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

161–170 of 171 posts

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

#161

Post by Nasrudith »

KDJohnBrown wrote: post #148
beaconstudios wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hey I'm no fan of naked neoliberalism either, but I promise you an EU facebook would suck just as much and in the same ways as US facebook. Profit motives still exist for huge corporations in Europe. every tool has its use, but protectionism is not the way to solve big tech's bad incentives.

Why is protectionism bad? Why is it better to allow trade imbalances which sucks your nation’s financial and intellectual wealth to others with nothing in return?

By definition in a trade imbalance you are getting the imports in return. Putting aside believed Great Depression influences and tit for tat tarrifing it puts your own nation's companies at a disadvantage intentionally by discouraging both efficiency and quality.

Coddling them with a protected domestic market. Protecting one company means harming others who depend upon their type of outputs. This in turn harms their competiveness and can lead to domestic demand declining.

Effectively imposing a tarrif is like sanctioning yourself - If protectionism was helpful shouldn't they be at least a player in the Caribbean and South and Central American markets? Cuba had its own domestic auto market for decades from sanctions and the only people to benefit were mechanics as they had to play automobile reanimator to actively used vehicles that have grown older than the oldest member of their workforce.

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

#162

Post by tluyben2 »

II2II wrote: post #78
8fingerlouie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not like the current tracking adds are super efficient always. I searched for a new washing machine, found one I liked, bought it, and spent the next 3 months looking at washing machine adds.

Clearly more tracking needs to be done in order to connect your conversion to your purchase. Not only will they stop showing ads of washing machines after the purchase, knowing the make and model will help them gauge when to start targeting repair ads as well as start targeting replacement machine ads. They will also know whether you will stick to the current manufacturer or which you will switch to, and which model…

Well, they could just use common sense: a washing machine is something people look at when the old one broke down or moved house: they need it so they are likely to buy one asap. Show it a week and then stop. Laptops are similar: makes no sense showing it for months, and that is what happens now.

Even if they have the sales data, it is not connected to the ad data (bought a laptop from a big chain here this week: will get ads for that laptop from the same chain for months) so common sense should work fine for now. If the ads appear around the days I am looking for the article, I even might click on them. Now that my brain knows all ads are irrelevant because they are outdated things I already have, I just do not see them anymore.

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

#163

Post by [deleted] »

GradientAssent wrote: post #128
stiray wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I would. Based on the really, really crappy results that google gaves me out lately (I have actually quit using it), $12 a year seems more than reasonable (you have market of millions of users, charging $10 / month is ripoff). Under condition that it is not some ads company under disguise (like google), that they eliminate all SEO crap (i dont want those results anywhere near the 100th page of results) and ads fr…

> Based on the really, really crappy results that google gaves me out lately People on Hacker News seem to think Google's results have gotten worse over time. Maybe they have for the narrow set of interests and requirements of this crowd, but I'm very confident they've gotten better for the vast majority of other users (users who I bet are less likely to use an ad blocker too). > That they eliminate all SEO crap (i d…

[deleted]

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

#164

Post by melomal »

ChrisIsTaken wrote: post #158
spaetzleesser wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a lot more AI the smart people at Google, Amazon and Facebook may find out one day that there are products you buy rarely versus products you buy repeatedly. Like washing machines vs potato chips. It makes sense to show ads for potato chips but with washing machines you should stop after purchase. I much preferred the time when kiteboarding sites had static kiteboarding ads instead of the current situation where…

Not an AI problem. This happens when small businesses outsource their adsense campaign to one of the many completely incompetent fly by night SEO shops, or to their grandson who's "good at computers". Half of Google's income is derived from businesses pissing their marketing budget up a wall with incorrectly targeted ads. But it's still more effective than newspapers.

> Half of Google's income is derived from businesses pissing their marketing budget up a wall with incorrectly targeted ads.

Ah yes I was waiting for a response like this. Adsense campaign or do you mean Adwords campaign? There's a pretty big difference between the two.

Also, what's the difference between pissing away money on "poor targeting" and "testing" targeting which helps you to determine what the best options are?

Alot of bro-vado in your comment - what's your avg CTR? Churn rate? Spend? Out of curiosity.

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

#165

Post by CaptainZapp »

fhood wrote: post #141
spaetzleesser wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a lot more AI the smart people at Google, Amazon and Facebook may find out one day that there are products you buy rarely versus products you buy repeatedly. Like washing machines vs potato chips. It makes sense to show ads for potato chips but with washing machines you should stop after purchase. I much preferred the time when kiteboarding sites had static kiteboarding ads instead of the current situation where…

You know I think Amazon may have gotten better about that in the last little bit. I don't recall being flooded with recommendations for something I just purchased recently.

Amazon knows what you ordered. So it's pretty simple for them not displaying ads for high-ticket items you just purchased.

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

#166

Post by jka »

jka wrote: post #155
GradientAssent wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a good question. I'd flip it around a bit and say that if you're a search engine that: - Hosts commercial advertising content (not the entire web; only product and service offerings) - Charges for hosting - Has a highly qualified audience that genuinely wants to receive relevant advertising (based on requests being user-initiated, not software-initiated) - Claims credit for revenue generated as a result of provi…

Two more thoughts:

- This is a bit like eBay or Amazon, arguably; except that the user profile and context is optional for the user to provide

- Addictive products could still be a loophole that bad advertisers could exploit to monetize users without providing them overall benefit; fortunately local regulations tend to cover that

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

#167

Post by ElectricMind »

I applaud EU for taking at least this initiative. US tech giants is result of lax rules by USA and entire world is suffering. I will even go further and say: EU should not allow any US company to work on EU soil unless there is separate sub-EU division which is tailor made for compatible with EU laws. US should solve their own problems inside US. We have our own problem- no free tutoring and moral lessons !

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

#168

Post by Avamander »

betterunix2 wrote: post #112
4cao wrote: post #6

Call me cynical but more regulation like this only serves to further entrench the existing (quasi-)monopolies by increasing the barriers for new entrants. Especially the focus on "illegal" content and political advertising only (as opposed to, say, advertising as such) makes it appear not as an attempt to improve the situation in general, but rather to carve a bigger slice of the extant lucrative pie for certain inte…

Yup, that is exactly how it worked with GDPR: big companies can easily afford the cost of compliance while smaller competitors struggle.

Can you provide any citations for that claim?

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

#169

Post by 8fingerlouie »

exporectomy wrote: post #147
8fingerlouie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not like the current tracking adds are super efficient always. I searched for a new washing machine, found one I liked, bought it, and spent the next 3 months looking at washing machine adds.

You seem to imply that the alternative would be more effective. What ads did you see in the 3 months prior to buying it? Maybe they were equally bad or worse but you forgot because of the psychological impact of the washing machines.

I’d like to say I saw the “normal selection”, but the truth is I don’t remember. I’m fairly certain there were not many washing machines there, but probably a good deal of “tech”.

In any case, I put up a network wide Pi-hole blocker shortly after it because the washing machine adds didn’t just show up on my single device, but pretty much every device i own, including my wife’s phone.

I’ve since spent a long time since trying to convince my wife that Apple doesn’t listen for keywords and sell it (though I have no doubt Facebook, Google and Amazon would - if allowed), and that the fact she was seeing washing machine adds as well was either that she had searched for one (at the same time) or they were basing it on our public ip.

I also switched my search engine to DDG at the same time, and it’s quite funny watching the profiling algorithms struggle to find something they think I like. There are still washing machines in there, but the rest of the adds are pretty much all over the place.

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

#170

Post by dillondoyle »

dillondoyle wrote: post #151
afdgadfgadfh wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are a lot of ways to do it. For us we make a donation page. The only links that go there are from FB ads. We also use different refcodes for different ad groups AND the FB pixel passing in purchase value which is really good at optimizing FB's delivery to highest ROAS FB is very very very good at this I feel like people who question it or like don't understand basic attribution should do some more research befo…

Also re-reading I think I misunderstood half of your question.

For us personally we cannot get anywhere close to similar ROI from other platforms like Snap that attempt to be FB let alone contextual targeting.

It probably works better for app instal ads but otherwise it's.

The cookie based ecosystem also doesn't add a ton of value, some studies say between 5-15%.

It's Facebook and Amazon and Google's 1P data that don't rely on cookies.

Post reply on HN