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

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

#231

Post by potamic »

dymk wrote: 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…

Funny if 50 odd genders that Facebook allowed you to select internally mapped to two.

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

#232

Post by mankyd »

falcolas wrote: post #185
mankyd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids watched different content at 2, at 8, and at 16 years old. Anything beyond late teens maybe could be chalked up to "advertising BS" but I would push further that my older parents watch markedly different content then I do at middle age, and I watch markedly different content than when I was in my early twenties. They could probably figure out watch preferences with good statistics, (and do), but asking for ag…

Here's the problem: None of that is remotely generalizable. What you watch at, say, 40 is only going to apply to you. What you allow your children to watch at age 8 is also going to only apply to you. Tying things from what you watch to what you might want to watch will be miles more effective than your age, because your age has nothing to do with what shows you watch. I've known parents to show their kids "The Passi…

> None of that is remotely generalizable.

What? I apologize, but that is absurd. Entire industries are built around the idea that people of different ages _generally_ have different tastes.

Take the "children's" television network Nickelodeon - someone realized that kids like different shows than adults, so they made an entire, 24/7 tv network dedicated to it.

Then they realized that kids go to bed at an earlier hour, so they made "Nick at Nite" for adults where they showed reruns of old tv shows. Then they realized that really young kids like different shows than older ones, so they made Nick Jr. Then they realized that ~college age people liked different shows, so they made Adult Swim. Then they realized that some older adults wanted to watch classic cartoons so they made Boomerang.

These weren't one-off "oh, one person likes different shows". These were entire age-based demographics. And this is but one example, plenty of industries - especially entertainment industries - target exactly this.

And plenty of hard science is based on the fact that human brains "mature" and adapt over time. Young kids brains are different that geriatric brains,

That is not to say any of this perfect. As these algorithms collect what a person does and doesn't like or watch, they can and should change.

And if someone wants to show their kids "age innappropriate" material to their kids, that's there choice. But don't recommend "The Human Centipede" to a three year old when they turn on the tv, and don't recommend Cocomelon to me.

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

#234

Post by anticensor »

potamic wrote: post #231
dymk wrote: 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…

Funny if 50 odd genders that Facebook allowed you to select internally mapped to two.

More like four: Maleness true/false, and femaleness true/false.

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

#235

Post by sublinear »

1attice wrote: post #132
sublinear wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called "cultural Marxism". It's not necessarily a conspiracy, but it's certainly a thing. DEI is just the latest consultant scheme.

What I love about nonsense phrases like 'cultural marxism' is that they invariably have the opposite impact than was likely intended. Calling "cultural marxism" on [checks notes] a *marketing ask* is like calling a restaurant a food bank because they both involve food.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory

Hah. Ok fine let's call it by the more academic term. It's still a thing and nothing was refuted by your comment.

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

#236

Post by rickoooooo »

fxtentacle wrote: post #123
mikedelago wrote: post #121

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?

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 :)

Have you published anything regarding your smartwatch or speech recognition solutions? I'd be interested to read about your custom watch project and your offline speech recognition project if you've published anything about those.

In the last few years I've also made the switch to a Linux workstation, alternative Android OS (Calyx), pi-hole, etc in an attempt to take back some of my privacy. I also spent some time trying to build my own voice assistant using Mycroft AI but I found it lacking at the time. I just ordered a smartwatch a few days ago (after avoiding them for years) and I went with a simple model with an e-ink screen to hopefully give me some new functionality without demanding my attention. If you've shared any details about your projects I'd love to learn more about them.

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

#237

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

jrnichols wrote: post #138
mikedelago wrote: post #121

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?

You're not alone. Not at all. I'm also tired of the mentality that we need advertising or the internet would cease to exist. In my opinion, if you need invasive advertising revenue to exist, you don't need to be on the internet. Advertisements are slowing everything down. Tracking us. Serving us malware in some cases. We don't need them. Pi-hole/adguard could be standard. I'd rather pay $200 more for a TV set than ha…

"I'm also tired of the mentality that we need advertising of the internet would cease to exist."

IMO, it's not a mentality, it is just propaganda. When "tech" companies are advertising-supported intermediaries conducting internet surveillance, then they are in a position to control the flow of ideas across the wire. There is no limit on the number of self-interested, bad arguments that Silicon Valley can inject onto the internet as attempts to influence the www using public and protect its "business".

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

#238

Post by vanilla_nut »

b800h wrote: post #73
vanilla_nut wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even better, if it ever ends up mattering -- say, at a border crossing -- you have plausible deniability. "Oh, that's the first Unix epoch timestamp, must be a bug in the system." Not sure how much it would help at a border crossing... but with any kind of tech support it would immediately elicit a chuckle.

What, you reckon first or second line tech support would recognise that as the Unix epoch?

tech support at any level could likely web search for it and confirm it quickly. But maybe i'm being a smidge optimistic :-)

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

#239

Post by thewebcount »

kuratkull wrote: post #115
TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am from Eastern Europe, so I have missed the "cable used to be subscription based without ads" time, so thank you for showing me how history rhymes and that ads in subscription based medium are inevitable.

I think he's talking about the 70s or sometime back then

Absolutely. In my area of the Midwest, first it was Channel 100 [0]. Then eventually they launched HBO. Shortly after that there came Cinemax and Showtime. These were all premium channels that showed only movies. (And many of them are still around.) It was a little while before they started having normal crap channels with ads, like WGN [1] and TBS [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_100 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WGN-TV [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPCH-TV

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

#240

Post by thewebcount »

autoexec wrote: post #167
pests wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's due to contract reasons. Hulu keeps a list of shows they are required to show ads on: https://help.hulu.com/s/article/no-ads-exceptions

Contracts the wrote themselves for themselves. Disney owns Hulu and ABC and ABC owns Grey’s Anatomy. They aren't being forced to show ads. They chose too.

Yeah, that’s really weird because my spouse and I watched a few seasons of it ad-free on Netflix. I think they had something like 16 seasons available, all ad-free. It seems really odd that the company that produced it couldn’t make it also ad-free.
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