Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 765 posts

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#361

Post by lock-the-spock »

pembrook wrote: post #75

Ok, my contrarian hot take (for HN at least). The real entities we need to be afraid of in regards to privacy are governments & politicians, not companies & entrepreneurs. The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap. The government on the other hand can literally ruin your life (or even end it in some countries). The EU is doing a fantastic job of keeping everyone distracted by pointing the finger a…

> The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap. The government on the other hand can literally ruin your life (or even end it in some countries).

No, the worst thing a company can do is to influence your desires, feelings and behaviours, causing you to spend money irresponsibly, getting your kids addicted to useless games, ... All that is also what this kind of tracking aims at. It is quite incredible how people have gotten used to being manipulated on a daily basis. Advertisement used to be fact based, but it's nowaday all emotional trickery and the more the companies know about you, the better they can modulate it to your wants, needs and worries.

Targeted advertising has already changed governments, caused hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies, family trouble and breakups, and many sucides. You don't notice it anymore because it is so utterly ubiquitous, but it drains you and affects your feelings and thoughts most of the day.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#362

Post by badwolf »

cm2012 wrote: post #261
mjburgess wrote: post #90

Comments 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…

> The ISPs have all the same data and regularly share it with the government in response to warrants.

I'd amend this to note ISPs also gladly share this information with... Advertisers.

Do people on HN use Credit Cards? Your transaction info is also sold to advertisers.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#363

Post by nonethewiser »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #282
bluelu wrote: post #268

I don't understand why this only applies for Facebook then. 2 1/2 years, ago they opened up a loop hole for newspapers that they are explicitly allowed to do it (Either you pay, or when you use their free version, you must accept to be tracked for behavioural advertising). Are they any better than facebook? Some example news sites: www.zeit.de, www.spiegel.de More information on this: https://www.heise.de/news/E-Priv…

> I don't understand why this only applies for Facebook then. It doesn't.

Can you elaborate? That's not how the article makes it sound.

> The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has instructed the Irish data regulator, where Meta’s European headquarters are located, to impose a permanent ban on Meta’s use of behavioural advertising within two weeks. The EDPB states that its decision is an urgent binding instruction to enforce the ban across the EEA.

Is the same happening at the newspapers?

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#364

Post by the_pwner224 »

alexvitkov wrote: post #325
giancarlostoro wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> increasingly microsoft Will the EU fix Windows by banning the insane amount of tracking they do? Would be nice. The OS is literally at its peak in terms of being great, but all the telemetry, forced accounts and Microsoft ads keep the meme alive that Windows is awful, when in fact, if you remove those three things I mentioned, you have an insanely reliable and polished OS, all my issues with Windows have always com…

The telemetry, ads and forced online accounts are the only major changes since Windows 7 that I can think of. What useful features has Microsoft added since then to make you consider it at its peak currently? I haven't been using it as heavily and I'm genuinely interested if there's something great I've missed.

Night mode (blue light filter) is naitvely supported/builtin

Dark theme

HDR support

Auto HDR for many older games

Native system wide support for surround sound in headphones with hrtf

Win+Shift+S screenshot tool

It took a long time to get here, but the settings app is now better than the old Control Panel imo

If you're a gamer then HDR/surround/raytracing can potentially be huge upgrades if your hardware supports it.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#365

Post by Semaphor »

tzs wrote: post #211
Semaphor wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I’m completely misunderstanding things, they’ll do what many news sites in Germany already do: Option A: Continue for free with ads (and tracking and profiling etc.) Option B: Pay for a subscription without ads or tracking (most seem to use a service called "Pur" (pure)) This does not mesh with some people’s understanding of the GDPR, but at least several German courts said it’s okay.

My recollection is that at least some country's regulators have said that if you offer option A you must also offer option A': continue for free without tracking and profiling. Their reasoning was that GDPR says that consent must be freely given. If the site provides more service if you consent than the consent is not freely given according to those regulators. (It seemed kind of goofy to me. In every other context I…

As I posted in another comment, German regulators apparently okayed this.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#366

Post by hartator »

kibwen wrote: post #206
hartator wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this are far from material harms. Compared to what governments can do and are doing.

Not only is Facebook a tool of oppressive governments, Facebook's own annual revenue is larger than the GDP of 2/3 of the countries in the world. I don't understand why people have this blind spot when it comes to giving corporations a pass on things that they'd criticize a government for. Most corporations are expressly authoritarian organizations, more so than many governments. Neither Facebook users nor Facebook e…

Still I haven't heard about Facebook killing anyone.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#367

Post by germandiago »

lock-the-spock wrote: post #357
germandiago wrote: post #346

I am an european and I am pretty sure that some day in the EU they will regulate even the position to go to po... Also, we are pretty broke now so get ready for looking for gold even underground... In the meantime... these people do not do more important homework...

Personally I find this quite an important issue. Whether you don't care is your own choice, but not all us are happy to live in a panopticon. And the EU is in fact mainly a trade body, setting standards and categorisations, so there are likely some rules on toilets already in EU acquis on health and safety at the workplace, etc. I doubt they oblige a specific position though, you can rest in peace on the piece

I care, but they spend a lifetime fining citizens and companies and later at the same time they tell you that with digital euro, anonimity... no. Want to make physical money disappear over time, restrict to 1000 euros cash transactions... (Spain case) They are so special. I thought common human beings work for public institutions also so they should be audited by the same rules.

Or for example they prepare a law to be able to get journalist sources (which is even illegal in my constitution!).

I do not think it is a fair position. They are increasingly telling us: you do all this and we... we have superpowers we do not need to do it.

I do not agree with that vision.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#368

Post by uxp8u61q »

bluelu wrote: post #268

I don't understand why this only applies for Facebook then. 2 1/2 years, ago they opened up a loop hole for newspapers that they are explicitly allowed to do it (Either you pay, or when you use their free version, you must accept to be tracked for behavioural advertising). Are they any better than facebook? Some example news sites: www.zeit.de, www.spiegel.de More information on this: https://www.heise.de/news/E-Priv…

> I don't understand why this only applies for Facebook then.

It applies to everyone. It's just a consequence of GDPR. The regulator has found, after complaints, that Facebook's handling of personal data was in breach. Anyone who does the same thing as Facebook will be in breach. It's just that so far, either nobody is doing the exact same thing, or nobody has raised a complaint yet, or they're still in the regulator's backlog.

Also, you're hearing about it because it's Facebook. If it were a small unknown company you wouldn't have heard about it.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#369

Post by magnusmundus »

troupo wrote: post #333
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious what widespread legislation on this front is going to cause. Not meaning to defend surveillance capitalism in the slightest, it belongs in the dustbin of history for reasons too numerous to articulate, but merely from the perspective that personalized ads that creep on you were essentially made a load-bearing column of the Internet before anyone knew how creepy they were going to get with it, and now jus…

> I am curious what widespread legislation on this front is going to cause Nothing. More dark patterns to trick people into accepting tracking. Look to how the industry reacted yo GDPR. > personalized ads that creep on you were essentially made a load-bearing column of the Internet before anyone knew how creepy they were going to get with it You can have personalized ads without invasive and pervasive tracking

> Look to how the industry reacted yo GDPR.

Anecdotal observation from big-ish corps in EU: everyone started trying to look very mindful about what data they ask for in the first place, what gets stored where, what is shared with whom. In some cases, this led to actually being more mindful about those. At least in e-commerce, GDPR worked in the privacy-minded consumer's benefit to some extent, and not quite against anyone.

Re: EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

#370

Post by arrowsmith »

poisonborz wrote: post #139
dr_dshiv wrote: post #122

Earlier 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.

Wait until you learn that Cambridge Analytica had no discernible effect on the 2016 US presidential election or the Brexit referendum and this entire "scandal" was bullshit: https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/08/27/7-things-netflixs-th...
Post reply on HN