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The EU's war on behavioral advertising

thisisunpacked.substack.com

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Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#91

Post by MandieD »

seydor wrote: post #87
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prob…

Some of us work for big companies that still basically make what they did 50-70 years ago, just faster and better now, with the help of computers and data science.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#92

Post by jaclaz »

JohnFen wrote: post #86
legitster wrote: post #70

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?

The two things do not seem to me as contrasting, there is an industry gathering the data and selling them (with promises and snake-oil) and other people buying those data.

Whether what is sold is accurate or not is another thing, as long as it is perceived as "good enough" by the buyers it will be bought anyway.

I don't think that many companies (buyers) have the guts to stop for - say - 6 months all advertising on a given channel and see what happens.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#93

Post by phailhaus »

I think the author has the terms "opt-in" and "opt-out" reversed, which was a bit confusing. If something is "opt-in", then you have to explicitly decide to opt-in, which means that by default you won't be included.

A good example of this is organ donation. Some countries have it opt-in (i.e., you have to decide to donate), whereas in other countries it is opt-out (so you are a donor by default).

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#94

Post by dweekly »

JohnFen wrote: post #89
dweekly wrote: 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?

That the data about you is not flowing from one party to another.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#95

Post by JohnFen »

dweekly wrote: post #94
JohnFen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rich telemetry to discern your interests and > privacy is preserved nicely Seem to be contradictory to me. What am I missing?

That the data about you is not flowing from one party to another.

Ah, OK. That doesn't really count as "privacy-preserving" in my book, but I understand what you're saying.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#96

Post by legitster »

JohnFen wrote: post #86
legitster wrote: post #70

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?

> If what you say here is accurate, that's all very good news.

Ummm. Except for the part where basically a few players will have a monopoly on online advertising. It's really a slow return to how TV advertising and etc worked.

> continues to be at war with people who don't want to be tracked

How so? There are infinitely more privacy rules and safeguards than there were a decade ago. Let alone the amount of tools like AdBlocker or Ghostery or Brave or etc.

Keep in mind that the awareness of your online presence is probably growing faster than your actual online presence.

In fact, just like standard of living, it's easy to lose perspective of just how fast our entire idea of privacy has changed. 100 years ago, hotel beds used to be shared amongst strangers. Within our lifetimes, books with every person in town's name, number, and address used to be delivered to everyone's home.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#97

Post by FirmwareBurner »

seydor wrote: post #87
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prob…

>Without it, the internet would be the equivalent of USSR era Pravda Yes, remember USSR Windows XP from the era when it came without ads? It was so terrible. /s

Didn't know I was using USSR internet in the '90s-'00s before the advent of user targeted advertising.

In fact most websites and products were way better back then compared to the mess of today.

> At least 3 of the trillion-dollar tech companies depend on advertising

Boo-hoo, let me play you and them the world's smallest violin.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#98

Post by legitster »

jaclaz wrote: post #92
JohnFen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The two things do not seem to me as contrasting, there is an industry gathering the data and selling them (with promises and snake-oil) and other people buying those data. Whether what is sold is accurate or not is another thing, as long as it is perceived as "good enough" by the buyers it will be bought anyway. I don't think that many companies (buyers) have the guts to stop for - say - 6 months all advertising on a…

Again, take the data buying and selling and set it aside. That's kind of like a whole separate thing.

Even without data brokers, there is tons of fraud and snake-oil. When you are comparing advertising success, website traffic, email delivery, product usage, etc - actually getting consistent user data between them is a nightmare. Everyone has incentive to pump up their own numbers. And oftentimes the reporting you are engaging in is so complicated that a lot of companies rely on consultants to do all of the work.

> I don't think that many companies (buyers) have the guts to stop for - say - 6 months all advertising on a given channel and see what happens.

Our company had a broken ad run on LinkedIn for 6 months. It cost us over $100k. The manager's response was "Can we turn them on again until we fix them? I need to spend the budget or I will lose it."

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#99

Post by legitster »

btbuildem wrote: post #34
JohnFen wrote: 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…

Canada is saying FB has to pay if they want news on their platform. FB doesn't make any money off of promoting news articles for free, so they take news off their platform. What's the controversy? Was FB just supposed to pay for news out of their own goodwill?

I'm no Meta defender but I'm also very confused about what the legislators thought the law was supposed to do.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#100

Post by FredPret »

tsimionescu wrote: post #45
seydor wrote: 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

It's unsustainable to do advertising while maintaing user privacy? Someone tell the whole advertising industry from 1950 to 2000 or so.

It's much less efficient to do mass ads than targeted ads. Giving a huge advantage to entrenched firms, and cutting off small startups. I guess that's what the EU wants though - protecting it's existing elites through exorbitant income taxes and regulations like these that favours big companies.
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