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The EU's war on behavioral advertising

thisisunpacked.substack.com

71–80 of 420 posts

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#71
post #2

This is a wonderful start. Here's hoping it catches on outside of the EU as well!

I really wish Canada would grow a pair, and stand up to the big social media platforms -- especially in the light of the latest shenanigans with the availability of / paying for news. Whichever side of that debate you fall on, you have to admit that meta et al are in a position to strong-arm a country and have an impact on its laws. That's a terrible precedent, already having played out in Australia. Anything that ch…

>Anything that chokes off the flow of money via advertising to these companies is a two-tier win in my book.

So you want paywalls for every service?

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#72
post #2

This is a wonderful start. Here's hoping it catches on outside of the EU as well!

What about this free market that everyone talks about? I don't think there are any protections around the reasonable expectation of privacy from a private industry perspective in the US. If you use the internet, or an app, you must protect yourself. I assume everyone is a capitalist, so wouldn't adding laws here somehow subsidize and therefore tarnish the market?

> I assume everyone is a capitalist,

I assure you that I am not.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#73

The EU's war is on US companies. They wouldn't be playing fast and loose with these regulations if their home born companies were the ones getting disadvantaged. They push draconian surveillance laws then claim sainthood when they go after Facebook. I guess you can hate Facebook et al and welcome this stuff but it's hard to deny how these laws are basically trade barriers aimed at the US tech industry.

No, you just have to follow the regulations. It's no "war on US companies" or anything like that. They wrote some good law (Albeit it has a few weaknesses), and enforce it now. And if you want to do business in the EU, you have to follow them. I would say it's more a problem of the US companies, if they can't do business without violating EU regulations.

Have you read how vague the laws are. It's all designed to extract fines from US companies.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#75
Contextual targeting hasn't been a thing because it's not very easy to accurately extract structured targeting signals from unstructured documents. At best for now, we may extract a set of word embedding per page which likely misses precise contexts as well as subtle nuances. Now we have LLM which has objectively better capabilities to do that job and everyone is now forced to invest more into contextual targeting, I guess there will be significant developments on targeting systems. The question would be how to make super cheap models which can handle both pre-processed offline web page context as well as online usage contexts.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#76
post #54
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it will not, because that is unsustainable. but we can shove our head even deeper in the sand and hope so

Why is it not sustainable?

Because he probably works for a tech company who's main revenue is advertising.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#77
post #38
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found the online marketing person! And there are plenty of reasons.

if you re in tech your salary depends on advertising money somewhere along the chain

Not all tech jobs depend on user targeted advertising. Only some big-tech ones.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#78

Interesting how this is forcing these companies to objectively improve their products -- chronological feeds, friends and follows only, etc is what users have been begging for and being ignored, because advertising trash salad is more profitable. If the long-term effects end up being along the lines of the big social corps withdrawing from the EU, I see that as an enormous win for that economic zone. The presence of…

> Interesting how this is forcing these companies to objectively improve their products

Is it though? Facebook only used to show me content from friends and pages I followed. Now it's a nonstop hose of garbage content that only exists to stuff the space between poorly targeted ads.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#79
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you re in tech your salary depends on advertising money somewhere along the chain You say that like it's a good thing.

without online media, computers would be in the sector of scientific instruments

I have an enjoyable and well-paying job in the sector of scientific instruments.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it? The EU is just protecting its own member states' IT industries and its own interest in undermining encrypted communications.

> The EU is just protecting its own partner states' IT industries Doesn’t the GDPR go back to a largely grassroots effort, including from members of the Pirate Party phenomenon that people initially scoffed at? I have no doubt that there has been local IT lobbying, but one cannot deny some level of true popular will.

The green party was a small german party with lots of access to powerful eu people

I very much doubt this was anywhere near "grassroots" to the italians

That is not even how eu politics work

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