The EU's war on behavioral advertising • Hacker News Board

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#121

Post by chongli » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 8:07 PM UTC

avianlyric wrote: post #118

legitster wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interesting how this is forcing these companies to objectively improve their products Is it though? Facebook only used to show me content from friends and pages I followed. Now it's a nonstop hose of garbage content that only exists to stuff the space between poorly targeted ads.

I’m confused, do you prefer chronological feeds from friends and family or not? GP is saying that feeds driven by friends and family would be an improvement to their products, and new EU law will drive that behaviour by making it hard for companies like Facebook to indiscriminately force black box recommendation algorithms on people. Isn’t that exactly what you say you want? And thus you agree with this statement > I…

I’m confused, do you prefer chronological feeds from friends and family or not?

Yeah I don’t get it either. I’ve unfollowed most of my family and friends. I’m not interested in their re-shared political pieces. My Facebook feed has morphed into a stream of stuff from my hobbies. It’s basically replaced Reddit for me.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#122

Post by troupo » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 8:08 PM UTC

asu_thomas wrote: post #23

JohnFen wrote: post #2

This is a wonderful start. Here's hoping it catches on outside of the EU as well!

Why would it? The EU is just protecting its own member states' IT industries and its own interest in undermining encrypted communications.

Ah yes. It should just ... checks notes ... let corporations do whatever they want to do

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#123

Post by veave » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 8:10 PM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #119

legitster wrote: post #70

Uh... hmmm. I work in the industry and this article is very even handed but still a bit off. We don't really have have a term for "behavioral" advertising. So a lot of things are being lumped together that don't necessarily fit. For example, Facebook USED to be highly valued because of the amount of "targeting" (again, we don't use the term "behavioral") data they had. When you went to tell FB what you liked and didn…

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

[flagged]

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#124

Post by AlexandrB » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 8:10 PM UTC

ta1243 wrote: post #115

legitster wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interesting how this is forcing these companies to objectively improve their products Is it though? Facebook only used to show me content from friends and pages I followed. Now it's a nonstop hose of garbage content that only exists to stuff the space between poorly targeted ads.

I certainly see that, but I think part of it is how rare it is for anyone to actually post on facebook nowadays.

Couldn't that be an effect of algorithmic feeds though? What's the point of posting something if the people you want to see it probably won't because it's buried under a mountain of "content". Or worse, the opposite happens: it goes "viral" and people you don't want seeing it see it and decide to make you the internet's punching bag for the day.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#125

Post by troupo » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 8:11 PM UTC

asu_thomas wrote: post #110

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The EU is just protecting its own partner states' IT industries Doesn’t the GDPR go back to a largely grassroots effort, including from members of the Pirate Party phenomenon that people initially scoffed at? I have no doubt that there has been local IT lobbying, but one cannot deny some level of true popular will.

> one cannot deny some level of true popular will I have never even heard anyone suggest such a thing. Whether a fringe grassroots privacy politics effort existed in Sweden at the time is not up for debate. It absolutely did, but it was not "popular" by any stretch of the imagination. Average voters simply don't care about privacy, no matter which country you're in. The EU was explicitly formed to compete with the US…

> It absolutely did, but it was not "popular" by any stretch of the imagination. Average voters simply don't care about privacy, no matter which country you're in.

Go tell Germans that with their very recent memories of Stasi. You can even tell Swedes that with their very explicit laws against mixing and accessing various government databases.

> Nobody should be surprised if their most flagship legislation to date is motivated by the same intent.

Instead of parroting whatever the latest internet conspiracy is, you could actually go and read the legislation, and have an opinion of your own.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#126

Post by troupo » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 8:12 PM UTC

nceqs3 wrote: post #73

JCWasmx86 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you read how vague the laws are. It's all designed to extract fines from US companies.

No. Its all designed against the predators that modern companies have become.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#127

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 8:12 PM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #119

legitster wrote: post #70

Uh... hmmm. I work in the industry and this article is very even handed but still a bit off. We don't really have have a term for "behavioral" advertising. So a lot of things are being lumped together that don't necessarily fit. For example, Facebook USED to be highly valued because of the amount of "targeting" (again, we don't use the term "behavioral") data they had. When you went to tell FB what you liked and didn…

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

I agree, but it would be better to spell out the many many ways than to leave it dangling.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#128

Post by Barraketh » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 8:13 PM UTC

So one issue that this article glosses over is how contextual advertising interacts with attribution.

Essentially, as an advertiser, in order to do effective contextual advertisement, you need to have some idea of how ads perform in a particular context - on a particular web page or app. So what you would really like to say is that "people who saw our ad on X were Y% more likely to visit or website, or buy our product". However, in order to actually measure that, when a user comes to your website you need to know which of your ads they've seen. Traditionally, you'd just serve the ad from your domain and set a cookie, but now you can't do that.

This is more relevant to brand advertising than "click here and buy product X" (direct response), but I think that the people saying "oh, just use contextual advertising" are underestimating the extent to which GDPR makes contextual advertising difficult.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#129

Post by Nimitz14 » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 8:14 PM UTC

btbuildem wrote: post #46

Interesting how this is forcing these companies to objectively improve their products -- chronological feeds, friends and follows only, etc is what users have been begging for and being ignored, because advertising trash salad is more profitable. If the long-term effects end up being along the lines of the big social corps withdrawing from the EU, I see that as an enormous win for that economic zone. The presence of…

You couldn't be more wrong.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#130

Post by johndhi » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 8:14 PM UTC

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 that conclusion, at the cost of zillions of dollars in legal fees.