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EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

reuters.com

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Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#121

Post by bsenftner »

pembrook wrote: post #112
squigz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on how a government can 'ruin your life', while a company can't? This might be hard to grok, but we can actually be aware of both threats without minimizing the seriousness of either.

Governments have a monopoly on violence. And as history has proven (especially in the EU), they tend to use it. Even in good times, in countries with mostly balanced institutions, the government can lock you up in prison and throw away the key if you piss off the wrong people. On the other hand, I can assure you the only thing Unilever is aspiring to do is get you to buy more toilet bowl cleaner. And I know the rebut…

> Governments have a monopoly on violence.

Except when they hire security contractors, and then that 3rd party assumes government powers - including police immunity - without the oversight. Which is what happens when cities ban technology uses such as facial recognition by the police - they just hire a 3rd party to do it with zero oversight. Same with large tourist events in non-tourist cities: those are not regular cops during the event, they are contractors with temporary police immunity and very little official oversight.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#122

Post by dr_dshiv »

mjburgess wrote: post #90

Comments here so far focus on personalised ads as the issue -- but that's a symptom of what's being banned, which is the mass collection of personal data. Personalised ads are beside the point. The issue is how they are personalised, namely by building a rich profile of user behaviour based on non-consensual tracking. It isnt even clear that there's a meaningful sense of 'consent' to what modern ad companies (ie., go…

Why should it be illegal? I don’t understand the moral threat. Personally I feel that privacy gets too much airtime as a value — I see lots of other more direct issues (like political manipulation) that will remain an issue even with “strong privacy.”

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#123

Post by mcv »

kwanbix wrote: post #108
gatinsama wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just that someone else will know that you have chlamydia, it's that they have your data and you don't know what they will do with it. We don't know what they can do and there could be more serious stuff.

What do you think they can do?

Sell it. Health insurance companies are always interested in more details about your health so they can adjust your premium accordingly. Or use it for excuses to deny coverage.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#124

Post by squigz »

pembrook wrote: post #112
squigz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on how a government can 'ruin your life', while a company can't? This might be hard to grok, but we can actually be aware of both threats without minimizing the seriousness of either.

Governments have a monopoly on violence. And as history has proven (especially in the EU), they tend to use it. Even in good times, in countries with mostly balanced institutions, the government can lock you up in prison and throw away the key if you piss off the wrong people. On the other hand, I can assure you the only thing Unilever is aspiring to do is get you to buy more toilet bowl cleaner. And I know the rebut…

I have a hard time taking this post seriously since you've now mentioned soap ads twice, as though that's the threat here.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#125

Post by kelipso »

squigz wrote: post #95
A_non_e-moose wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet. I would rather have rather than . That's not an equal comparison, neither does it represent a common scenario. > It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, peo…

Thanks for this comment. I am getting sick of this implication that it's one way or another - we either accept the gross invasion of the privacy of billions of people and let companies do whatever they want with that data... or we're freeloading assholes who just want everything for free and clearly we don't understand how business and the world works. Unfortunately many people seem to ignore the fact that it isn't o…

Ya it's not like there's a real need for these companies to exist anyway. Most people will happily go back to sms messages and calls if they shut down. Not a big deal.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#126

Post by kuschku »

pembrook wrote: post #75

Ok, my contrarian hot take (for HN at least). The real entities we need to be afraid of in regards to privacy are governments & politicians, not companies & entrepreneurs. The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap. The government on the other hand can literally ruin your life (or even end it in some countries). The EU is doing a fantastic job of keeping everyone distracted by pointing the finger a…

Take a look at /r/androiddev and the constant posts from people who've been wrongly banned, for life, from developing android apps. Who don't get any fair trial or hearing, not even a written accusation, it's just over.

And everyone who even ever dares to come near them gets banned too, so employers don't want to risk hiring them either.

When the Nazis did Berufsverbote, that was an unusual and cruel punishment. When Google does it, that's just the free market baby!

Companies can destroy a life just fine.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#127

Post by mcv »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #122
mjburgess wrote: post #90

Comments here so far focus on personalised ads as the issue -- but that's a symptom of what's being banned, which is the mass collection of personal data. Personalised ads are beside the point. The issue is how they are personalised, namely by building a rich profile of user behaviour based on non-consensual tracking. It isnt even clear that there's a meaningful sense of 'consent' to what modern ad companies (ie., go…

Why should it be illegal? I don’t understand the moral threat. Personally I feel that privacy gets too much airtime as a value — I see lots of other more direct issues (like political manipulation) that will remain an issue even with “strong privacy.”

Political manipulation is a lot easier if the manipulator knows everything about you.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#128

Post by hedora »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #122
mjburgess wrote: post #90

Comments here so far focus on personalised ads as the issue -- but that's a symptom of what's being banned, which is the mass collection of personal data. Personalised ads are beside the point. The issue is how they are personalised, namely by building a rich profile of user behaviour based on non-consensual tracking. It isnt even clear that there's a meaningful sense of 'consent' to what modern ad companies (ie., go…

Why should it be illegal? I don’t understand the moral threat. Personally I feel that privacy gets too much airtime as a value — I see lots of other more direct issues (like political manipulation) that will remain an issue even with “strong privacy.”

Modern political manipulation techniques rely on the same data as ad targeting.

Ad targeting infrastructure is expensive and hard to hide, so banning it would defeat many political manipulation attacks.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#129

Post by bsenftner »

konschubert wrote: post #50
capableweb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet. That's all fine and dandy, I think. The problem starts to become a bit bigger when suddenly everyone in your household starts to see "chlamydia medication" ads everywhere they go online based o…

We have no reason to assume that FB is using message content to target ads.

You have every reason to believe FB uses message content to build and enhance your internal FB Profile, which is where ad targeting originates. To believe otherwise is just being gullible. If there is a profit enhancing mechanism lying on the floor, it will be picked up.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#130

Post by ndriscoll »

thorncorona wrote: post #4

Hot take, it’s hard to have a free internet without ads. Lots of websites have marginal utility, but can be paid for with ads. And those websites will disappear when CPM rates go down the drain.

Lots of things like niche review sites might die, but those are impossible to find thanks to SEO spam (which is fueled by ads) anyway. Something like forums? The entire reddit database (excluding media) fits on a $150 SSD, and a used laptop can serve tens of thousands of requests/second for such a simple site. Something like a Ryzen 7950X with a few NVMe drives could probably do more than you could reasonably get a network connection for. Someone with 10 gigabit Internet could serve a forum for 10s of millions of users at least at almost no cost.

The primary issue is liability. Secondary is ISPs not allowing people to use their Internet connections for server hosting (a hobbyist could do colocation, and many do already). Fix the law there and the compute cost is peanuts.

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