Facebook and all other ad networks using personalized advertising will pull out from the EU, then.
EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram
291–300 of 765 posts
Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram
#292Comments here so far focus on personalised ads as the issue -- but that's a symptom of what's being banned, which is the mass collection of personal data. Personalised ads are beside the point. The issue is how they are personalised, namely by building a rich profile of user behaviour based on non-consensual tracking. It isnt even clear that there's a meaningful sense of 'consent' to what modern ad companies (ie., go…
Data privacy is one of the least important issues of our day. People (especially on HN) get very passionate about it but are unable to produce specific harms Google and Meta ad tracking creates. Could there be an issue in the future? Possibly. Are privacy laws like GDPR worth the economic and other harms? Probably not. The amount of wasted programmer hours alone has far overcome the negative impacts of big tech ad tr…
> ... but are unable to produce specific harms Google and Meta ad tracking creates.
One of the first results of a Google search: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3555102
> Also all the data is out there and me and my family in a million databases. Just like in the 80s with the yellow books. Did you know you can buy a list of almost every American with an estimate credit score and income and other details? This is 50 year old tech.
While one could argue that this is "old tech", the main issue is reach.
Back in the 80s, there could be a way to contact someone and make an educated guess, using their credit score, as of what kind of products they may be inclined to buy.
Nowadays, these databases may include data about diet, job situation, alcohol intake, or family issues, because those educated guesses are made upon information about your searches, your Facebook group memberships, your postings, etc.
You also seem to be making the argument that, since either this data is already out in the wild, or other companies may have access to it, why target big tech specifically?
And the counter to this couldn't be simpler: two wrongs don't make anything right.
Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. And when I’m unhappy with my government, I can vote them out or, if I want to, get politically active. I can’t vote out Google. Their customers are advertisers, not me. And I don’t know which apps on my phone send my information to Facebook or what they do with it.
It’s infinitely easier to avoid the companies you don’t like than it is to vote out any part of government. You have near zero power to remove someone you don’t like because your vote is worth next to nothing. However, you have full power to avoid the products and services of a company.
You can avoid the services of Google and Facebook, but you can't avoid their tracking. Every other website you browse will let them know and your family and friends will happily tell them about you.
Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram
#294I know in HN there is a big "personalized advertising" is bad sentiment, but I don't get what the problem is. I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet. It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people w…
> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here. Ads are bringing so little revenue per user that I can't see how that can possibly be true. And even then people are paying the ads on the product they end up buying after. Ads function at a macro economic level like a very inefficient tax…
Ads bring in little per user, but sites can have a lot of users.
Here's a video [1] by a reasonably successful YouTube guitarist, Samurai Guitarist, on the various ways a professional guitarist might make money and how effective they are. It includes a section on content creators for social media.
The content creator part is what is relevant for this thread, but the whole video is worth watching if you are at all curious what a working musician who is not a big name star might make.
He gives some numbers from back when he was at around 50k followers, after two years of working full time trying to turn content creator into something he could make a living from.
He was getting $500/month from AdSense.
He was also getting about $500 for sponsored videos but he only had sponsors occasionally. He wasn't focused on something specialized gear reviews which would have probably gotten more sponsorships, so the sponsors were more general like VPN companies or game companies.
Patreon was around $300/month.
Amazon affiliate links to products he mentioned were around $50/month.
Spotify and other streaming services that he uploaded his music to were about $30/month.
He'd promote in his YouTube videos giving guitar lessons over Skype. That brought in around $750/month.
Fiverr gigs ranged from $80-500/month.
All in all a good month would be around $3000 at 50k followers.
Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram
#295Facebook and all other ad networks using personalized advertising will pull out from the EU, then.
Don't threaten me with a good time.
Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should it be illegal? I don’t understand the moral threat. Personally I feel that privacy gets too much airtime as a value — I see lots of other more direct issues (like political manipulation) that will remain an issue even with “strong privacy.”
Wait until you read about Cambridge Analytica.
FYI - referring to Cambridge Analytica like it has any meaningful relationship to privacy, ad tech or election results is the silliest thing you can say to someone who has any understanding of the subject. Cambridge Analytica is a like a canary in a coal mine that says, "this person has no actual understanding of the issues".
Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram
#297Does anyone have any specific details on the ban, maybe a link to the legal document? The article seems to use "personalized advertising" and "behavioral advertising" interchangeably, and also mentions that using location for advertising is a breach of privacy - which would prevent any local business from advertising itself to people in the same city, as I see it. Was that the intent here?
geographic location in internet means you are being tracked which is by definition part of what we want to stop. This is nothing like local advertising.
Local advertising is contextual advertising not personalised one. The equivalent of that in internet would be for example a Gardening website showing adds for gardening tools or a tech website showin ads for notebooks etc. these are tied to the context and are fine. the distinction is that when i go away from that context i'm not followed by those ads. Location based ads in internet follow you around no matter where you are. Imagine how creepy would be for you if you go to vacation in Hawai for example and see a billboard advertising for something in your home town on the other side of the world.
Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and not necessarily know where you drive and how often. They do tough. They know where you refueled/charged your car, hotels you've booked. Not only that, but they also know if you donate money to your local mosque/synagogue, spend just a bit too much at a liquor store, etc.
You can still opt for taking money out of an ATM and and pay by cash to not be tracked by the card company. Meta does not offer the same option
You have to use Meta? I'm not arguing for or against privacy here - just trying to point out that you still have options. It might be a pain to contact loved ones, check in on friends, etc. but so is using an ATM.
Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram
#299While I could care less about Meta and Alphabet, I find it difficult not to basically see this as a form of economic warfare between the United States and the EU. The latter simply being jealous of the former's technological superiority, both economically and technically.
Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cambridge Analytica basically didn't work. For all the data it collected, it amounted to trying to build political influence by reading tea leaves. The strongest decider in the outcome of the 2016 election is that the Trump campaign spent something like a factor of three more on advertising across the board than the Clinton campaign. Cambridge Analytica was more representative of the notion that the Republicans were…
What's your view on their effect on elections in other countries? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Elections
As a professional advertiser who has worked in political ads, I can tell you it had no effect on any of the results of these campaigns. A bunch of bad people hired them after the Trump campaign because they bought the fluff too.