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GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

blogs.harvard.edu

371–380 of 454 posts

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#371
The real answers here should be in the data, but as an anecdote I experienced something that genuinely impressed me the other day.

I’m in the market for a new mattress, and the other day on a whim I stopped at a mattress store (in real life). After I left the store, within an hour, I looked at a site I commonly look at (a political site), and saw a banner ad for the mattress store company.

In any case, it’s hard for me to believe that targeted advertising doesn’t work, because without it, I see adds in product categories I will never buy in.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#372
post #299
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are the marketers other choices? Advertise on a tech site, 80+% will be interested in tech. Advertise on a dog community site is probably pretty spot on if you want to target dog owners... Far better than what, 5% ? This isn't rocket science, we sold everyones integrity for pennies. > who watch the ad, and aren't buying an iPhone. It's waste. No, advertisements like that are more about selling the brand than s…

> Advertise on a dog community site is probably pretty spot on if you want to target dog owners... Big brands struggle with UGC. Witness the events of YouTube & brand safety. But even without that, what you're saying just isn't scalable. What community site can reach even 50% of dog owners -- let alone what a primtetime sitcom or YouTube can reach? > No, advertisements like that are more about selling the brand than…

People that has enough interest to use a dog-forum has too much knowledge of quality to buy things that a company advertises. They will know already what works for their dog and does not listen to advertising in the normal sense. They might however listen to bloggers that has been payed to talk about brands.

If you buy ads, you want them displayed to the non-fanatics that is not influenced by experience and vulnerable to brand exposure.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it ends up abused by marketers, and frequently ends up facilitating crime as well. GDPR as a law came out directly from the last decade of mass surveillance economy.

So what? It was part of the agreement when you consented. The same way that when you go to a club, a strip club, or a casino you know you 'll be exploited in a way. Sounds like advocating for overreaching laws that "save you from yourself" and keep you away from harm / drugs etc. It's a bit ironic that you brought up mass surveillance because GDPR explicitly exempts the police and security services from its reach. Ed…

Replying to your edit:

> consent should always be required, but if you don't consent i shouldn't be legally required to service you. GDPR is more than just consent hence the overreach

Yeah, and in a world where companies were not abusive, it would work that way. As it is, we both know perfectly well what happens - companies have leverage over users, and they'll use it. They'll make you consent to every kind of data abuse and sharing to use the service, exploiting the fact that giving up privacy doesn't feel like it's hurting at the point the data is being taken. GDPR is designed to remove that leverage - to make it unable for companies to extract arbitrary consents on the threat of refusal of service.

This only really affects you if your business model was baiting users with "free" services, spying on them, and selling that data to adtech industry.

> The NSA has more data than any single actor on the internet, we can't possibly claim that private surveillance is worse. The NSA may have a better profile of me than any private actor even though (and especially because) i m not american. And their profiling can harm something that businesses generally don't care to harm: my freedom

Sure, so NSA may have pulled in your e-mail history at some point in time. But it's mostly sitting there. NSA doesn't care about you unless make yourself important to US national security. Adtech surveillance, on the other hand, track you constantly, through pretty much every device you have, every site you visit, and makes use of your data all the time. And all in all, this data might at some point finds its way to NSA too, already nicely packaged. NSA vs. adtech is kind of like choosing high potential loss but very rarely, vs. low loss all the time. I'd say the expected loss is worse with adtech, but I'm still happy GDPR will make the life difficult for both.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#374
post #97
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how self-hosting has anything to do with it honestly. This is about tracking people without their consent. It's about preserving rights of individuals. Self hosting is no more or less acceptable than third party hosting. It's not a technical issue.

> It's about preserving rights of individuals. I'm not sticking up for all the big data perverts, but what about an individuals right to speak freely and disclose information they have observed/recorded? The 'right to be forgotten' seems at odds with everyone else's right to remember and disclose occurances.

GDPR also doesn't forbid individuals to do pretty much anything. Article 2c "This Regulation does not apply [...] for a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity;" - you can speak freely and disclose information you have observed/recorded, but the business you are running can not.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#375
post #371

The real answers here should be in the data, but as an anecdote I experienced something that genuinely impressed me the other day. I’m in the market for a new mattress, and the other day on a whim I stopped at a mattress store (in real life). After I left the store, within an hour, I looked at a site I commonly look at (a political site), and saw a banner ad for the mattress store company. In any case, it’s hard for…

On the other hand I'm not in the market for a new mattress but I see advertisement for it everywhere. Might it just be that mattress ads are common this time of the year? A quick check of one of scandinavias more known bed and furniture chains (if ikea does not count...) shows they are having a sale of mattresses right now so if I didn't have ads blocked I would probably have seen some.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#376
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What site you run and why you need to log my personal data(IP,browser,other identifying data) do you have good reasons to keep it forever or you purge it after you analyze it?

How can a SAAS defend chargeback claims without IP address? Stripe stores IP address and the proof that the user paid for the subscription using the same IP and created an account ties them together.

Have a timeout, that may be a valid reason to store it for the chargeback limitation (120 days IIRC) but definitely not a valid reason to store it forever, as the parent post was talking about.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#377
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR doesn't say you have to purge backups. That's nonsense spread by people who have assumed it's stupid without reading it.

"The individual can be assured that their personal data will not be restored back to production systems (except in certain rare instances, e.g., the need to recover from a natural disaster or serious security breach). In such cases, the user’s personal data may be restored from backups, but the controller will take the necessary steps to honor the initial request and erase the primary instance of the data again." It…

> It sounds like you need to erase the data again even if you used a backup. That means you need a separate database of the entries you deleted.

Which you would need anyway. What, you're gonna make previously-deleted users active again after a backup restore? Fixing references to deleted data from active data might be a little more work, but tombstoning the deleted users isn't hard.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$250 shoes do not last 5 times as long as $50 shoes. Improved comfort is the main benefit.

The math can work out in some cases. I've had my 400$ Allen Edmunds for 8 years, some wear, but generally still in fantastic shape and very comfortable. Prior to getting them I bought 1-3 pairs of ~70$ department store shoes per year.

Usually it's very anecdotal and hard to tell ahead of time. My current shoes cost 40€ and that was about 4 years ago. So they have lasted atleast half as long as your expensive shows for 1/10th the price.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#379

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…

Yeah, my impression is that this whole "smart, targeted ads" thing is actually just a lie, and that it's really more of a "spray and pray" kind of thing. It's a bubble!

But everyone using this spray and pray knows it is far from perfect. You just use the best you can get and knows about the imperfections. Spray and pray also works in a broad sense.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#380
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the odds of someone offical even noticing that you are in violation of GDPR? Plenty of ordinary people will be actively looking for opportunities to file GDPR complaints. I know I will. This is a crusade. Taking the Internet back from adtech.

Are you going after amazon or my neighbours small online flower business?

It depends, for example a local restaurant mini-chain has been doing some spamming and refused to take me off their list, so if I get a single message from them after May 26th, I'll definitely file a complaint. From the consumers perspective, the main GDPR effect is that things that previously were scummy but legal have now become forbidden, and some of the things that have been forbidden but not enforced now have an enforcement mechanism with teeth to make it happen.
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