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The EU's war on behavioral advertising

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Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#241

Post by xNeil »

Const-me wrote: post #219
throwaway5959 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only non-consenting advertising I can think of is public billboards - and I believe those should be banned, most definitely.

Every single other type of advertising requires your explicit consent. YouTube? Google? Newspapers? All have your consent.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#242

Post by ehnto »

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?

It is a product, just not for consumers. Other companies buy the product and it is applied onto the consumer, to the consumers distaste.

Advertising is itself always balancing on the tradeoff between disgruntling the consumer and the benefit the consumer gets from the media/tool they're actually trying to engage with. It's an implicit bargain for most people, not an explicit one.

For me, advertising crossed that line a long time ago. If I had to watch the amount of ads YouTube actually puts in front of you, I wouldn't use it. Thank goodness for ad blockers.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#243

Post by mediumsmart »

11 years ago Apple bought a patent for something that would work great with personal llms to turn behavioral advertising into a circus. But they will probably keep it buried so a Hacker will have to build a clone of this and become the real John Connor in our fight against the machines.

https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_granted_patent...

if you liked this comment we would appreciate a thumbs up from one of your Bostonareamidthirtylessthan65kincome Identities, thanks

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#244

Post by ponderings »

ppsreejith wrote: post #135

Seeing many folks ITT questing the value of advertising (behavioural/contextual) so some points: 1. Advertising ideally works as match making by connecting buyers to sellers where the seller is unaware of the buyer. (i.e. the unknown unknown problem). Companies usually collect advertisements and place them on limited ad slots. 2. In earlier, physical, forms of advertising such as newspapers, TV, Retail Stores etc, th…

It's about margins. We have a box of paperclips that costs 10 euro. 100 people sell it for prices ranging from 11 to 100 euro. 11 is probably to low to build a reliable business, 13 is within reason, 15 would allow for some advertisement budget. Everything below is out. Then we have a market with advertisement budgets ranging from 1 to 85 euro per box. These expensive boxes make a hell of a lot of noise! The customer is left choosing between the 80+ and the 60-70 euro screamers.

And then, then they go to AliExpress and buy it for 8 euro from someone who wants out and you've made us all look stupid.

And now a moment of silence for the thousands who failed to want paperclips regardless of systemic encouragement.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#246

Post by devjab »

duringmath wrote: post #35

The EU's war is on US companies. They wouldn't be playing fast and loose with these regulations if their home born companies were the ones getting disadvantaged. They push draconian surveillance laws then claim sainthood when they go after Facebook. I guess you can hate Facebook et al and welcome this stuff but it's hard to deny how these laws are basically trade barriers aimed at the US tech industry.

How do you come to that conclusion? These laws apply to all EU based companies while non-EU companies have the clear option to opt out of them, which many do. If you want to do business within the EU, then you need to respect citizen privacy. Though I do agree that they should eat their own medicine, but here in the EU, we do tend to view private corporations as less worthy of our data than our own governments.

That being said. The branches that are working to secure citizen privacy and the branches that are working to ruin online encryption and monitor everything we do are often very sepperate parts of the government. So it's not exactly the same people.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#247

Post by devjab »

rank0 wrote: post #225
duringmath wrote: post #35

The EU's war is on US companies. They wouldn't be playing fast and loose with these regulations if their home born companies were the ones getting disadvantaged. They push draconian surveillance laws then claim sainthood when they go after Facebook. I guess you can hate Facebook et al and welcome this stuff but it's hard to deny how these laws are basically trade barriers aimed at the US tech industry.

I violently agree with you and am stunned at the amount of pro EU/anti US rhetoric on this forum. You make an excellent point about the EU surveillance laws. They clearly don’t give a shit about privacy. None of the folks disagreeing ITT seem to be willing to discuss that point. The EU spends more resources regulating US corporations than they do building their own. If they want to reverse course on their economic tr…

> You make an excellent point about the EU surveillance laws. They clearly don’t give a shit about privacy. None of the folks disagreeing ITT seem to be willing to discuss that point.

You can be for privacy and against survailance. Often the politicians who work to implement data protection laws and politicians who work to increase survailance come from opposite sites of the political middle. So it's not really a very good point unless you can only deal in black and white.

The EU can clearly be good on some areas and terrible on others. As it is with most things. Another example could be how the green party members of the EU are working toward clean energy while the conservative branch is working to increase the markets for fossil energy simultaneously. They do so by positioning them in the legalislative branches where they get the most influence acording to their political agenda, and while that may be "weird" to people from a "winner-takes-all" sort of system, it's how the vast majority of the EU democracies work.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#248

Post by Too »

PeterStuer wrote: post #245

"Legitimate interest" is the universal GDPR loophole. This one needs to be closed asap.

Along with the dark patterns of “confirm my choices”, where my “choices” are an endless list of checkboxes hidden under expandable sections of complete gibberish.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#249

Post by rank0 »

devjab wrote: post #247
rank0 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I violently agree with you and am stunned at the amount of pro EU/anti US rhetoric on this forum. You make an excellent point about the EU surveillance laws. They clearly don’t give a shit about privacy. None of the folks disagreeing ITT seem to be willing to discuss that point. The EU spends more resources regulating US corporations than they do building their own. If they want to reverse course on their economic tr…

> You make an excellent point about the EU surveillance laws. They clearly don’t give a shit about privacy. None of the folks disagreeing ITT seem to be willing to discuss that point. You can be for privacy and against survailance. Often the politicians who work to implement data protection laws and politicians who work to increase survailance come from opposite sites of the political middle. So it's not really a ver…

> You can be for privacy and against survailance.

Is this a typo? Of course you can they’re literally opposites.

You’re performing mental gymnastics if you think that the EU is somehow “pro privacy” just because they created cookie banners via GDPR. State sponsored surveillance is FAR worse than corporate sponsored surveillance.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#250

Post by _nalply »

_nalply wrote: post #112
dweekly wrote: post #52

I think this will evolve advertising in interesting ways. "Ads 1.0" had a viewpoint of trying to scrape every last little bit of data about a user's interests: from their email, messages, calendar, search history, friendships, and discussions. There was a mental model that you can't really know what's going to resonate with a person until you have their life under a microscope. This the "surveillance capitalism" take…

I am profoundly anti-advertisement because I believe in the pull model: if I want something I ask. So I think about 95% or more of advertisement today is annoying if not outright evil. But your comment got me thinking. Is there a world where advertisement is, um, just simply good? In other words, what makes advertisement bad today and how would these superapps make advertisement good?

Replying to myself.

Inherently there's a conflict in advertisement. The consumer expects entertaining and unbiased information and the advertiser expects the consumer to buy something.

One example how this conflict plays out: The youtuber Colin Furze tells people about Surfshark, a VPN solution. The way he does is funny (being in a bathtub with a shark mascot and his dark grey tie on), but I am not sure whether this is enlightening and useful information,

Because of this conflict I think there will always be some tension. One example is that one extension for Youtube marks these parts as advertisement and enables skipping it. And sometimes I feel the need to skip it. When thinking about it, it is because I don't want to listen to it and try to separate the information I am after from advertisement I am not willing to listen to it.

So I still think that the pull model is the best way. When I am ready I am willing to listen to what companies tell me.

It's like learning. If your mind is ready, learning is quick and easy.

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