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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

#271

Post by blackbeans »

mrweasel wrote: post #251
johndhi wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying the laws EU has released are too complex and indirect and cost too much money, and that if they wanted to ban behavioral advertising outright they should have and could have done that instead of what they have done.

Any idea as to way they'd opt for this indirectness, rather than an outright ban? I'd imagine it would be to protect some niche, or to avoid getting the law dragged through courts for ten year.

As far as I know, the EU legislation is primarily aimed to protect privacy. Behavioral advertising is related because it requires tracking, and tracking requires the consent and understanding of users in the EU. There was (is) a huge dependence on US software in Europe, that's probably why there was some reluctance at the start in enforcing it. However since "America first" the EU is trying to be more independent and boost its own European made software, that's likely why the climate for other software has worsened.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#272

Post by FridgeSeal »

xNeil wrote: post #241
Const-me wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is good in theory, but does not hold for day-to-day reality.

News reports, announcements, updates, etc are often announced and hosted on social media and YouTube. The main news outlets hardly host their own video, and half the useful announcements got made on Twitter first (before Musk torched it lol), so unless “remain deliberately ignorant” is the alternative - which I don’t think it is, then the reality is that you end up on one of these tech giants real quick.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#273

Post by dgb23 »

johndhi wrote: post #223
jmilloy wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm saying the laws EU has released are too complex and indirect and cost too much money, and that if they wanted to ban behavioral advertising outright they should have and could have done that instead of what they have done.

The actually ridiculous part is not that.

It’s the fact that our browsers don’t solve this issue in a standardized way.

Everyone who serves HTTP in the Eu and includes third party tracking, shows you an idiosyncratic consent banner. Often these things download a large amount of JS as well.

That’s completely and utterly idiotic.

- It’s confusing for users.

- It interrupts the user’s flow everytime they visit a site.

- It’s bad for overall performance.

- It’s bad for people who publish content.

- Developers have to defer to legal experts for trivial stuff out of FUD.

- It doesn’t work correctly on the technical side.

- It doesn’t work from a user’s perspective, because they just get annoyed or uncertain and falsely consent!

Nobody wins.

It should just be a standard, global feature in browsers. A site should only ask you _once_, if at all from a user’s perspective.

The browser should send a “profiling and tracking” whitelist, or simply make it available via a JS API.

Why is this not the case?

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#274

Post by martin8412 »

dgb23 wrote: post #273
johndhi wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying the laws EU has released are too complex and indirect and cost too much money, and that if they wanted to ban behavioral advertising outright they should have and could have done that instead of what they have done.

The actually ridiculous part is not that. It’s the fact that our browsers don’t solve this issue in a standardized way. Everyone who serves HTTP in the Eu and includes third party tracking, shows you an idiosyncratic consent banner. Often these things download a large amount of JS as well. That’s completely and utterly idiotic. - It’s confusing for users. - It interrupts the user’s flow everytime they visit a site. -…

There's already DNT(Do not track) in the browsers, but nobody respects it.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#276

Post by dgb23 »

martin8412 wrote: post #274
dgb23 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actually ridiculous part is not that. It’s the fact that our browsers don’t solve this issue in a standardized way. Everyone who serves HTTP in the Eu and includes third party tracking, shows you an idiosyncratic consent banner. Often these things download a large amount of JS as well. That’s completely and utterly idiotic. - It’s confusing for users. - It interrupts the user’s flow everytime they visit a site. -…

There's already DNT(Do not track) in the browsers, but nobody respects it.

So there’s the problem. This should be sufficient?

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#277

Post by yabatopia »

legitster wrote: post #70

Uh... hmmm. I work in the industry and this article is very even handed but still a bit off. We don't really have have a term for "behavioral" advertising. So a lot of things are being lumped together that don't necessarily fit. For example, Facebook USED to be highly valued because of the amount of "targeting" (again, we don't use the term "behavioral") data they had. When you went to tell FB what you liked and didn…

> it doesn't hurt that economically, consumer wealth in Europe is falling like a rock

Falling like a rock? Where is this comming from? What Europe are you talking about? The EU, the continent, the eurozone, the UK, Russia?

Granted, high inflation, primarily caused by higher energy prices after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has slowed down consumer spending in the EU, but generally speaking the outlook isn't that bad.

- Total financial assets of EU households grew almost continuously during the period 2011–2021, falling only in 2018. Their total value increased from €21 331 billion in 2011 to €34 982 billion in 2021, a 64.0 % overall increase. (Source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...)

- Consumer Spending in European Union is expected to be 1804.00 EUR Billion by the end of this quarter, according to Trading Economics global macro models and analysts expectations. In the long-term, the European Union Consumer Spending is projected to trend around 1836.00 EUR Billion in 2024 and 1869.00 EUR Billion in 2025, according to our econometric models. (Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/consumer-spendin...)

- In June, Eurosystem staff revised down slightly the outlook for growth in the euro area for the next two years. The economy is expected to slow to 0.9% in 2023 before rebounding to 1.5% in 2024 and 1.6% in 2025 as energy prices moderate, foreign demand strengthens and real incomes improve. (Source: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2023/html/ecb.sp230...)

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#278

Post by mantas »

imglorp wrote: post #237
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…

The megacorporations are at war against humanity and won't stop until forced: they must profit and grow at the expense of civilization, climate, and biosphere. It's true the EU does not recognize it's in a war yet but they are at least trying to slow them down. The US is further behind.

Is EU really trying to slow it down? TikTok ban in US seems to be a common talking point. Meanwhile here very few people talk about it and those are seen as lunatics in most cases.

Most people seem to happily approve all the GDPR dialogs too. While doomscrolling TikTok/Instagram/FB.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#279

Post by troupo »

dgb23 wrote: post #273
johndhi wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying the laws EU has released are too complex and indirect and cost too much money, and that if they wanted to ban behavioral advertising outright they should have and could have done that instead of what they have done.

The actually ridiculous part is not that. It’s the fact that our browsers don’t solve this issue in a standardized way. Everyone who serves HTTP in the Eu and includes third party tracking, shows you an idiosyncratic consent banner. Often these things download a large amount of JS as well. That’s completely and utterly idiotic. - It’s confusing for users. - It interrupts the user’s flow everytime they visit a site. -…

> Everyone who serves HTTP in the Eu and includes third party tracking, shows you an idiosyncratic consent banner. Often these things download a large amount of JS as well.

> That’s completely and utterly idiotic.

Yes. And that's not the fault of the law, but the fault of the companies.

1. The law doesn't talk about browsers, or cookies, or banners. It's a General Data Protection Regulation. It applies in equal measure to browsers, apps, VR, AR, offline interactions, and whatever you can think of

2. The law is ridicuously simple for 99% of use cases, and is extremely cheap to implement. It says, "Only use data you need for the operation of your business. If you collect any other data, you have to ask users for consent. Consent has to be informed, and it must be as easy to say no as it is to say yes"

> Why is this not the case?

Because the companies think that tracking you and selling your data on theopen market is their god-given right.

And the standard is literally already there: it's called GDPR.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#280

Post by troupo »

dgb23 wrote: post #276
martin8412 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already DNT(Do not track) in the browsers, but nobody respects it.

So there’s the problem. This should be sufficient?

Browsers removed the Do Not Track header because it was... used to track users.

This should give you the answer to "why this isn't sufficient". The ads industry does not respect anything until it's driven out of existence by fines.

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