191–200 of 765 posts
I know in HN there is a big "personalized advertising" is bad sentiment, but I don't get what the problem is. 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. It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people w…
Problem is that they show you the notebook after you have purchased one. The car after you bought one. Medical services after you get back from the hospital. Your ability to discover relevant products from targeted advertisement is flawed to begin with.
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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.
So what you need to do is regulate what they can do with the data, not forbid personalized ads. By the way, here in Europe we have universal healthcare, maybe is something the US should consider?
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> the government is the solution to when business gets too much power. I totally agree with this. But are personalized Facebook ads really an example of this? And what's the solution when the government gets too much power? Especially in a "democracy," when the people have implicitly given approval for this by voting in the people who are attempting to consolidate power?
> But are personalized Facebook ads really an example of this? Yes: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health (tau.ac.il) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32938622 Facebook collecting people's data even when accounts are deactivated (digiday.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817297 Facebook test asks users if they're worried a friend is 'becoming an extremist' (cnn.com) https://news.ycombinator…
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When you realize that large enough corporations are a form of government, your way of thinking really starts falling to bits... But, the government is the solution to when business gets too much power. You can't convince a profit motivated corporation to stop doing something evil as long as it's profitable, so it's the government's job to protect people from corporate governance.
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A shadow of that situation is seen when, e.g., (Google/Some other big company) wrongly suspects that you have CSAM, bans all your accounts, and you have no recourse. If the services of that company are vital to you, that's effectively a parallel "judicial system".
Large corporations that could get away with it (e.g. East India comp.) have had standing armies and waged war to benefit their commercial interests.
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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.”
Wait until you read about Cambridge Analytica.
The strongest decider in the outcome of the 2016 election is that the Trump campaign spent something like a factor of three more on advertising across the board than the Clinton campaign. Cambridge Analytica was more representative of the notion that the Republicans were willing to spend money on anything that might work than on the efficacy of that specific approach.
At the end of the day, that election came down to a combination of sexism in the voting base (Clinton's gender had a demonstrable effect on turnout among non-voters to vote against her; Americans don't want to admit it but in their hearts they're still pretty sexist) and good old fashioned, well understood rules of how spending on ads can move an election by a percentage point or two. The Democratic party as a whole believed Trump to be so unelectable that they pulled money from the presidential campaign to push it into campaigns down ticket in an attempt to win a massive political coup by controlling the House, Senate, and Presidency at the same time; they underestimated the political position of their opponents and it backfired spectacularly.
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The ability to aggregate personal information of large numbers of people is a form of political power. Facebook can, if it so wishes, provide a list of all gay people in an area; all supporters of gaza or of israel; all people who have recently commented on an article about drugs. The very ability to provide that list previously required an expensive secret police; today it does not. This is an extremely dangerous ab…
Yes, as can Apple, Google, every cable company, every telecom, the credit card companies, Grindr, health clinics
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…
Don’t forget Apple has a billion dollar ad business!
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This very American point of view, for some reason the Americans believe that politicians are some other kind of breed of people coming from somewhere else and they don't have control over them. The more European point of view is that companies are run by greedy people on who we have no control and we need the government to keep those in check. We have control over the governments and it's O.K. to take them down by fo…
As a European, this is so embarrassing to read. The US is one of the oldest democracies on earth. "You can give the government infinite power, we will do a revolution, no big deal." Do you have any idea with how much suffering each revolution has been paid for? And remind me again how the revolutionaries overthrew Nazi Germany? The sowjet bloc created decades of suffering and blood but according to you that's fine be…
It's just difference of attitudes. Europeans tend to trust the government more than the corporations.
No need for ridiculous examples, for every bad politician example there exist a bad corporation example. You say nazis, I say Bhopal disaster. No need for that, at least the Nazis payed dearly for it. Corporations are unaccountable.
>And remind me again how the revolutionaries overthrew Nazi Germany?
Remind me how the Nazis are doing these days?
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> the government is the solution to when business gets too much power. I totally agree with this. But are personalized Facebook ads really an example of this? And what's the solution when the government gets too much power? Especially in a "democracy," when the people have implicitly given approval for this by voting in the people who are attempting to consolidate power?
> But are personalized Facebook ads really an example of this? Yes: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health (tau.ac.il) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32938622 Facebook collecting people's data even when accounts are deactivated (digiday.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817297 Facebook test asks users if they're worried a friend is 'becoming an extremist' (cnn.com) https://news.ycombinator…