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Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

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Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#111

Post by timlod »

whimsicalism wrote: post #77
simongray wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you participate in discussion about the GDPR when you clearly know nothing about it? Of course a "like" or any kind of data that is core to the service doesn't infringe the GDPR. The illegal part is about processing or forwarding personal data of users to third parties, when users haven't agreed to that aspect of the "service". You usually see the distinction between "functional" and "advertising" cookies in t…

I literally work in this field and can tell you that "likes" are regulated under GDPR just like any other personal data. If someone asks us to delete under GDPR, we have to delete these as well.

Are you sure about this?

Being roughly familiar with GDPR, I would be reasonably certain that you could keep a like as long as the identity it's attached to is deleted. Much in the same way as you may see reddit posts that just show a [deleted] user.

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#112

Post by WithinReason »

samwillis wrote: post #92
WithinReason wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But wouldn't different ads be a different service?

No, under GDPR you can't coerce a user into give up their privacy in order to receive the service for free. If they offer the service for free, the tracking still need to be opt in.

"But wouldn't different ads be a different service?" meaning wouldn't serving more annoying ads to the free tier be such coercion?

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#113

Post by kmeisthax »

whimsicalism wrote: post #6

[flagged]

Good. I'm sick and tired of innovation.

Keep in mind that "innovation" is a codeword for "finding someone else's value and taking it for ourselves". The entire business model of platform capitalism today is "Someone Elses Content"; the ad business today is "Someone Elses Data". Nothing here is actually innovative, it's just stolen.

The actual tech service revenue model is not untenable under GDPR. You just can't sign away people's GDPR rights by burying a clause deep within a 100 page EULA, and you can't refuse service to people who don't opt-in to ad tracking. This doesn't mean that they can't be advertised to; far from it. Advertising existed before tracking and will survive it.

In fact, most of the reason why advertising is less lucrative today is because of tracker-driven remarketing. This shifted revenue away from publishers and towards platforms, because platforms could just sell your audience out from under you. Why buy ads on the NY Times when you could just buy "people who visited nytimes.com in the last 14 days" for a fraction of the price?

My gut feeling is that legally limiting tracking is actually going to make advertising a more healthy business by taking out the power of the intermediaries that control this ad data.

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#115

Post by dooglius »

quotemstr wrote: post #80
jdiez17 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This decision, as I understand it, renders large swathes of tech service revenue models untenable. To be honest, good riddance. If it is no longer possible to offer users a "free" service in exchange for extremely invasive spying and psychological manipulation (without explicit consent [0]), it forces companies to 1) innovate in order to offer such services for a sustainable price, and 2) encourages competition fro…

> To be honest, good riddance. If it is no longer possible to offer users a "free" service in exchange for extremely invasive spying and psychological manipulation Is it right that a tiny but loud minority be able to ban these ad-supported services for all of society? Going by revealed preferences, most people don't consider targeting advertising to be "spying and psychological manipulation". If they did, usage patte…

> most people don't consider targeting advertising to be "spying and psychological manipulation"

A bit of a catch-22; if they did consider it that, then the manipulation wasn't very good, was it?

The revealed preferences of companies to pay for advertising indicates that it is successful at manipulation, enough to justify its cost.

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#116

Post by naravara »

quotemstr wrote: post #80
jdiez17 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This decision, as I understand it, renders large swathes of tech service revenue models untenable. To be honest, good riddance. If it is no longer possible to offer users a "free" service in exchange for extremely invasive spying and psychological manipulation (without explicit consent [0]), it forces companies to 1) innovate in order to offer such services for a sustainable price, and 2) encourages competition fro…

> To be honest, good riddance. If it is no longer possible to offer users a "free" service in exchange for extremely invasive spying and psychological manipulation Is it right that a tiny but loud minority be able to ban these ad-supported services for all of society? Going by revealed preferences, most people don't consider targeting advertising to be "spying and psychological manipulation". If they did, usage patte…

Most people have no idea how any of this works, so I wouldn't take observed behavior to be a "revealed preference."

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#117

Post by cool_dude85 »

crazygringo wrote: post #88
jdiez17 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This decision, as I understand it, renders large swathes of tech service revenue models untenable. To be honest, good riddance. If it is no longer possible to offer users a "free" service in exchange for extremely invasive spying and psychological manipulation (without explicit consent [0]), it forces companies to 1) innovate in order to offer such services for a sustainable price, and 2) encourages competition fro…

But why do you think legislation should be the one forcing that choice on everyone, rather than the market allowing consumers to choose? The issue isn't what we personally like or prefer for ourselves -- it's more about when we think it's legitimate to take away the right of businesses to experiment with business models, and of consumers to be free to enter into the tradeoffs they prefer. Why shouldn't a consumer be…

>Why shouldn't a consumer be allowed to agree to what you call "extremely invasive spying" in exchange for a free product, if they want to? As long as you're not signing away rights (e.g. you can't agree to sell yourself into slavery) or engaging in physical harm (e.g. food and safety regulations), then what's the moral basis for taking away choice?

Not everybody believes that individual, consumer-level choice is such a sacred cow. Why is a "moral basis" needed to prohibit choices that the broader society deems bad to offer? For example, I would be quite happy to see pyramid schemes regulated out of existence despite the fact that all participants are making reasonably informed choices to join up (certainly, much more well-informed than people who click agree on the Facebook ToS). Hopefully I don't need to offer a "moral basis" on why I think that's a good idea.

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#118

Post by [deleted] »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #86
whimsicalism wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 and what the GP is stating is not how any multinational I work with considers GDPR compliance. Properly managing "likes" and other member activity are absolutely key to compliance.

> managing "likes" and other member activity are absolutely key to compliance As is keeping an eye on competitors, particularly lightly-capitalised ones, and noting when they stray into grey areas. Bonus points if you can get multiple DPAs to issue simultaneous requests in obscure languages.

[deleted]

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#120

Post by rpastuszak »

whimsicalism wrote: post #65
burkaman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're understanding it correctly, Meta is still free to serve normal contextual ads to all users so they can make money. There are many other sustainable business models they could try out if they aren't able to get their customers to pay for that sort of ad. They are not mandated to provide any kind of service to anyone.

> Users must be able to withdraw consent at any time and Meta may not limit the service if users choose to do so. Seems pretty blatantly a mandate to continue providing service regardless of users' actions. Given that what is shown on the feed is also personalized, the "contextual ads" still allowed bit makes no sense to me.

> Given that what is shown on the feed is also personalized, the "contextual ads" still allowed bit makes no sense to me.

This is where the line between contextual and behavioural is blurry. In theory, behavioural == who I am, and contextual == where I am/what I am reading.

Shortly after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, we started getting companies selling "ethical" contextual targeting SDKs. The issue was that the "context" was a result of a ML model running on your device and using your location, accelerometer, magnetometer readings (etc...) to define a real-time profile of the user, e.g. "exercising at the ", "they're having coffee at ".

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