dangerous (see the first one in the album), and your interests always come last.
That doesn't even include the primary concern: The rampant abuse of privacy and collected data.
[1] - https://imgur.com/a/NGBsEaM (one or two are mildly NSFW)
I'd argue that it's impossible to have a free internet with ads. I'm old enough to have seen the internet before it was ad infested and it wasn't lacking for great content. Humans seem to have a need to share (or at least show off).
Who is paying you to post comments here on HN? I'm guessing nobody, but here you are, contributing to the internet for free.
Without ads we'd lose some things certainly, but the greater the focus there is on making money the worst everything seems to get. The best things are usually the free things, at least until greed causes enshittification to set in.
Value is relative. Some people value attention, showing off, the nice feeling of helping others, contributing to a community, stuff like "I made this tool to help with a task I struggled with, maybe it can help others too, I'll put it in Github" or simply having a good time. People's time is their own, and they'll use it however they want.
Let's say you are looking for a notebook, you are assigned to "notebook seeking" cohort. You will see "notebook ads". But the ads you will see will be the ones most profitable for your cohort.
For simplicity, let's say cohort is 100 people; if there is a one person in this cohort that is the target of an overpriced, low quality, drop shipped product, with huge margin, rest of the 99 people will be bombarded with that ad.
We were discussing haircuts in the morning and I showed her some photos online. 15 minutes later she opened Facebook and saw hairdresser commercial with THOSE EXACT haircuts we were discussing.
I was using iOS with no-track and adblocker on top of that. My guess is that link was made using IP address. Meta/Facebook was processing MY data to which I didn't agreed at any point. Most likely some website (which didn't ask for my permission, as I'm very anal about making sure I disagree to everything) shared this data with Facebook, Facebook linked the dots and voila.
That's my problem.
P.S. We did similar experiment 2 times, once with jewellery and once with specific types of shoes. One using Firefox Focus using home WiFi, second using 5G network. I disagreed to all cookie processing at any point.
WiFi connection was linked, 5G wasn't.
Genuine question but what's the harm here? Or what's the negative consequence? I understand that this is creepy, people find it uncomfortable or odd, but what about it is harmful or so negative?
But it's not about material harm, it's about boundaries. And really about which boundaries can be set. For example these days we realize being married doesn't mean the other person can force you to have sex. But that wasn't obvious at a certain point in history! The boundary couldn't be realistically set because it wasn't supported by legislation. You can't set boundaries without power.
Let's consider an example. My premise here is that boundaries depending on harm done is insufficient to motivate existing legislation-supported boundaries that basically everyone would agree with.
Imagine someone that gives everyone hugs. They are gentle, mostly. They particularly like giving you hugs, because they know you don't like it. No matter what you say, they won't stop. You can't get them to leave you alone, and your work requires you to be in that office. Actually they have access to all offices of business with open positions in your field. They even show up at and in your house. They just follow you until you get tired. You can't change your locks because the company that services your house only supports that lock. You can't get them fired. Most of your coworkers don't care that much, and some like it. A few people really don't like it and have sophisticated ways to track him so they can avoid people like him most of the time, but they spent a lot of time on boats to do that and no one will hire them. You can't do that because you are neither technical enough nor willing to forego showers and employment. If you retaliate or lash out you'll be arrested. You are complaining about it, suggesting someone makes it illegal to gratuitously touch someone who doesn't want to be touched, and someone asks you "What is the harm? I know you don't like it, but how are you being harmed?"
How do you answer?
It incentivizes companies to gobble up any and all data they can about people. It incentivizes companies to increase the silent intrusion into our lives. It incentivizes companies to forget their "markets" are actually people -- extracting value from markets is taking resources from people.
Hypothetical scenario - with 23andMe and other DNA profiling places being targets for lots of different kinds of data thieves, what are the chances that "leaked" datum ends up in some kind of ad profiling system? Ad companies might know you have cancer before you do because your genetics hint at it, your purchase history hints at it, your online behavior changes might hint at it. Yet instead of alerting you that you might have cancer, they use those hints to sell you "life extending supplements" or homeopathic remedies promising to fix one of the symptoms you have. They squeeze you for money while you are still alive to be squeezed because you aren't a person, you are an ad profile. A cash cow.
Ad companies are not out for our benefit, they are out for their own. Just like every other company whose goal is to make money, they will throw people/consumers under the bus to save profit. So why would we give them any more leverage over us?
This isn't a ban on companies from collecting personal data. This is a ban for Meta (it's unclear to me if other companies are included) to process user data for the purpose of behavioral advertising.
I would rather have <best case of personalized ads> rather than <worst case of random ads>. That's not an equal comparison, neither does it represent a common scenario.
> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here.
People do want ads to subsidize free internet usage, as it has been since the Internet's inception. People accept random ads or even contextual ads, but people flat out refuse targeted ads. This refusal comes out of many reasons, many of which you'll find in other comments around here.
Mine are self-determinism and privacy. I don't want someone, regardless of how well intentioned or competent they believe they are, to collect sensitive data on my habits, preferences and choices to then attempt to influence me. I like to make my own mistakes and own up to them.
I can assure you, there was an Internet before ads, and it was better without them.
Unfortunately many people seem to ignore the fact that it isn't one or the other, and we can reach a balance here.
Before Facebook, if you wanted to find information about a notebook, you would go to an independent forum dedicated to notebooks. These forums would typically have adverts from notebook manufacturers or computer stores - and so the ads would be relevant to what you are looking for.
Now, you wanted to learn about new notebook friends talked to you about, you opened a link and from there everywhere you go you see notebook ads. It's madness and unhelpful.
But then there are things that I don't want ad companies to know about. My medical history, my likely voting patterns, my political affiliations, my sexual orientation, the nature of my relationships with other people, etc. These are private, and I don't want ad companies (or anyone) to know these. Depending on the topic and where I live, it may even be dangerous to me for others to know these things.
One thing that has been made apparent by the advancements of ad-tech's excellent ability to find unintuitive patterns in consumer behaviour, is that the benign data can be used to predict the non-benign. So even if data collection is regulated to only collect benign data, or I am extra careful with where my sensitive data goes, I still have a problem.
That's why tracking on this scale is bad. That's why I hope we can build a society where we stop these practices.
Even that is a problem for me. Advertising is manipulation, they want to change my behaviour so I purchase whatever product they are selling. So I've gone from a state of not thinking about buying something to reaching into my wallet.
I don't want any corporation to do that to me which is why I'm against advertising in general.
When Nazis invaded a city, first thing they'd have done was getting to people register and getting names and addresses of "undesirables".
People have not learned their lesson.
Evil regimes have never had a problem finding lots and lots of citizens to kill in the 99% of human history before the internet.
Still, I think it's clear that data can very quickly go from harmless to harmful depending on who gets their hands on it. The Nazis absolutely did have a problem finding all the Jews they wanted to kill, and abundantly available data about the religious preferences of literally every citizen being immediately available to them would absolutely have caused much more death than already happened.
That's a more extreme example, but there are lot of other ways creative government could make the lives of people they don't like miserable or impossible.
Also things don't have to be as extreme as literally killing all members of a minority group for this to be deemed "bad". It can be as simple as targetted influence campaigns to push certain policies/agenda. The ability to influence on mass scales has never been easier and cheaper. There are many examples throughout the world of how that influence has been used. And while yes influence campaigns have always existed in some form, the degree of targeting and the ease at which this has been made is a case where and difference in scale is a difference in kind. This is a powerful tool that I don't believe anyone should have access to. States, companies, or individuals
Advertising in Inc vs Wall St Journal vs People magazine vs Wired vs TV Guide vs Car & Driver vs Cosmo vs Ebony all gave you easy ways to target different audiences. It's more targeted now, but I don't think it's multiple orders of magnitude more powerful (mostly because the reach isn't nearly the entire story; you still have to influence after reaching.)
Personalized ads are better at convincing you personally, so they are worse for you than random ads, or even than content-based ads. Additionally, they depend on building a detailed profile of you, which most people are fundamentally uncomfortable with when they are aware of.
I also used to 'boost' my high school senior posts to other 16/17/18 year olds in whatever area they're from. Not only did that work as advertising for me, all of the likes that the images got from that probably really boosted the kid's self esteem. Within the past year they made it so that I can no longer target people under the age of 18 by area.
Because you had the money to advertise, they wound up exposed to your photos; they liked them and they were able to afford you, so they booked you.
However, the cost of your services necessarily accounts for you spending money on advertising. Someone who doesn't advertise may have had the same quality and style of photography and a better price, but because of your advertising, the couple were tricked out of finding the best vendor. You distorted the wedding photography market in your area, and your customers actually got a worse deal than they maybe could have.
Or, perhaps you are actually the best photographer in your area, and no one else would have come close for that couple. You still lost money because you paid for advertising.
Even worse, someone who is worse than you at photography may come along with a huge advertising budget and become the only visible photographer in the area, scamming both you and the couple from a better deal.
If instead there had been some open local directory of wedding photographers, which may charge some fee for services but otherwise present all phtogorpahers neutrally, the couple would have still found the best deal, and you would have been able to either offer lower costs, or made higher profits.
Ads are not trying to inform. They virtually universally make claims that are pushed as far as possible without breaking false advertising laws. Ads never ever state limitations, for example - even though any honest information would.
I did not know that such software existed.
The ad was good for me and for the seller.
Trade is not a zero sum game.
The fact that advertising sometimes actually helps in discovering a product you actually needed is a coincidence. The main point of advertising is to convince people to prefer a product for reasons other than cost/benefit.
Even in your case - did you see the ad and immediately bought the product? Or did you see the ad and then actually went and looked for reviews, competitors, tried it out yourself etc? If you did the former, you almost certainly got scammed at least to some extent. If you did the latter, then it's not the ad that convinced you, it's the reviews/personal trial/price comparison. The ad happened to show you the product existed, but the same could have happened from a mention in a comment or anything else. The ad was not designed to show the product exists, it was designed to convince you it has certain characteristics that the product may or may not actually have.
There is no reason to assume that the negative effects outweigh the positive effects.
There are some forms of advertisement which are maybe bad.
I think we would be worse off if all advertising were banned.
Most forms of advertising are bad. There are maybe a few which are decent, but there are far better alternatives (such as business directories and non-paid review sites).
If you believe in the free market to any extent, you should be against advertising. The only thing advertising does is to distort the free market - by making market agents be less rational.
I think with a little critical thinking you can take your "the only" or "is about" statements and ask yourself if you can think of exceptions. You can, and easily.
This is false. If you've ever run ads before, the best way to get people to convert is to offer a higher cost/benefit than competitors.
How do you think Uber grew from 0 to a 90B market cap? Magical emotional trickery? No.
Uber advertised cheaper, faster, and more convenient rides. The definition of a better cost/benefit. Hence they grew fast. I could list a million examples.
I don't like the idea of companies using biases and tricks from our human brain to sell their stuff. Ads are profitable because they use our anchoring bias, amongst others. This is disgusting and inhumane to accept to exploit our vulnerabilities for capitalist reasons. We, as a society, should seek for better solutions.
For example, the personalized advertising algorithm could deduce that someone is insecure about being fat and ugly and having no friends. Then, they get ads with the message (a bit veiled of course) "you have no friends because you're fat and ugly", and some product they can buy to ostensibly solve that. Seeing that message is not good for someone's wellbeing.
That's not how adverts work. Instead I get an advert for a new TV because I bought a new TV last week.
> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads.
Adverts aren't free. The service still costs the same to provide, but on top of that you have to pay for the advert infrastructure too
Companies paying for the adverts fund the, but they only do that because they will get more money from you than the money they spend to acquire you as a customer (if they don't they go bust)
Therefore you looking at www.bmxsite.com are paying more than you would in a world without adverts
> That's not how adverts work. Instead I get an advert for a new TV because I bought a new TV last week.
Whether that works well enough to pay for producing and distributing that BMX page depends on how big the market is for BMX-related products and how many different BMX pages are vying for the attention of people who visit BMX sites and buy BMX-related products.
For things with a large market and a small number of major sites that much of the market visits, it can work great. For smaller markets it might only work for the largest sites (if there are any). So you can easily end up with the biggest site or two getting almost all the interest-related ads, and the smaller sites only get ads for things that the general population buys.
That's all fine and dandy, I think. The problem starts to become a bit bigger when suddenly everyone in your household starts to see "chlamydia medication" ads everywhere they go online based on some message you sent a month ago to a friend.
> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here.
I'm not sure that's so obvious as you make it seem. There are lots of long running websites that don't survive on personalized ads created based on behavioural profiles created by data harvesters.
The "whole category of business" doesn't have a right to exist, and the EU has the right to regulate it out of existence. And why shouldn't they? Because it would be bad for your employer or your stock portfolio?
Personal data should be toxic with high potential liability costs. This would naturally cause companies to limit their data retention and use.
By the way, here in Europe we have universal healthcare, maybe is something the US should consider?
But is funny, people want all (most?) things free, nobody wants to pay for news for example, but they don't want ads at the same time.
Makes no sense at all.
Healthcare != life insurance - they're very different things. Are you deliberately conflating them because it suits your argument?
> But is funny, people want all (most?) things free, nobody wants to pay for news for example, but they don't want ads at the same time.
Again, you're conflating two groups of people because it suits your internal narrative and makes you feel superior. I don't want ads, but I'm happy to pay for things, and I'm also happy to just not use a service that wants to spy on me and sell my data like YouTube and Facebook. According to your statement I don't exist.
> Makes no sense at all.
That's because you've made it all up.
* Hacker News (has promoted content, but without tracking) * Lobste.rs * Wikipedia * Mastodon * Project Euler * Notabug.org * Lingva Translate * Documentation for numerous FOSS projects * Various personal blogs
Honestly, it's hard for me to find websites that I regularly voluntarily use and do contain ads.
E-mail: Disroot (but with any provider that supports IMAP, you pretty much never have to visit their website)
Online shopping: while some of the sites may have ads, they could easily survive without ads because, well; they literally sell products
News: if HN stopped allowing links to websites with ads, I certainly wouldn't miss them
And if that means ad-driven websites disappear too, I don't see that as a big loss. The best websites are not ad-driven.
People prefer personalized ads. I know many friends who like Instagram ads, but don't care about ads on some random news site.
Source - worked on ads for a few years at FAANG.
Gmail famously scans the user emails to sell the info to third parties and sell adds
Ought be noted that while WhatsApp to my knowledgeable doesn't carry such a clause. It would be idiotic beyond belief to be led to believe that Facebook doesn't do the exact same thing
Please stop repeating falsehoods.
They don't: "We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads"
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en#:~:text=Th....
Do you have evidence that they do? I think Google said they did this a long time ago, but they stopped since email content didn't actually improve revenue on those ads. Message data just isn't very helpful for ads, they would do it if it was useful but it isn't so they don't.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
Personal data used to create highly personalised and targeted political ads.
It's not just about whether you get a nice notebook.
Good. A well-functioning market might emerge instead.
Regulation is the best chance for well-functioning markets. I highly doubt we are going to be without advertisements.
Advertisers pay money to serve ads not out of the goodness of their hearts but because they want to earn back not only their initial investment for the ad but a profit on top. Since they keep buying ads, it means that they are able to achieve this.
This means it should always be cheaper to pay for a service directly (avoiding all middlemen involved in the advertising industry) than to "pay" with ads. In the latter you'll not only still pay, but will have to pay more to cover the overheads of the advertising industry.
If folks were truly poor then they would be denied service since nobody would pay to serve them ads. Advertisers paying to serve them ads means there's still money to be extracted out of them, money they're better off just paying directly for the service they use.
This effectively means then that if you are in the EU and you'd want to use either Facebook or Instagram you'd have to pay for a subscription then because they presumably won't offer the free-service without personalized ads and since the law prohibits them from doing that then the only way to use either service will be to pay for it..?
Option A: Continue for free with ads (and tracking and profiling etc.)
Option B: Pay for a subscription without ads or tracking (most seem to use a service called "Pur" (pure))
This does not mesh with some people’s understanding of the GDPR, but at least several German courts said it’s okay.
Their reasoning was that GDPR says that consent must be freely given. If the site provides more service if you consent than the consent is not freely given according to those regulators.
(It seemed kind of goofy to me. In every other context I can think of consenting to something that you do not like in exchange for getting something that you want is usually considered to be freely given consent unless that something you want is something that is necessary).
[0]: https://netzpolitik.org/2023/alternative-zu-tracking-datensc...
> Meta said it has cooperated with regulators and pointed to its announced plans to give Europeans the opportunity to consent to data collection and, later this month, to offer an ad-free subscription service in Europe that will cost 9.99 euros ($10.59) a month for access to all its products
> Tobias Judin, head of the international section at the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, said Meta's proposed steps likely won't meet European legal standards. For instance, he said, consent would have to be freely given, which wouldn't be the case if existing users had to choose between giving up their privacy rights or paying a financial penalty in the form of a subscription.
In fact, it would still make sense to track ad-free users, if for no other reason than to better target ads to their family members, coworkers, and friends. They probably like what you like.
And "Bob's birthday is coming up, he would love a Barcelona team t-shirt" would be very convincing.
This is already present in EU. Spiegel.de and others are like that. Pay or be tracked.
And legal challenges to that are in the works. Some have even been partially upheld. “Pay or okay” done as a binary choice isn’t okay, like anything else, granular consent is important:
https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=DSB_(Austria)_-_2023-0.17...
It’s simply that nobody has been sued to the end for it yet.
An alternative might be homomorphic encryption, which would already be doable with current technology for something like a newspaper.
It’s easy to show ads. Not that easy to make money from doing so. It’s as valid alternative as telling people to use horses instead of cars to reduce CO2 emissions. They both get from point A to B, right?
Too bad, if your business model can’t make money without breaking laws and harming people’s rights, do you really deserve to stay in business?
> It’s as valid alternative as telling people to use horses instead of cars to reduce CO2 emissions. They both get from point A to B, right?
More like banning formula 1 cars from suburbs. People survived before without personalized ads, what will not survive is making 10-digits of profit every quarter and the associated butchery of our life and institutions in the pursuit of profit.
That's not the argument I'm making nor the comment I'm responding to. OP presented non-personalized ads as a viable alternative for their business. It's not. Let's not pretend it is.
It's a totally different conversation from one you try to turn it into.
> More like banning formula 1 cars from suburbs.
It's not, unless there have been F1 cars in every suburb for last decade.
I get it, you hate ads. Great. But that's not what we're talking about.
So like banning lead from paint? Wouldn’t someone think of the poor paint makers and landlords?
If I say "car dealers can't sell cars that go faster than 10mph and if they go out of business then they shouldn't exist", it's clearly fallacious, and I don't see how this is any different.
Agreed. So why do none of the EU's moronic laws make sense?
Most normal people are happy when they come across a useful product or service as an ad in their Instagram feed. After these laws, that won't be possible anymore for an entire continent of people.
Biggest example is the IOS privacy which has hit whole industry in terms of marketing effectiveness and cost.
To some extent easy ad revenue has given some of these companies a version of Dutch disease, if this revenue falls away for whatever reason they'll need to win out in features or efficiency. Given that I'd be happy if facebook vanished from the face of the earth and that their website is the definition of bloat I'd say they're not doing too well in that regard.
Ads are fine, but if the idea is that in order to have a free internet, Facebook needs to monopolize our online presence and shape how we receive information on other sites, then that's hardly a free internet. Facebook ruined the internet.
nothing of value will be lost and all that meme.
On a flip note: that's not reddit to preface comments w/ 'hot take'
The primary issue is liability. Secondary is ISPs not allowing people to use their Internet connections for server hosting (a hobbyist could do colocation, and many do already). Fix the law there and the compute cost is peanuts.
Huh? SEO exists because companies don't want to pay for ads. If advertising disappears, SEO will just become more prevalent and we'll have to suffer through more and more garbage.
But that's not the issue here is it? *Personalized* ads is the issue. Can the free internet survive without personalized ads? Of course it can. Will a ton of companies disappear? Yes, and so what? Business fail all the time, and new businesses based on different models will fill the void. We might even see a ton of innovation beyond figuring out how to harvest and profile people's data when our biggest brains are directed towards different problems.
For me personally it's also the constant pushing pushing pushing to buy crap that you don't need or replace things you already own. I already have a washing machine, I got it last month, you don't need to sell me another (It's actually amazing that we haven't gotten to the point there advertisers can stop push products a consumer already bought).
Google is actually really good as a "I need to buy X,Y,Z" in that case the ads are super helpful and often more relevant than the search results. I will absolutely click those ads, but I'm not going to order that new washing machine while I'm reading the news anyway.
Some will say that ads hijack your attention and therefore should be blocked by default. This is a different question. But since ad companies wanted to track ROI it became a problem, because it’s pretty easy for them to do that on the internet. That’s why more people are opposed to ads on the internet but not on a busstop.
If the busstop ads start taking retina scans to show you more personal ads while you travel around town, people will be opposed to that too.
You don’t need to track every user and every click to show ads and make money. But as ad companies like meta can make more money by tracking your every step they will just do that.
There were ads on the internet before tracking became a thing. And people made money off of those ads.
The Deutsche Post, or DHL is sort of tracking too, since a looong time. By having their delivery minions gather information about the circumstances people live in, and selling that information to interested parties.
Agreed. So why is the EU making that illegal? I want to be able to use products for free by opting in to personalized ads so that businesses can make enough revenue to justify having an ad-supported free version of their product.
The incompetent bureaucrats at the EU won't allow Meta to offer that.
Free sites will close without targeted advertisement, obviously; they barely can afford to pay salaries now, so with untargeted ads it will be impossible. And the only media sites that will be able to afford to run are those that are subsidised by the state. This is already happening in Europe, where most of the big media are practically bankrupt and their income comes from the state in the form of subsidies, ad campaigns, internships paid by the state, etc.
You already have a sibling comment in this thread precisely asking for that: the state paying for the media. How do they think this will end?
This is not idle talk. Think e.g. about personal credit. An important consideration in certain banking models is filtering out good from bad credits. Guess what, so-called "alternative credit data" which include social media activity is already a thing (search for it).
Its basically a digital wild west. Greed, hypocrisy, misrepresentation, collusion, corruption. As a rule, anything that is not be prohibited by draconian fines and license removals will be done. The honeypot is irresistible and people left on their own are just digitally illiterate idiots.
To groups, not individuals. Soap operas cast a wide net, they don’t target you specifically. Which is very much possible with Facebook ads.
https://observer.com/2014/09/marketing-whiz-drives-roommate-...
We all want roads to allow us to roam freely but don't want to pay the government people that manage everything around those roads.
Everyone wants free content but everyone wants to be paid for their work.
I have a pihole and one of the website I frequently visit has been remade and now everything is empty. I'm currently thinking about paying for this content... or just quit and live without this content.
pretty easy if you publicly fund it. My vision of Europe is every town, every city putting some money into building out federated and decentralized systems, supported by small and middle-sized business. Effectively the same way radio or public broadcasting is already supported in say Germany or the UK.
We should go all the way and just rid ourselves of Meta, Tencent et al, sadly there's probably not enough vision for something like it.
Good!
we're not incentivised to pay as our data is mined and sold anyway, our attention still fought for
I know lots of advertisers think they can't live without it --- because promoters have told them so.
No, it's because they want to make as much money as possible.
If promoters told them to turn off all ads, they wouldn't. They don't care about promoters. They care about money.
The promoters of personalized advertising care about money too.
The auction systems they promote can be easily manipulated to maximize profits. And since these systems are "black boxes", advertisers themselves really have no way to know if they are being manipulated or not. The only insight they have is what the promoters tell them.
As a thought experiment, let's go back to the time when the internet existed, adds existed, but targeted adds were in their infancy. Now let's imagine they were launched as some sort of op-in Google BETA this in early 0s fashion.
Assuming, for a moment that the targeting quality was on part — would that have been a success? Ie. would the user adoption have been significantly higher Apple's Tracking Transparancy Policy? (Considering that consent was involved before distrust accumulated in the following decades as result of forcefully surveiling, fingerprinting, third-party cookiea, facebook shenanigans, appstore malware, supercookies, etc.)
Back then, before smartphones, before carrying a device in your pocket that can track your every move, it wouldn't have seemed nearly as creepy.
It's actually kind of amusing to me that Apple is the one acting like it's protecting people's data. Without Apple's invention of the iPhone, which doesn't have to be built to collect as much data about its use as it does, there wouldn't be nearly as much data for these apps to collect!
Products with no fancy marketing, frequently coming from smaller local companies, bring much better price/quality ratio.
The sponsoring of brainwashing is worse than the value loss.
That would imply, that (globally) we spent significantly [EDIT: remove -less-, insert:] more on advertising before the advent of personalized targeting.
Why would a reduction in advertising costs equate to lower consumer pricing — if there's a better margin to be had instead?
Got confused while writing by the observation that ad expenditure is rising year after year. So clearly, the "savings" allegedly attributed to personalized targeting have not translated to advertisers.
Advertising is a type of "content", and people like content-, but how one can say it's better than the content recommended by people not paid to promote it?
One, the more people are used to get their content via ads (instead of share by friends), the least they'll be incentivize to share good content.
Two, platforms that are paid by advertisers are certainly incentivize to have the best content in ads vs non ads. Why feature a video in your feed but they can be paid to push the same content from an advertiser?
There are so many reasons why "some ads are great" says nothing about ads being a good thing.
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