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The EU's war on behavioral advertising

thisisunpacked.substack.com

81–90 of 420 posts

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#81
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the media that never tracked its users, yes.

people should remember that advertising was equally vilified at all times , whether it was on TV or print or radio. But at the time the EU was wise enough not to destroy its media economy. This time it's different

Sure, and rightly so, but still there needs to be some limit to how much the advertising industry is permitted to do.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#82
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You don’t need to track people to pay for things with ads. You can advertise based on the surrounding content pretty effectively. It’s what TV channels have done for years.

Behavior ads or paywall is a false dichotomy.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#83
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> except the destruction of the entire eu online advertising industry Yes, but what are the negative effects?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4HkASndEXo&t=40s [SFW]

I immediately thought of Ali G, too. But please don’t post memes on HN, the community really doesn’t want that.

(It is also worth pointing out that Ali G’s American drugs sketch simply used word-for-word the same jokes as the original sketch with a British policeman, and most fans regard the original British version as superior.)

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#84

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.

Funny, then, how as a US citizen I'm all about this.

I don't want to undermine Facebook's business model because I hate them. I hate them because they run on a business model I want undermined.

There are real, present dangers to having your data hucked around like it's going out of style.

Let's also think for a second about the unprecedented level of propaganda and general bullshittery this stuff enables.

The whole reason we're so desperately divided right now is because the marketing managers in politics have been able to see with fine-grit granularity what makes people tick, so they know precisely which buttons to push to start the next distraction/flamewar every time people start talking about dangerous topics like election reform, lobbying, and antitrust - all stuff that people on both sides of the aisle have no trouble getting behind. Quick, get em talking about guns and gays!

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#86

Uh... hmmm. I work in the industry and this article is very even handed but still a bit off. We don't really have have a term for "behavioral" advertising. So a lot of things are being lumped together that don't necessarily fit. For example, Facebook USED to be highly valued because of the amount of "targeting" (again, we don't use the term "behavioral") data they had. When you went to tell FB what you liked and didn…

If what you say here is accurate, that's all very good news. But how does that square with the fact that the online ad industry continues to be at war with people who don't want to be tracked?

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#87
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that s not how it works though, tech is a big ecosystem. At least 3 of the trillion-dollar tech companies depend on advertising , which feeds money into the content system. The rest of the ecosystem is in the business of supporting and distributing this content. Advertising is very high in the pecking order of the tech business sector. Without it, the internet would be the equivalent of USSR era Pravda (and we'd probably have a different job)

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#88
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4HkASndEXo&t=40s [SFW]

I immediately thought of Ali G, too. But please don’t post memes on HN, the community really doesn’t want that. (It is also worth pointing out that Ali G’s American drugs sketch simply used word-for-word the same jokes as the original sketch with a British policeman, and most fans regard the original British version as superior.)

[deleted]

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#89
post #52

I think this will evolve advertising in interesting ways. "Ads 1.0" had a viewpoint of trying to scrape every last little bit of data about a user's interests: from their email, messages, calendar, search history, friendships, and discussions. There was a mental model that you can't really know what's going to resonate with a person until you have their life under a microscope. This the "surveillance capitalism" take…

> rich telemetry to discern your interests

and

> privacy is preserved nicely

Seem to be contradictory to me. What am I missing?

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#90
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the media that never tracked its users, yes.

people should remember that advertising was equally vilified at all times , whether it was on TV or print or radio. But at the time the EU was wise enough not to destroy its media economy. This time it's different

Ok, but can you provide an actual argument explaining why advertising (in general) is a good thing for society and the economy?

You've mentioned multiple times the "it's good at extracting huge sums of money out of people making decisions against their own interests, which goes on to fund other endeavors" argument, but I don't think that's a good thing on the whole.

If you can forgive a huge exaggeration from my part, to me it sounds similar to saying that criminal activities are great because the money earned from those activities can go on to spur economic activity in the region (I'm not saying advertising is a criminal activity, but I think you get my point).

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