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The EU's war on behavioral advertising

thisisunpacked.substack.com

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Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#211

Post by Cyph0n »

phatfish wrote: post #201
riversflow wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it certainly wasn’t equitable, connected computers were the realm of the rich. The problem with free services is scaling them to significant portions of the entire population.

My family wasn't rich and we had a "connected computer" in 97/98 before ad-tech really took over. Getting online was far less costly than the computer itself.

Did you also have access to free email (beyond a measly few MBs), maps, video hosting, and private data storage? Because that's what ad-tech enabled. Getting online wasn't the hard part.

Not saying that ad-tech is purely good, of course.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#212

Post by pseudalopex »

asu_thomas wrote: post #66
omginternets wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people balance the ideal of a free market with other ideals, such as freedom from corporate predation.

Small businesses use this kind of advertising as much or more, proportionally speaking, as corporations. And with a virtual guarantee of worse data security/privacy practices when applicable.

Your point is unclear. Small businesses are corporations. Advertising services are run by corporations. Tracking is predatory.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#214

Post by throwaway14356 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #209
legitster wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If what you say here is accurate, that's all very good news. Ummm. Except for the part where basically a few players will have a monopoly on online advertising. It's really a slow return to how TV advertising and etc worked. > continues to be at war with people who don't want to be tracked How so? There are infinitely more privacy rules and safeguards than there were a decade ago. Let alone the amount of tools like…

> It's really a slow return to how TV advertising and etc worked. TV advertising is the opposite of targeted. Literally every person picking up a broadcast signal sees the same ads. My neighbors having my name and address in the phone book doesn't bother me the way Google tracking every damn thing I see on the internet does. People don't notice it, but the latter is far more invasive.

it was but tv is now a specific audience: people who don't care what they watch. Sounds terrific for advertising?

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#216

Post by jmilloy »

johndhi wrote: post #130

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…

This doesn't make sense to me. You make it sound like a rosy cooperative relationship where advertisers want to follow the rules and regulators just haven't made them. Even so, regulation isn't "complete control" in any way. It seems more like the advertisers are always going to try to make the advertisements as effective as possible while toeing the letter of the law as closely as possible and ignoring the spirit of the law completely. What are you actually trying to say here?

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#218

Post by tomComb »

goodpoint wrote: post #180
tomComb wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m no fan of the power of big tech, well, except when it involves standing fast against the blatant political corruption of a government devising a bizarre and nonsensical law to funnel money to their corporate buddies (according to PBO analysis the most money goes to bell, rogers and Shaw). Yes, Canada should develop strong privacy and competition laws, but I’ve lost hope that they wouldn’t just be whatever serves…

Big companies are not standing against corruption. They are the ones pushing the biggest envelopes.

Their influence (and the size of their envelopes) is puny here compared to our telecoms.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#219

Post by Const-me »

throwaway5959 wrote: post #208
kranke155 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising is not a product

gestures broadly at advertising everywhere OK, I’ll bite, then what is it?

Infinite money glitch for big tech, with dramatic externalities pushed to non-consenting general population.

These externalities include death of traditional media, extreme levels of political polarization, and climbing suicide rate of teenagers, girls in particular. These things are caused in very large part by the big tech companies maximizing consumption of ads, and efficiency of ads targeting.

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