Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech giants

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 171 posts

Re: EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech giants

#81

Post by throwaway2245 »

Jestar342 wrote: post #3
an_ko wrote: post #2

In what I imagine is a brilliant twist of irony (I can't read the article), all I see when I open this page is a consent form to be tracked, with a link buried in text to opt out, which brings me to a page that requires me to fill in all of my personal details in order to opt out. Apparently in order not to track me reading their web page, Reuters requires (among others) my full name, residency, date of birth, street…

I see the usual OneTrust modal, with a giant, very easy to locate "Reject All" button at the bottom of the modal. https://imgur.com/uZmlGlc

I would wager that "Reject All" does not, in fact, opt you out of "Legitimate Interests" - sites are using the language "Object to Legitimate Interests" for this.

Re: EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech giants

#82

Post by melomal »

Nextgrid wrote: post #72
DaedPsyker wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it just be that online advertising is simply oversold? I don't know about others but I'd click an ad maybe once every 6 months at best. Maybe there is logic behind constant feed although on a number of occasions I actively avoid products for bombarding me (looking at you grammerly).

I do believe online advertising is a bit of a bubble right now. Lots of bullshit unprofitable VC-funded companies burn tons of money on advertising (more than what they'd ever earn from the potential customer) in an attempt to establish monopolies which in turn inflates the value of advertising companies.

Slap the word A.I. or ML in there are you are golden.

New platform, new opportunities. I have thrown money into ad's on various content suggestion platforms, Reddit, Quora, BuySellAds, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and a hell of a lot more.

TikTok is apparently incredible right now with conversions and pricing. It's all over the forums and the guru's are pumping it too. Give me some solid targeting options and viable metrics and you could probably wrangle some money out of me and many other marketers out there. I would say it's easy money if you can spin the ad network in a new way.

Re: EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech giants

#83

Post by dillondoyle »

melomal wrote: post #49
yulaow wrote: post #5

At this point honestly I just wish for a general ban on tracking ads of any kind. Just give me good old contextual ads and remove some MBs of js, with the only purpose of tracking me, from most websites of the internet.

The thing is these ads are not exactly effective either. I mean you'll read about the guru's with 90% conversion rate at 0.50c per click or some garbage like that but when you run them yourself, with what is considered a normal company (not a unicorn) you somehow find yourself with a They are crazy cheap though and essentially act like a TV/Radio ad. It's about getting repeated exposure, even if it's not a direct con…

I see this a lot but I find that it can't be true on the whole for many many.

We buy ads for political clients. On FB I could get a positive immediate roi for donations. Scaling huge is hard (i got one client to over $1 million last cycle for context). Admittedly but you could go a lot bigger if you look at ROI down the line with email donations.

And we're not alone. I don't think the many many direct to consumer brands would spend so much money on FB if they didn't get a positive ROI.

Maybe some PE or other funded brands are trying to grow over profit spending more than they make. But there are a ton that are profit seeking and get good value. FB is definitely an exception though unless you are an app install ad on mobile.

Re: EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech giants

#85

Post by jefftk »

> profiling of users for content moderation purposes should be banned

I'm not sure exactly what this is suggesting, but noticing that a user has previously posted abusive comments and using that to lower the threshold for flagging future comments for review seems completely fine.

Re: EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech giants

#86

Post by afdgadfgadfh »

dillondoyle wrote: post #83
melomal wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is these ads are not exactly effective either. I mean you'll read about the guru's with 90% conversion rate at 0.50c per click or some garbage like that but when you run them yourself, with what is considered a normal company (not a unicorn) you somehow find yourself with a They are crazy cheap though and essentially act like a TV/Radio ad. It's about getting repeated exposure, even if it's not a direct con…

I see this a lot but I find that it can't be true on the whole for many many. We buy ads for political clients. On FB I could get a positive immediate roi for donations. Scaling huge is hard (i got one client to over $1 million last cycle for context). Admittedly but you could go a lot bigger if you look at ROI down the line with email donations. And we're not alone. I don't think the many many direct to consumer bra…

Where is the control for the experiment? What is the ROI on non-targeted ads?

Re: EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech giants

#87

Post by bgdam »

weinzierl wrote: post #14
Semaphor wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me (EU) the consent popup has "reject all" at the very bottom (though I only see it with blocking disabled). Pretty lame, but still better than most.

"For me (EU) [..]" You are probably not the right person to ask then, but I always wondered: How prevalent are these consent popups outside of the EU?

Way less frequent. I'm usually jumping between Germany and India and whenever I'm in Germany it feels like I'm always getting a popup on every site I visit for the first time.

A lot of the same sites don't bother to throw the popup when I'm browsing from India.

Re: EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech giants

#88

Post by thetrb »

KDJohnBrown wrote: post #29

What the EU should really do is fine / tax monopolists like Google and Facebook into submission then invest that money into the EU-based startup ecosystem.

Cool, maybe the US should also add some protections against German exports.

Re: EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech giants

#89

Post by Fargren »

GradientAssent wrote: post #38
jka wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads could be placed into a search engine, and user agents could choose to request relevant ads based on the page they are viewing (the context) and/or the current user's profile (if the user opts-in to their profile being included). Advertisers would compete within that search engine to have the most relevant and accurate product and service offerings to match demand, and would pay the search engine provider for the…

And when effectively no users opt in to advertising, how does the search engine stay in business? It does actually cost money to operate a good search engine.

The search can still show ads that are relevant to my search terms, right?

Re: EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech giants

#90

Post by simion314 »

apples_oranges wrote: post #76
simion314 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People. Just. Delete. Your. Cookies. Regularly. Do you think you are clever? Like this ad trackers can't just switch to use local storage, fingerprinting or other methods to go around your clever solution? You can't use tech to solve this, Google, Facebook and the others will tech around your fix.

I am not being clever, but sometimes the clever people need an idiot to see what is in front of them. ;) ok tell me what are anonymous browser windows good for? Local storage is not deleted then? If yes, use that.

Sure, now train all people to use that. And then tell them how to edit their hosts file(or to install a firewall) to also block tracking embedded in apps or in the OS. And when the OS vendor goes around the firewall and the DNS by using other technology then tell the users to buy and setup some fancy router and when they invent some other tech then what ?

Much simpler, make tracking without permission illegal so everyone can benefit not only the tech people and the ones that can afford extra routers, VPNs or other tech solutions. Also not sure if private mode is 100% safe.

Post reply on HN