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GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

blogs.harvard.edu

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Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#311

Post by wolco »

dnautics wrote: post #153
madeofpalk wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By and large, it doesn't, very well. I know Twitter isn't known for being the best at advertising, but it was made exceptionally clear to me that online advertising is a massive bunch of lies when I did my GDPR Twitter data export and it included me in a bunch of incorrect, non-sensical and contradictory ad targeting groups. Twitter claims I: * Own a cat, dog and other animal (I don't) * Have between $100k- $999k l…

Facebook believes I'm african-american (I'm not)

You might just be to facebook because you like content similiar to others in an ad group labelled african american.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#312

Post by jamiequint »

losteric wrote: post #173
jamiequint wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I don't think that Walmart should be able to record me with security cameras while I'm in the store I should have the right to demand that they ask me to sign a waiver before entering the store? Shouldn't it be Walmart's right to do what they want on their property, and my right to decide not to visit Walmart if I don't agree with that. Isn't the converse an infringement of Walmart's rights?

GDPR has exemptions for security. Your free to track information for the purposes of blocking vulnerability bots, but only the minimum data required for that purpose... and your visitor's data cannot be used for other applications without their consent. > Shouldn't it be Walmart's right to do what they want on their property, and my right to decide not to visit Walmart if I don't agree with that. Isn't the converse a…

> “they can't record what you're looking at and reuse that information for targeted advertising without consent”

What law prevents them from doing this?

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#313

Post by lovich »

afarrell wrote: post #161
lovich wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you dont have money, materials, or employees flowing through Europe there is very little they could do to you even if you actively flaunted the law. They could always block access to your site, or even try to sanction your business but unless they are willing to invade your country to physically stop you they don't have very many options. There is always the chance that your own government will enforce EU rulings…

If another company with facilities in the EU then buys the noncompliant company, could they enforce a judgement on the parent company? If a noncompliant company is going through due diligence prior to being acquired, they be legally obligated to disclose that judgement? Even if they didn't, how hard would it be for an associate at a law firm to check public records about the company?

Yea they could, but this is basic politics and sovereignty. Nations are allowed to make rules for operating inside themselves. You don't just get to ignore all of those rules when working inside them because you said your home is another nation.

The other side of that is that you can tell foreign governments to fuck off if you aren't dealing with them at all. The only time the foreign governments matter is if they are a superpower able to bend your own country to it's will, and that point you are basically a colony anyway so there's not much you can do

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#314

Post by wolco »

seanieb wrote: post #259
fanf2 wrote: post #211

> perhaps a $trillion or more has been spent on adtech, and not one brand known to the world has been made by it Google.

Every single venture backed company in SV since 2000 was built with ad money.

Is this true? No oil money or movie money? Or software sales money?

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#315

Post by confounded »

quotemstr wrote: post #264
TeMPOraL wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is "my business model depends on it" not a bona fide legitimate purpose for information collection? Business models are arbitrary and orthogonal to services provided. > But you don't get to randomly outlaw certain entire classes of business. Why not? Some business models are clearly antisocial and don't deserve to exist. GDPR is only outlawing business models based on large-scale abuse of people's private and i…

> Business models are arbitrary and orthogonal to services provided. That's a very interesting claim. So you're saying it'd be possible to organize fighter jet production as a co-op vegan collective?

One example might be the provision of a ‘free attraction’ service in exchange for surveillance capabilities, and the business model being various unrelated ways to exploit those capabilities (targeted ads, selling the raw data, selling products derived from the data, etc).

This has become the default business model of the B2C Internet, as distinct from offering a service in exchange for payment.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#316

Post by jamiequint »

tomtheelder wrote: post #245
adventured wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can add Alibaba, Baidu and Toutiao to that list. Nearly all of their revenue comes from adtech. Just three platforms used by a billion people. Yahoo was also made possible by adtech, it was / is a brand known to over a billion people. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat - they only exist courtesy of their adtech. Can you imagine how difficult it would be for Twitter to sustain itself with a paid model? There's such an ex…

Out of the three you listed, only one has actually made money. Snapchat and Twitter have lost incredible amounts. Also, I think what the article is suggesting is that brands don't typically get built on the back of advertising _initially_. All three of those started without it and added it in later once they were highly entrenched to try to monetize. I still don't think it was a very good point in the article, though…

Twitter has been net income positive each of the last two quarters.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#317

Post by seem_2211 »

rossdavidh wrote: post #59

Oddly, I think the article underestimates the size of the change coming. I think one side affect of the surge of IT into advertising, is that it has become easier to measure exactly how well advertising works. By and large, it doesn't, very well. I am reminded of this, from Paul Graham, about his time at Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "...The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the…

There's a well-worn advertising quote "I waste 50% of my advertising budget. The problem is I don't know what half."

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#318

Post by joering2 »

Something tells me it will be similar to the fear mongering of cookies policies circa 2014.

Meanwhile as ICO reporting, only on average 50 companies/sites have been investigated and punished, per year.

https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/cookies/

Most likely with GDPR being so damn popular, they will be overloaded on day one. Heck, I personally have 5 different emailers I never provided my email to, that I just wait for the end of May to report! Do I believe each will be prosecuted and extracted out of $25MM in penalties ? Nope.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#319

Post by curun1r »

tzs wrote: post #277
solomatov wrote: post #30

One surprising side effect of this might be that the hordes of machine learners and data scientists who used to work for adtech might go to healthcare/bioinformatics where we might get new breakthroughs.

They can still use sufficiently anonymized data under GDPR. They also will have data from people who have consented to have their data used. They will also have data from visitors who are not in the Union. I would not at all be surprised if this is enough for the machine learning and data science people to be effective, especially at very high traffic sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Anonymization won't really help because you can't store unique identifiers. IPs, emails device identifiers, etc and anything derived from them (no hashes of that data either) are all prohibited. So you can't really build a profile of someone if you've got no key to look it up when you need to target someone.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#320

Post by seem_2211 »

nine_k wrote: post #223
madeofpalk wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By and large, it doesn't, very well. I know Twitter isn't known for being the best at advertising, but it was made exceptionally clear to me that online advertising is a massive bunch of lies when I did my GDPR Twitter data export and it included me in a bunch of incorrect, non-sensical and contradictory ad targeting groups. Twitter claims I: * Own a cat, dog and other animal (I don't) * Have between $100k- $999k l…

Have they got the following mostly right: * Your age bracket; * The fact that your net worth is positive (not deep in debt); * Whether you live in a city / suburb / countryside; * Which part of country is that; * Your gender; * Your race / ethnicity, broadly? If so, they still have an immensely precise focus on you, compared to TV, radio, or paper media, even if they're mistaken about your cat.

Yep agreed. As a salesperson, knowing someone went to college is often more helpful than knowing what exact college someone went to - too personalized is just creepy. I think the trick is somewhere around the space being able to accurately engage someone with of "hey you look like the sort of person who might be interested in xyz".
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