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Disney+ demands users’ age and gender so it can “deliver targeted advertising”

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221–230 of 240 posts

Re: Disney+ demands users’ age and gender so it can “deliver targeted advertising”

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So first, get a VPN. I go with ProtonVPN. Mullvad is also high quality VPN. You need these because the copyright wonks surveil popular torrent trackers. Then, I stick primarily with video and audio. I stay away from software piracy because I prefer my data to be in FLOSS formats. MAKE SURE to use Firefox, with "uBlock Origin" and "Privacy Badger" plugins before going to any of these links. Also if you're on Windows,…

you know you could just link r/freemediaheckyeah right? https://www.reddit.com/r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH/wiki/index/

True, I could have.

But I've found there's a rather large contingent of anti-reddit people. And frankly, the wider this stuff is copied, the better we all are.

Re: Disney+ demands users’ age and gender so it can “deliver targeted advertising”

#222

I've lost count of the amount of times the government has asked me what my race is. Surely they'd know by now...

It depends on how adventurous you’ve been using CRISPR to experiment on yourself. Personally, I plan on becoming a petite Mexican woman.

Re: Disney+ demands users’ age and gender so it can “deliver targeted advertising”

#223
post #56
post #15

Age and gender are the two highest signals that targeted ads take into account. The Facebook growth team has always wanted to remove gathering age / gender from the sign-up flow (which reduces friction to sign up). But, ad targeting would take such a large hit, they could never do so. It was a huge deal internally when "Custom" was added as a gender option in the sign-up flow, and even then, there's a nudge towards t…

But gender is a social construct? Why should such a meaningless data point have any impact on their bottom line?

Gender is a social construct in that various 'gender typical behaviours' don't necessarily correlate with sex between cultures. That implies it is a learnt behaviour.

In a society where someone of the male sex is pressureed to be male gendered there will be a larger correlation between gender and sex. Which would mean miracle balding cures would do better targeting the male gender if they don't have the inofrmation to target the male sex.

Re: Disney+ demands users’ age and gender so it can “deliver targeted advertising”

#224
post #200

I'm so exhausted from constant advertisements. I'm so tired of my information being sold off to third parties in order to deliver ads. I'm so tired of good, useful tools and services requiring a forfeit of my privacy in order to use them. Does anyone else wish that they could just exist without being told to buy something every 15 waking minutes?

Im exhausted about people complaining about. It's a fact that targeted ads pay a lot better. This enables better services that are free to the end user. Most people just don't want to pay for things. 99% of facebook users have never paid meta a dime, yet they have the audacity to complain about a free service. There are paid social media alternatives, or even self hosted ones, but by and large they fail because certa…

Disney plus ain’t free though. It’s actually one of the more expensive streamers

Re: Disney+ demands users’ age and gender so it can “deliver targeted advertising”

#225

I'm so exhausted from constant advertisements. I'm so tired of my information being sold off to third parties in order to deliver ads. I'm so tired of good, useful tools and services requiring a forfeit of my privacy in order to use them. Does anyone else wish that they could just exist without being told to buy something every 15 waking minutes?

Just pay for the ad free tier of Disney+?

That's the only tier that currently exists. Everybody is being asked for their age and gender.

Re: Disney+ demands users’ age and gender so it can “deliver targeted advertising”

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is also a social construct, yet I suspect it has a decent impact on their bottom line.

How do you mean? The thing you are measuring affects your measurement?

I mean it literally. Money is a social construct. The joke here being that it's funny/ironic to claim that gender being a social construct is "meaningless" but then turn around and claim that another social construct -- money (which is what the "bottom line" is made of) -- is meaningful.

The fact that something is a social construct doesn't mean it doesn't matter. Heck, once you get past the basic "keep this biological organism alive" level, most of human life is lived within social constructs. That doesn't meant they're not real or not meaningful.

Re: Disney+ demands users’ age and gender so it can “deliver targeted advertising”

#227
post #56
post #15

Age and gender are the two highest signals that targeted ads take into account. The Facebook growth team has always wanted to remove gathering age / gender from the sign-up flow (which reduces friction to sign up). But, ad targeting would take such a large hit, they could never do so. It was a huge deal internally when "Custom" was added as a gender option in the sign-up flow, and even then, there's a nudge towards t…

But gender is a social construct? Why should such a meaningless data point have any impact on their bottom line?

Who told you that social constructs are meaningless? They're not. That's not what the term means.

Re: Disney+ demands users’ age and gender so it can “deliver targeted advertising”

#228
post #200

I'm so exhausted from constant advertisements. I'm so tired of my information being sold off to third parties in order to deliver ads. I'm so tired of good, useful tools and services requiring a forfeit of my privacy in order to use them. Does anyone else wish that they could just exist without being told to buy something every 15 waking minutes?

Im exhausted about people complaining about. It's a fact that targeted ads pay a lot better. This enables better services that are free to the end user. Most people just don't want to pay for things. 99% of facebook users have never paid meta a dime, yet they have the audacity to complain about a free service. There are paid social media alternatives, or even self hosted ones, but by and large they fail because certa…

No matter what you think of the privacy aspects, I worry that we've decided to build the entire modern tech universe around the mother of all bubbles. All manner of bad business decisions seem to be running with the assumption that back-end ad/targeting/etc. revenue will eventually patch the hole in the sides of their business model.

Here's my theory for the bubble factor:

You can sort of divide the ad market into four quadrants.

1) Premium advertiser, premium content. Coke and Toyota paying to be on the front page of the New York Times etc. 2) Premium advertiser, low-grade content. A lot of this is remarketing, where that damned fridge you looked at once six months ago follows you across the web.

3) Low-grade advertiser, premium content. This is likely the rarest quadrant, as it's too expensive for amateurs to play in. 4) Low-grade advertiser and content. Think of the chumboxes at the bottom of news sites.

I feel like Quadrant 1 and 2 are surprisingly at risk.

Premium advertisers have experts running their campaigns and analytics up the wazoo. Eventually they're going to ask "Is it worth paying Google/Meta/etc. NN% of the total spend when we could probably call top-50 publishers directly and arrange a deal? They may also be more brand-sensitive, worried about blowback from inappropriate ad placement in Quadrant 2.

There is a real risk that the "better" sections of the ad market eventually graduate away from brokered networks, and eventually Google and Meta are left as a glorified Taboola. Is there a lot of money in there? Possibly, but I wonder how sustainable the money is. I suspect a lot of revenue from small advertisers is due to very poor inefficiency (bad campaign design, poorly managed spend, dark pattern tooling), and it runs a risk of death-spiraling as the quality of the network tanks.

Facebook is an interesting monetization problem because the product is so intensely based on network effects. A strategy to maximize ad revenue may end up coming at the cost of some user abandonment, which is the ultimate risk for their platform. They need to thread the needle of "how creepy can we be without making people leave."

Re: Disney+ demands users’ age and gender so it can “deliver targeted advertising”

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have pretty much summarized the thinking that led me to build: 1. my own SmartWatch 2. a tool to remove iTunes DRM so that my TV can stay offline 3. fully offline speech recognition 4. a beefy Linux workstation 5. set up a pi-hole 6. patched LineageOS to work on my phone And now my life is pretty much ad-free :)

> 1. my own SmartWatch You could buy PineTime instead.

I got a casio. Tells the date and time, and battery lasts about 3 years. It's 10 years old now, and I've no plans to replace it.

Re: Disney+ demands users’ age and gender so it can “deliver targeted advertising”

#230

I'm so exhausted from constant advertisements. I'm so tired of my information being sold off to third parties in order to deliver ads. I'm so tired of good, useful tools and services requiring a forfeit of my privacy in order to use them. Does anyone else wish that they could just exist without being told to buy something every 15 waking minutes?

https://incogni.com/
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