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EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

reuters.com

21–30 of 765 posts

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

#21
post #8

Why do people hate personalized ads so much? I understand hating ads in general, but why something personalized is worse than just random spam? EDIT --- Ok, I get it now. Personalized ads = surveillance. Fair enough. Doesn't the whole GDPR already cover it though? You can opt out of the surveillance.

Random spam is just random spam. Personalized ads are based on behavioural data that they have harvested from people, it seems that makes people feel iffy about it. Seems some do care about privacy after all.

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

#22
post #8

Why do people hate personalized ads so much? I understand hating ads in general, but why something personalized is worse than just random spam? EDIT --- Ok, I get it now. Personalized ads = surveillance. Fair enough. Doesn't the whole GDPR already cover it though? You can opt out of the surveillance.

Because they go with mass corporate surveillance. As soon as a company starts personalizing ads with some data, they’re going to be under financial pressure to personalize ads with all the data they can get.

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

#23
post #8

Why do people hate personalized ads so much? I understand hating ads in general, but why something personalized is worse than just random spam? EDIT --- Ok, I get it now. Personalized ads = surveillance. Fair enough. Doesn't the whole GDPR already cover it though? You can opt out of the surveillance.

If you are on your phone showing something to some person, and you get an ad for a new pressure cooking. Well, there it is a nice pressure cooking. Now if you have been looking for something else that you want to keep private (gay clubs, abortion clinics, or anything embarrassing) then your phone has betrayed you. There is also a point that if the ad is more useless, the quantity of ads should decrease because advert…

Incognito mode?

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

#24
post #9

Oh, yeah! Can’t come soon enough. Kneecap the need to datamine users. I totally want to see this happen even if that means they will have to charge money for their heretofore “free” services. This would be a big win for society, in my view.

This isn't data mining users. It's just tracking an ID against likely preferences detected automatically.

I think this topic becomes emotive because there are obviously ways to misuse data, but I struggle to see the actual harm in personalised advertising. If there's a data acquisition route that we all agree is bad, then we should ban that.

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

#25
post #8

Why do people hate personalized ads so much? I understand hating ads in general, but why something personalized is worse than just random spam? EDIT --- Ok, I get it now. Personalized ads = surveillance. Fair enough. Doesn't the whole GDPR already cover it though? You can opt out of the surveillance.

I find it a bit hard to like the idea of letting professional manipulators try to manipulate me to do things that benefit them. Regardless if they are succesful or not.

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

#26
post #8

Why do people hate personalized ads so much? I understand hating ads in general, but why something personalized is worse than just random spam? EDIT --- Ok, I get it now. Personalized ads = surveillance. Fair enough. Doesn't the whole GDPR already cover it though? You can opt out of the surveillance.

It's not so much the ads for me - though some recent ones that are clearly scams have been making the rounds here that facebook refuses to do anything about.

It's the whole tracking, data-gathering, and trying to optimize for squeezing the last bit of revenue out of people that I dislike.

That and the stupid amount of bandwidth and compute caused by the ad scripts on every other website. ublock makes the web so much faster, it's hard to believe.

EDIT:

I'm actually subscribed to some e-mail newsletters from certain brands/sectors that I care about, and they regularly deliver personalised ads to a subfolder in my e-mail account. I sometimes even buy things as a result. I don't mind this, because it's opt-in and by consent.

I do mind when facebook tries to infer what kinds of things I might like, which it's generally terrible at and the various "ad preferences" I can set don't seem to make any change.

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

#27
post #6

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…

>Also, it is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads

Good. A well-functioning market might emerge instead.

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

#28

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.

>Hot take, it’s hard to have a free internet without ads pretty easy if you publicly fund it. My vision of Europe is every town, every city putting some money into building out federated and decentralized systems, supported by small and middle-sized business. Effectively the same way radio or public broadcasting is already supported in say Germany or the UK. We should go all the way and just rid ourselves of Meta, Te…

Anything is easy if you can take people's money and assign it to companies deemed worthy by a bureaucrat. But now you have a much bigger problem.

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

#29
post #8

Why do people hate personalized ads so much? I understand hating ads in general, but why something personalized is worse than just random spam? EDIT --- Ok, I get it now. Personalized ads = surveillance. Fair enough. Doesn't the whole GDPR already cover it though? You can opt out of the surveillance.

[deleted]

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

#30
post #8

Why do people hate personalized ads so much? I understand hating ads in general, but why something personalized is worse than just random spam? EDIT --- Ok, I get it now. Personalized ads = surveillance. Fair enough. Doesn't the whole GDPR already cover it though? You can opt out of the surveillance.

Because they are collecting a shitload of data about me to make them work.

It's like a little camera accompanying you everywhere and you don't get to say no and it's used for anything they can get away with.

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