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The EU's war on behavioral advertising

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Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#151

Post by Barraketh »

JohnFen wrote: post #140
Barraketh wrote: post #128

So one issue that this article glosses over is how contextual advertising interacts with attribution. Essentially, as an advertiser, in order to do effective contextual advertisement, you need to have some idea of how ads perform in a particular context - on a particular web page or app. So what you would really like to say is that "people who saw our ad on X were Y% more likely to visit or website, or buy our produc…

> However, in order to actually measure that, when a user comes to your website you need to know which of your ads they've seen. That may be the case, but so what? If an industry can't function without abusing people, I would argue that it shouldn't function. But this doesn't mean the industry can't function. It just means that advertising becomes less efficient (i.e., more expensive). Which is fine -- if it's more e…

You're right, it's just that the word "abuse" is doing a lot of work in that statement. I've still never seen any example of any person being actually damaged by the "tracking", so calling it "abuse" feels pretty harsh.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#152

Post by troupo »

johndhi wrote: post #130

As a lawyer working on these topics, this is a poor phrasing. EU regulators don't need to "war" with advertisers - they have complete control over them. There's no other side of this war, just regulators issuing commands that industry tries to follow. It's confusing as a war is because the regulators decided not to make the law say, 'behavioral advertising is illegal,' and instead have spent years slowly awakening to…

> There's no other side of this war, just regulators issuing commands that industry tries to follow.

We know how well the industry "tries to follow" from how industry follows GDPR and how Facebook keeps pretending that it's their god-given right to use tracking data in advertisment.

> It's confusing as a war is because the regulators decided not to make the law say, 'behavioral advertising is illegal,' and instead have spent years slowly awakening to that conclusion, at the cost of zillions of dollars in legal fees.

It's not confusing. Regulators do what they always do: they let companies do whatever companies do. And when the companies keep doing shitty things, regulators regulate.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#153

Post by legitster »

chongli wrote: post #121
avianlyric wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused, do you prefer chronological feeds from friends and family or not? GP is saying that feeds driven by friends and family would be an improvement to their products, and new EU law will drive that behaviour by making it hard for companies like Facebook to indiscriminately force black box recommendation algorithms on people. Isn’t that exactly what you say you want? And thus you agree with this statement > I…

I’m confused, do you prefer chronological feeds from friends and family or not? Yeah I don’t get it either. I’ve unfollowed most of my family and friends. I’m not interested in their re-shared political pieces. My Facebook feed has morphed into a stream of stuff from my hobbies. It’s basically replaced Reddit for me.

> My Facebook feed has morphed into a stream of stuff from my hobbies. It’s basically replaced Reddit for me.

Is there some sort of setting somewhere I am missing? FB has ignored my follows and stated preferences and just feeds me random trash.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#154

Post by MauranKilom »

riversflow wrote: post #40
hnhg wrote: post #7

I would rather be the subject of behavioral advertising and keep privately encrypted comms than the other way around, but apparently the EU has other ideas.

Yeah. Having thought about this long and hard, lucrative behavioral advertising seems like a fair price to pay for an open, free (as in beer), internet. I fear this type of regulation will only serve to make the internet become much less equitable.

Without trying to dismiss your opinion: Was the internet before Google/ad-tech not "open, free (as in beer)"?

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#155

Post by laserdancepony »

seydor wrote: post #13
brap wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU is a huge fan of shooting itself in the foot with useless regulations, unable to think 1-2 steps ahead. Waiting for someone to tell you why "the destruction of the entire eu online advertising industry" is actually a good thing in their view.

you didnt have to wait long

That's what you get for making the world a worse place.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#156

Post by Moldoteck »

legitster wrote: post #145
avianlyric wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused, do you prefer chronological feeds from friends and family or not? GP is saying that feeds driven by friends and family would be an improvement to their products, and new EU law will drive that behaviour by making it hard for companies like Facebook to indiscriminately force black box recommendation algorithms on people. Isn’t that exactly what you say you want? And thus you agree with this statement > I…

> I’m confused, do you prefer chronological feeds from friends and family or not? Yes. I would prefer this. FB no longer gives me a customized feed. I get a generic feed tailored to my demographics - brain achingly dumb posts about Disney and Marvel and memes I don't care for. And I am unable to unsubscribe from any of them because none of them are based on my preferences. This has been FB's response to the EU sancti…

it was just a way to increase profit, because, you know, growth growth growth...

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#157

Post by FredPret »

Barrin92 wrote: post #142
FredPret wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

every regulation favours big companies in the trivial sense that there's a non zero cost to comply with any rule. However this is hardly a reason to not have rules, we also don't let startup companies throw waste into the river. Smaller companies aren't somehow inherently virtuous, if they can only exist by violating user privacy even more so than large companies, I'd rather deal with large companies. Small companies…

I hear you that small companies can suck even harder than big ones. But the idea of capitalism is that it’s a search function, looking for optimal solutions.

So having many firms positioning themselves differently is better than having a couple in that you’re more likely to find a good best solution.

We need some rules, but we need to err on the side of fewer not more rules.

My point is that mass ads requires massed capital. There will be few, huge, entrenched players. It’s much better to have a dynamic economy with piles of mom and pops as well as a couple of huge companies. This can only happen if mom and pop can afford to advertise. This can only work with targeted ads.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#158

Post by sib »

johndhi wrote: post #130

As a lawyer working on these topics, this is a poor phrasing. EU regulators don't need to "war" with advertisers - they have complete control over them. There's no other side of this war, just regulators issuing commands that industry tries to follow. It's confusing as a war is because the regulators decided not to make the law say, 'behavioral advertising is illegal,' and instead have spent years slowly awakening to…

Unfortunately, it's really the EU regulators at war with companies' abilities to make better products.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#159

Post by sib »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #15
seydor wrote: post #3

... for no reason , to no effect, except the destruction of the entire eu online advertising industry

What do you mean "no reason"? The reason is that the user's data privacy rights come first. If interests collide, privacy must come out on top. I'm curious on how you could have missed this ideological position that powers those regulations after years of headlines after headlines about the topic.

If that's all it were, then the trade would be "you can get this [free like beer] service if you agree to give up some personal data, otherwise you don't get the service."

As it is, the law says "You, company, must give users a service for free even if they choose not to give you the data."

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#160

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #141
btbuildem wrote: post #46

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…

Twitter and youtube had chronological feeds for years.

5 min on yt shorts and I'm fed a diet of Andrew-Tate, Joe Rogan, or if I disagree with this genre and rage-click it away, I get left-wing US hate on why aren't you outraged about Dave Chapelle - because you should be?

Youtube feed for content discovery of intelligent men has died long time ago. It is US propaganda at it's finest but for a global audience.

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