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The EU's war on behavioral advertising

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Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#231

Post by krapp »

bryan_w wrote: post #229
Const-me wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infinite money glitch for big tech, with dramatic externalities pushed to non-consenting general population. These externalities include death of traditional media, extreme levels of political polarization, and climbing suicide rate of teenagers, girls in particular. These things are caused in very large part by the big tech companies maximizing consumption of ads, and efficiency of ads targeting.

> death of traditional media Well if adverting is so bad, and old media relied on advertising, Tech was doing the world a favor by starving them out. We should be thanking Google for exposing the corruption that was the old media advertising empire

As bad as advertising in old media was, at least it wasn't a platform of targeted surveillance and psychological manipulation. An advertisement was just an advertisement, you could pay attention to it or not, and your attention if it was noted at all was only noted in aggregate. Your radio or tv didn't know who you are, know where you live, develop complex behavioral profiles on you, record all of your browsing, shopping and communication data, listen in on your with microphones or watch you with cameras.

Google didn't expose the corruption of old media, rather it supplanted it with even deeper and more insidious corruption.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#232

Post by bee_rider »

johndhi wrote: post #228
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TL:DR of GDPR is "just don't drack your users without their consent". Why is that difficult for US corporations to follow? Even '90s web was by default GDPR complaint.

I've implemented gdpr. It's much more than that.

How so?

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#233

Post by esperent »

johndhi wrote: post #228
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TL:DR of GDPR is "just don't drack your users without their consent". Why is that difficult for US corporations to follow? Even '90s web was by default GDPR complaint.

I've implemented gdpr. It's much more than that.

I've also implemented GDPR. Of course it's complex, it's a continent wide law, how could it not be complicated?

But I still think that "don't track your users without their informed consent" is a good summary of the intention of the law.

And I would also say that's it's only really complex to implement if you were already tracking your users and now you need to change everything. If you weren't doing that, you'd probably find it remarkably easy to implement.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#234

Post by hedora »

bryan_w wrote: post #229
Const-me wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infinite money glitch for big tech, with dramatic externalities pushed to non-consenting general population. These externalities include death of traditional media, extreme levels of political polarization, and climbing suicide rate of teenagers, girls in particular. These things are caused in very large part by the big tech companies maximizing consumption of ads, and efficiency of ads targeting.

> death of traditional media Well if adverting is so bad, and old media relied on advertising, Tech was doing the world a favor by starving them out. We should be thanking Google for exposing the corruption that was the old media advertising empire

The article is about behavioral advertising, which was not feasible with old media technologies.

The problem isn’t the ads. The problem is the ad targeting.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#235

Post by bee_rider »

nceqs3 wrote: post #71
btbuildem wrote: post #34

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 see what business models people come up with without ads sucking up all the oxygen in the room. We tried ad supported content, it was bad, let’s roll the dice again and see what we get.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#236

Post by jacquesm »

legitster wrote: post #137
cm2012 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who works in advertising, this comment is wrong in many many ways.

I don't work in advertising - I just use it as a customer. To the extent that it is wrong it is because we, as an average customer, have a pretty bad customer experience using the products. Educate me.

> I work in the industry

> I don't work in advertising

??

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#237

Post by imglorp »

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…

The megacorporations are at war against humanity and won't stop until forced: they must profit and grow at the expense of civilization, climate, and biosphere.

It's true the EU does not recognize it's in a war yet but they are at least trying to slow them down. The US is further behind.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#238

Post by spunker540 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #111
spunker540 wrote: post #63

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…

Addictiveness is not necessarily an indicator of utility. Drug addicts keep going back to heroin even if it's ruining their lives. Just because I feel compelled to scroll and endless, algorithmic feed it does not mean that this is how I want to use social media or that such usage reflects the role I want it to have in my life.

The average American watches close to 3 hours of tv per day— I just don’t see what the fuss is about. It seems like you simply don’t approve of how other people choose to spend their time.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#239

Post by ponderings »

Pannoniae wrote: post #9
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.

Well, it would be a net positive for society if the advertising industry disappeared, so at least this move is not short-sighted at all.

We wouldn't know which products to buy! We would all be standing there at the entrance of the supermarket, hungry but not knowing what to buy. We would wait for that old lady then follow her around talking amongst our own (on our phone ofc), what is she doing? What would she be up to with that? Chat GPT would have to baby us though the apple pie from scratch as the only one who remembers all those marvels of SEO recipe websites from back in the days.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#240

Post by sellmesoap »

krapp wrote: post #231
bryan_w wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> death of traditional media Well if adverting is so bad, and old media relied on advertising, Tech was doing the world a favor by starving them out. We should be thanking Google for exposing the corruption that was the old media advertising empire

As bad as advertising in old media was, at least it wasn't a platform of targeted surveillance and psychological manipulation. An advertisement was just an advertisement, you could pay attention to it or not, and your attention if it was noted at all was only noted in aggregate. Your radio or tv didn't know who you are, know where you live, develop complex behavioral profiles on you, record all of your browsing, shop…

I wouldn't underestimate the psychological manipulation of old media, but you're right there's a whole industry around gathering and leveraging metrics, it still feels primitive but my imagination always wanders into how you can tie data points together. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of the fence.
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