Live data from Hacker News

The EU's war on behavioral advertising

thisisunpacked.substack.com

251–260 of 420 posts

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't make sense to me. You make it sound like a rosy cooperative relationship where advertisers want to follow the rules and regulators just haven't made them. Even so, regulation isn't "complete control" in any way. It seems more like the advertisers are always going to try to make the advertisements as effective as possible while toeing the letter of the law as closely as possible and ignoring the spirit of…

I'm saying the laws EU has released are too complex and indirect and cost too much money, and that if they wanted to ban behavioral advertising outright they should have and could have done that instead of what they have done.

Any idea as to way they'd opt for this indirectness, rather than an outright ban? I'd imagine it would be to protect some niche, or to avoid getting the law dragged through courts for ten year.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#254

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.

No, you just have to follow the regulations. It's no "war on US companies" or anything like that. They wrote some good law (Albeit it has a few weaknesses), and enforce it now. And if you want to do business in the EU, you have to follow them. I would say it's more a problem of the US companies, if they can't do business without violating EU regulations.

If we're being a bit generous it's easier for the EU to make these rules, because it has very little impact on it's own companies. The majority of the large companies being impacted by these laws are US based.

Similarly you could argue that the companies are US based, simply because the US have pretty terrible privacy rules which makes it easy for them to get started with a fair amount of users/targets.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#255
post #248

"Legitimate interest" is the universal GDPR loophole. This one needs to be closed asap.

Along with the dark patterns of “confirm my choices”, where my “choices” are an endless list of checkboxes hidden under expandable sections of complete gibberish.

Usually one button in the end is some vaguely stated "accept all spying" too that sounds like you don't accept. E.g. "Accept all choices" or whatever.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#256

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.

wait till you find out about politicians. the corps have nothing on them.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#257
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

wait till you find out about politicians. the corps have nothing on them.

Really? How about that politicians constantly spamming antisocial networks? What would they do without those tech corpos? Big tech literary give them a power. And manipulate with politicians as well. You'll not free once you caught into trap of likes and virtual audience dopamine.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#258
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Advertising is not a product

It's proof that advertised product is not good enough to be advertisement by itself.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#259
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?

In concept advertising is good, I'd love to know about good products that serve my purposes for good prices, the problem is that as far as the people in these companies are concerned they just want to sell stuff.

Many companies don't make great products, so what ends up happening is they compensate with advertising that's just borderline false. Filled with emotive words, gish gallop etc that doesn't actually provide very useful or accurate info but hopefully convinces you to buy anyway.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#260
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?

> 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…

I find both hotel and phone book examples pretty weak. Neither proves we got a lot of privacy. Temporary sleeping with a stranger while traveling is loss of fonfort, but nit meaningful loss of privacy.

With phonebook, you could ask to be omitted and more famous people routinelly did that. Also, information about you was very limited. Stalker or violent ex could use it, but it would be impossible to si thousands of strangers into harrasing you. It was nit the same as posting address on 4 Chan.

Post reply on HN