Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#111

Post by blackflame7000 » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 8:27 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #91

sieabahlpark wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the president says on Twitter affects me or the world, whether or not he uses a 9 iron or a driver to get the ball out of the sand trap does not. You can't even conflate the two. Twitter is his method of communicating to us. He doesn't use the media like previous president's.

> What the president says on Twitter affects me or the world But will be widely reported in every other media channel anyway, so you lose little or nothing by using Twitter directly. In fact, you might gain a little useful filtering, depending on your range of new outlet choices of course, and conversely there is a sort of reverse filter because you are less likely to miss things that are rather quickly deleted.

"so you lose little or nothing by using Twitter directly"

You lose the credibility of a primary source.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#112

Post by dabei » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 8:51 PM UTC

GDPR is a huge win for user privacy. All these have been going on and getting worse for years and finally getting surfaced.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#113

Post by passivepinetree » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 8:58 PM UTC

cameronbrown wrote: post #46

olivierduval wrote: post #30

For me, it looks like the European GDPR - that received a lot of harsh words here, on HN - is a little bit improving the situation for everybody on the net, at least regarding the Big Players. Maybe some regulations is not bad after all (at least for de facto monopolistic business like Google, Amazon & co)...? ;-)

Maybe it has, but I still believe in the long run it will do us more harm than good. We were starting to see a massive push to shift away from FAANG, but GDPR has just made those incumbents far stronger. They roadblocked the free market.

Can you offer any sources for your assertions? In my observation, we were seeing the exact opposite of

> We were starting to see a massive push to shift away from FAANG

In my experience we were/still are seeing ever-greater consolidation towards Google/Facebook services. As an example, authentication/login with Google and Facebook is becoming the default on many web services, excluding users who may have deleted or never acquired such an account.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#114

Post by riffic » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:02 PM UTC

move-on-by wrote: post #45

There is no shortage of good reasons to block ads. Passive ads no longer exist, if they ever did. They are all actively exploiting, tracking, and selling you- even if you never interact with them. Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? Beyond Twitter, there is no shortage of school systems, police departments,…

>Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform?

Ask your lawmakers to require public agencies and officials to run their own social media infrastructure based on implementations of open standards.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#115

Post by bulldoa » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:07 PM UTC

move-on-by wrote: post #45

There is no shortage of good reasons to block ads. Passive ads no longer exist, if they ever did. They are all actively exploiting, tracking, and selling you- even if you never interact with them. Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? Beyond Twitter, there is no shortage of school systems, police departments,…

i am not questioning the intent, but I just wonder how would one support content creators besides donating money?

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#116

Post by pbecotte » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

skocznymroczny wrote: post #36

DarwinMailApp wrote: post #12

So there are essentially remnants of our browsing history linked to our devices shared among numerous ad companies. They then serve relevant ads for us all over the web depending on where they are being paid to display relevant ads. Twitter is at it. We've experienced the same behavior from Google & God knows Facebook is at it too. I've even had conversations where the only connection we had to the web was our locall…

I'm confused. If this technology is so pervasive and supposedly efficient, why do I always get such terrible ads, completely irrelevant to my interests? Usually the only targeted ads I get are ads for products I was searching for to buy, but usually they show up after I bought the product, so, no, I am not going to buy a new fridge within few years anyway.

Because the way that adtech takes credit for sales has very little to do with whether it actually influences you. So they claim to be effective at the same time as doing the stupid stuff you point out.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#117

Post by msla » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 10:10 PM UTC

blackflame7000 wrote: post #110

msla wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything important will make the news.

Where the definition of important is defined by the News, yes.

So I need only check Twitter if I wish to see inanities, yes.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#118

Post by Nextgrid » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 10:41 PM UTC

koolba wrote: post #34

DarwinMailApp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not my Alexa I'm talking about! I have no reason to buy one. I made a list of benefits and it really wasn't strong enough!

I’d love a FOSS one that operated totally locally.

It’s crazy that ~10 years ago I tried a pirated copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking on a 700mHz single-core machine with 384MB of RAM and it was capable of recognising my speech locally but now they want us to believe that local speech recognition is impossible despite having 10x the processing power.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#119

Post by tomjen3 » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 11:10 PM UTC

DarwinMailApp wrote: post #12

So there are essentially remnants of our browsing history linked to our devices shared among numerous ad companies. They then serve relevant ads for us all over the web depending on where they are being paid to display relevant ads. Twitter is at it. We've experienced the same behavior from Google & God knows Facebook is at it too. I've even had conversations where the only connection we had to the web was our locall…

Why would you have a surveiliance node in your home if you are concerned about privacy?

As for the other thing, I am running this in firefox with containers active. Google gets their own, Facebook gets theirs, twitter gets theirs and mostly everything else gets a temporary container. There will be no connection between them to use my data on, and in a few minutes my records of their cookies will disappear.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#120

Post by pbecotte » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 12:07 AM UTC

With the way the internet works and the tech they have built, it's harder not to collect stuff. All of these companies have all sorts of stuff they shouldn't, and I wouldn't trust anything they say about opting out.