Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The EU's war on behavioral advertising

thisisunpacked.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 420 posts

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#381

Post by speleding »

malwrar wrote: post #380
speleding wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the collective will of an entire continent If you ask the average man on the content "would you like your behaviour tracked?" he will indeed reply "No!" But if you ask him "If you have to choose between seeing ads for women's clothing or ads relevant to your interest, which would you choose?", then he will pick the option that requires behavioural tracking.

I think he’d probably prefer to not see the ad altogether. Who actually wants advertising besides the people attempting to sell things.

If you ask him “would you like to see ads”, then the answer will indeed be “No!”

But if you ask the more realistic question “would you like to pay for Google or would you rather see ads”, then I think most will choose ads.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#382

Post by speleding »

nologic01 wrote: post #378
speleding wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the collective will of an entire continent If you ask the average man on the content "would you like your behaviour tracked?" he will indeed reply "No!" But if you ask him "If you have to choose between seeing ads for women's clothing or ads relevant to your interest, which would you choose?", then he will pick the option that requires behavioural tracking.

The case you describe can be served with contextual ads, no need to know anything more than what I have searched for just now. No history, no fingerprinting, no profile that follows me everywhere, that gets sold, stolen, triangulated and potentially used against me without me even even knowing. Maybe I take human history too seriously. Maybe others are morally bankrupt and will try mental and moral somersaults to jus…

I can think of many searches that do not at all make clear which ads I would find interesting.

I don't think anybody is claiming you should be tracked against your will. The more interesting question is if we should force everybody to oppose tracking, which is what's happening now, with the consequence of less relevant ads being shown.

I don't work for Google, I'm just annoyed that the ads I'm forced to watch are getting less and less relevant as a consequence of (well intentioned) privacy measures.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#383

Post by btbuildem »

LordShredda wrote: post #185
legitster wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

It doesn't even have to be EU based -- just create a decent product voluntarily.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#384

Post by btbuildem »

troad wrote: post #192
legitster wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I'm no Meta defender but I'm also very confused about what the legislators thought the law was supposed to do. Cui bono? The law was supposed to siphon funding from foreign companies to Canadian media, who the Canadian government are in bed with. That's why it doesn't appear to make sense: it's not public-benefit lawmaking, it's plain ol' corruption. Same as the earlier Australian law (there, it was Rupert Murdoch…

Yeah, that law and the govt's response seems so absurd until you line up their incentives with the incentives of the Canadian communications oligopoly and suddenly things make sense.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#385

Post by dcow »

bastawhiz wrote: post #372
nologic01 wrote: post #344

So many words to defend the indefensible. Its not a "war", it is asserting the collective will of an entire continent (made up of fairly diverse cultures and a long history of painful social strife, political and racial oppression and persecution). The aim is to close Pandora's box that was (as it happened) opened by the amoral and asocial advertising industry that cannot see beyond its (admittedly long) nose. The is…

> The issue is not advertising, the issue is the construction, classification and use of human profiles through the collection of behavioral data, by-and-large without the subjects being aware or cognizant of the possible short and long-term implications. I don't disagree that collection of data isn't bad, but two things: 1. The collection of data isn't the goal, the advertising is. The data is only practically valua…

Exactly. I essentially think we need an amendment to the constitution that protects an individual’s right to not be solicited.

What law would stop Google and Facebook in their tracks is more the question we need to answer.

Data collection is a means to an end for advertisers and not in and of itself bad (nor are applications and/protocols that use PII or globally unique IDs, etc.), which is why GDPR hasn‘t really moved the needle much. It’s fighting the symptom not the cause. Invasion of privacy and “spooky” knowledge about individuals is all downstream.

And if I want to be solicited and psychologically manipulated into consume consume consume, then I really want it to be as relevant and effective as possible, don’t I? Yet another reason why attacking the data collection is ultimately barking up the wrong tree. But solicitation definitely shouldn’t be legal without my consent and probably broadly illegal to do to children.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#386

Post by mantas »

saiya-jin wrote: post #337
mantas wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is EU really trying to slow it down? TikTok ban in US seems to be a common talking point. Meanwhile here very few people talk about it and those are seen as lunatics in most cases. Most people seem to happily approve all the GDPR dialogs too. While doomscrolling TikTok/Instagram/FB.

The only reason TikTok was banned in US is because its Chinese company. Have you completely missed all-out trade/informational/technology war US has declared on China in past few years? Huawei, ban on chips and so on and on. Facebook is doing exactly the same and wish to emulate TikTok as much as possible, sharing all data with US 3-letter agencies as required (most probably meaning everything all the time). They are…

And here in europe we can’t even deal with the Chinese because muh German car market. Let alone local and murican corporations who have a lot of leverage.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#387

Post by bostik »

ForHackernews wrote: post #209
legitster wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It's really a slow return to how TV advertising and etc worked. TV advertising is the opposite of targeted. Literally every person picking up a broadcast signal sees the same ads. My neighbors having my name and address in the phone book doesn't bother me the way Google tracking every damn thing I see on the internet does. People don't notice it, but the latter is far more invasive.

> Literally every person picking up a broadcast signal sees the same ads.

This is technically true, but only because it implies the word "same" before broadcast too.

Regional ads injected into the ad slots were definitely a thing with TV already back in ~2005. So households getting their signal from the same transmitter got the same ads, but just a few kilometres away you could see entirely different ads during the advertising break.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#388

Post by extraduder_ire »

SuperCuber wrote: post #313
phailhaus wrote: post #93

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).

"opt-in by default" kinda makes sense as a combination of words, but you're right that people just usually call it "opt-out" (and vice versa)

I think it describes a somewhat common scenario, where it's on by default but there's an effort made to make it seem like you went out of your way to agree to it.

Like a pre-checked box on a form about your desire to receive marketing mails.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#389

Post by FredPret »

mantas wrote: post #354
FredPret wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the target market for your specific content is 10k people? And they are spread out geographically? Let's say you develop a new product/service aimed at a thin slice of the population - say, dentists in Chicago, or 19 y.o. females across the US, or beginner coders, or people with older dogs in the state of Utah. How do you reach these people? Not through a national/regional ad campaign - your ad budget is like…

What could be a product only for such a specific niche? All dentists is Cervelo market :) Even if you really really want to target specifically Chicago dentists, you’re probably better off doing a presentation at local dentists’ union or something along those lines. Or just doing old good cold calls. As for 19 year olds, just advertise in whatever is popular among such crowd? If 18 or 20 y/o sees it, it’s probably no…

Have you ever marketed anything?

If you ever do, I hope you have an unlimited budget and time horizon to make your ideas work.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#390

Post by goodpoint »

tomComb wrote: post #218
goodpoint wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big companies are not standing against corruption. They are the ones pushing the biggest envelopes.

Their influence (and the size of their envelopes) is puny here compared to our telecoms.

No: GAFAMs are massively wealthy and powerful, also telecoms are big companies as well.
Post reply on HN