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Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

noyb.eu

361–370 of 443 posts

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not an analysis, that's a polemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mises_Institute Even if they got the numbers right, which I doubt, they completely miss that US income has to pay for a lot more than in most of Europe, healthcare and education just as the most prominent examples, also lack of public transit etc. And of course anyone who has ever lived both in the US and in one or more European countries knows t…

if you read the article, you would see that they account for social service transfers. > And of course anyone who has ever lived both in the US and in one or more European countries knows that this "analysis" is BS. mm. if we are going by anecdata, my dad grew up in Europe in latter 20th century and they could not afford shoes or electricity. his siblings were put up for adoption. things have certainly changed, but t…

> they account for social service transfers

They claim to account for them. Whether they actually did so in any way that makes sense is not documented. Given the credibility of the source... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also, their claim is "social benefits paid to households". That wording strongly suggests that they only took into account those social benefits that result in a payment, of money, from the government to the households, such as social security payments or unemployment benefits.

Which would miss the vast majority of benefits, including all the ones I mentioned, because those benefits don't work that way.

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s lovely. It sounds like the kind of thing that would work well in a fortune cookie. Meanwhile, in the real world, we find that that’s not how happiness works at all. People want more than they used to have or they want more than the people around them. If they don’t, they aren’t happy. You can blame capitalism all you like, but this is a fundamental tenet of brain chemistry. No matter how well off we are, our d…

That's not true though if you look at at global "happiness" studies, it's not the countries with the highest individual material wealth which typically come out on top, but the countries with the least wealth inequality, usually the Scandinavian countries.

That’s pretty much what I said. People are comparing themselves with those around them. If they’re about equal, they’re happy. If the society has high inequality, they’re unhappy. The absolute level of what they have is irrelevant, which is weird. You’d think that a person who doesn’t have to worry about food, clothing, shelter, entertainment and social connections would just be objectively happy. But no, the existence of many rich people makes them feel worse.

This isn’t good or bad. It’s just the way humans are.

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#363
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they can't. If a service is only profitable with personalized advertising they aren't allowed to say "if you want to use this service you need to allow us to do personalized advertising". Which means that in the future if there's a service I might want to use which is in this category and if I don't mind having my data used to personalize my advertising, I don't have a choice: the service won't exist.

So essentially you want to take choice away from the majority of consumers because it might make certain business models unprofitable and you want that business model for yourself? If that's not what you want then you need to better explain your point because right now it certainly sounds like that.

> you want to take choice away from the majority of consumers

Huh? My worry here is that privacy regulation will reduce the choices available to consumers. If it's legal for some services to offer "pay with ads + fraud detection" and others to offer "pay with your money" we can see what sort of services consumers prefer. In most areas online it turns out its the former. Regulation removes the first option.

> you want that business model for yourself

I'm not interested in running this sort of business; while I used to work in ads I'm not planning to go back. My main perspective here is as someone who uses and enjoys many ad-supported sites (including HN) and doesn't want to see them regulated out of existence or behind paywalls.

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#364
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I unironically enjoy non-targeted ads. Every time I see one that has nothing to do with my interests, I know that my meticulously tuned home network and browser settings are working.

What kind of upside do you see in this lack of targeting? (Asking unironically, too; different people value different aspects.)

https://www.socialcooling.com/

This site explains better than I could.

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#365
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly: it's not fully clear yet whether the GDPR requires you to offer people the opportunity to use your site without ad fraud detection, but I'm expecting it turns out it does. And without ad fraud detection ad-supported sites are mostly not practical.

You can have ad models that are immune to fraud. A time-based model such as "your ad here for X days" is immune to fraud, just like ads in print or TV are immune to it. If the ad drives purchases, the advertiser renews; if it doesn't, you may have to lower your price until another one comes up.

It's not immune to fraud: if I offer you ad space on jefftk.com how do you know how much to pay for it? Without some kind of fraud detection, how do you know whether to trust me when I tell you I have 25k unique visitors monthly?

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#366
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But why do you think legislation should be the one forcing that choice on everyone, rather than the market allowing consumers to choose? You paint a rosy libertarian picture about choice, but choice is not an inherently good. I don't want to live in a society that allows the use of consumer data to be used adversarially against consumers to defraud and manipulate them. It is good when laws prohibit fundamentally im…

You paint a rosy utopian picture about regulation, but regulation is not inherently good. I don't want to live in a society that allows regulation to be used adversarially against business owners to control them and manipulate the market. > It is good when laws prohibit fundamentally immoral behavior. Sure, but that's not relevant, because people don't agree on what "fundamentally immoral behavior" is to begin with (…

I am glad that regulation prohibits human trafficking, despite the 'loss of choice' business owners have as a result. Prohibition is never perfect, but there is certainly a lot less human trafficking than if the market was less 'authoritarian'.

In 70 years, I suspect people will view the ad/consumer surveillance industry much like we view the 1950s tobacco industry today.

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#367
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have ad models that are immune to fraud. A time-based model such as "your ad here for X days" is immune to fraud, just like ads in print or TV are immune to it. If the ad drives purchases, the advertiser renews; if it doesn't, you may have to lower your price until another one comes up.

It's not immune to fraud: if I offer you ad space on jefftk.com how do you know how much to pay for it? Without some kind of fraud detection, how do you know whether to trust me when I tell you I have 25k unique visitors monthly?

Could always be an auction-based market - you start with a trial and only do a day/week/etc and gauge your results - if they're good you know you can bid more next time. With enough "liquidity" on either side the true price of said ad inventory will naturally come up without any tracking necessary.

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll preface this by saying that I don't like Meta and am very privacy-conscious. > it's also very possible that the business models are actually unpopular and people are upset after learning about them. I am 100% convinced - from people around me - that those who use FB and IG don't give a damn about privacy and would rather it be free of charge. This is clearly a small group of "elite people in the know" (which in…

> I am 100% convinced - from people around me - that those who use FB and IG don't give a damn about privacy and would rather it be free of charge. When Apple forced apps to implement App Tracking Transparency which asks a neutral, OS-provided question to the user, only 4% opted in. Furthermore, people generally don't care about privacy because they don't understand the ramifications of that decision (which is exactl…

100% agreed - the issue is that people aren't giving _informed_ consent, I think it'd be great to have a law that basically says "the default has to be not tracking, and you can prompt and allow users to opt-in for targeted ads"

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#369
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not immune to fraud: if I offer you ad space on jefftk.com how do you know how much to pay for it? Without some kind of fraud detection, how do you know whether to trust me when I tell you I have 25k unique visitors monthly?

Could always be an auction-based market - you start with a trial and only do a day/week/etc and gauge your results - if they're good you know you can bid more next time. With enough "liquidity" on either side the true price of said ad inventory will naturally come up without any tracking necessary.

That works for performance advertising, where you're able to tell whether your specific ad is getting results. But most display advertising (by dollars) is brand advertising, where Ford cares that a real person is seeing their ad but isn't expecting you're going to drop everything and click through to buy a truck.

Re: Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement

#370
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're implying the EU is this privacy guardian fighting these evil American tech companies. Except it was the EU who mandated data retention laws, the EU who banned prepaid cards over 150 euros, the EU who mandated countries release a public registry of who owns everything, and a substantial number of member states have mandatory key disclosure and SIM card registration laws. I don't really get the impression the EU…

EU-based governments are at least honest about their intent of spying on their citizens, where the collection & processing of said data is at least subject to due process and can potentially be challenged in court. The US would rather outsource it to the private sector so while the end-result is the same (the government can buy the data off the open market or request it via an NSL) they don't even have to pay for bui…

>EU-based governments are at least honest about their intent of spying on their citizens, where the collection & processing of said data is at least subject to due process and can potentially be challenged in court.

Not really. It can be challenged in court in that anything can be challenged in court. There's no real due process.

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