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The EU's war on behavioral advertising

thisisunpacked.substack.com

181–190 of 420 posts

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#181

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…

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Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#182
post #152

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 ha…

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Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think "abuse" is a fair term, but I acknowledge that it's emotionally loaded. If a company is spying on me (collecting data about me, my machines, or my use of my machines without my informed consent), then I think it's not out of line to call that abusive.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#184

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…

Yeh but that’s a fault of FB not the EU law

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#185

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…

This is where a EU based competitor could step in and give a decent product, while still complying and benefiting the local economy

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think complex algos, complex feeds, across large search space (all content instead of friends and family) turns out to be more profitable? Are ads suddenly more valuable in that context? I don’t think so. And it’s certainly much more expensive to operate than a simple chronological feed of friends and family. It comes down to time spent. People spend more time on the apps and see more ads. We can argue ove…

My, thank god people are perfect utility-optimising machines and not complex brains with a ton of psychological and neurological weaknesses and quirks :-) If people behaved like you're saying there would be no drug addicts or gambling addicts, or even obesity or depression.

There's definitely a school of thought that goes "If they're gambling, then gambling must be their highest value; and they're lying if they say otherwise."

"Revealed preferences", if you want something to search for. The most obvious issue is that humans aren't utility-maximizers.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#187

Seeing many folks ITT questing the value of advertising (behavioural/contextual) so some points: 1. Advertising ideally works as match making by connecting buyers to sellers where the seller is unaware of the buyer. (i.e. the unknown unknown problem). Companies usually collect advertisements and place them on limited ad slots. 2. In earlier, physical, forms of advertising such as newspapers, TV, Retail Stores etc, th…

> In earlier, physical, forms of advertising such as newspapers, TV, Retail Stores etc, the same ad used to be shown to everyone so ad slots were fewer, much more expensive, and typically only big businesses could afford them.

Well, my local newspaper shows ads for family businesses, and they don't pay that much for it. I've found my local newspaper quite interesting as well, diverse in political articles, with good cultural recommendations, and generally of higher (content) quality than the ones sold nation wide.

I think your point applies to those with most eyes on them, but... The same is true in the digital age. We often give too much credit to the content we partake in. I don't think much has changed on that regard, I just think it's much more obtrusive now.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#188
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?

I want to consume content that was made by people who simply want to make that content for the sake of sharing information.

I don’t care if content that is made by people that only make content to make money is pay walled. They can have their 10:01 long YouTube videos and recipes with a preamble of their life story behind a paywall. Sounds good to me.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#189
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…

I am profoundly anti-advertisement because I believe in the pull model: if I want something I ask. So I think about 95% or more of advertisement today is annoying if not outright evil. But your comment got me thinking. Is there a world where advertisement is, um, just simply good? In other words, what makes advertisement bad today and how would these superapps make advertisement good?

> Is there a world where advertisement is, um, just simply good?

I think there can be. The fundamental idea of advertising is certainly a win-win sort of deal: informing people of products and services they may not be aware of.

But most advertising is not that. Most of it is not informative or useful for making purchase decisions, most of it is manipulative to the extreme, and a lot of it relies on surveilling people without their consent. That sort of advertising isn't anything I can support.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#190
post #174

> Prior to ATT, every app by default had access to your advertising ID, i.e. it was opt-in by default. Nitpicking, it was not opt in, as the user did not opt in. It would be more accurate to say: "consent was implicit", or even "the app could access the user's advertising ID without the user's consent". I feel that it's important to distinguish "opt in" as something that requires explicit user action.

I think that's not just a nitpick - it's a misuse of the word. "Opt-in by default" should just say "opt-out". You can see the same misunderstanding, I think, in the strapline of the article.
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