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EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

reuters.com

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

#381

Post by JAlexoid »

josephg wrote: post #165
MereInterest wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap. A company can bar the exits, letting you burn to death [0]. A company can send private militias to force you to work [1] (or because you were sent the wrong set of MtG cards [2]). A company can improperly store pesticide, until the resulting explosion kills thousands [3]. A company can own every house and store in a town, managing your expenses to ensur…

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.

I would like to vote out my homophobic government, but I can't.

I can't avoid not paying taxes to fund the catholic church in my country, that uses that money to lobby homophobic laws... I can block Google and not use them.

This is not a simple "just vote them out", unless you're part of the privileged majority that can affect the policy.

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

#382

Post by digging »

officeplant wrote: post #306
lapphi wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upon logging into okcupid today I received a pop up inviting me to join The League (another dating app), with my phone number already pre-propagated. After accepting, they sent me this email. > We use the combination of your Facebook and LinkedIn data plus your About Me and Photos to ensure we are building a balanced, high-achieving and diverse community. Our screening algorithm looks at indicators like social influe…

As someone that refuses to use Linked In or Facebook it is wild to me that someone would not only use them, but willingly link a dating app to them. It makes me wonder how many more things I'll never get to participate in because I've deleted/avoid social media.

You and I, and probably a few others here on HN, are slowly being sifted into a parallel "unsocial" world, I fear. It's genuinely disgusting to see the kind of personal data we're expected to pass out by the truckload for every little digital trinket and feature, let alone entire facets of society such as dating apps.

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

#383

Post by devsda »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #315
devsda wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s infinitely easier to avoid the companies you don’t like than it is to vote out any part of government. If you can avoid a company, the fact that there is an acceptable alternative itself says that the market is not monopolized and so there is less chance of abuse. In the markets where abuse is possible there are often monopolies, or there is illusion of choice like a (colluding or copycatting)duopoly or one wh…

> If you can avoid a company, the fact that there is an acceptable alternative itself says that the market is not monopolized and so there is less chance of abuse Avoiding a company doesn't necessarily mean there's an acceptable alternative. I could use no social media and my life wouldn't be much worse or burdensome. There's very little I can do to prevent the government from doing what it's doing by myself.

Sure one can refuse to participate in the "market" altogether but like I said, it is a luxury that not everyone can afford to have due to various personal/social/economic reasons.

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

#384

Post by not_wyoming »

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 government can also force companies to hand over data. Better that the data is never consolidated in the first place.

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

#385

Post by amelius »

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…

The ad networks could have self-regulated and perhaps could have received a better treatment that allows some forms of personalized ads.

However, they blew it, and now we have this law that takes away their incentive to infringe our privacy. The needle is now on the other side, but not as far as it was before. I'm happy.

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

#386

Post by aloe_falsa »

cowl wrote: post #297
aloe_falsa wrote: post #61

Does 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.…

So there are two different things here: you're talking about building an individual profile for someone and including their home address as part of it, and I meant tailoring the ads to the IP address location, regardless of the user identity.

E.g., if I go to linustechtips and see an ad for cheap notebooks at Best Buy, that's pretty useless if Best Buy doesn't even ship to my country. I was just curious what the new regulation says about this.

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

#387

Post by thfuran »

kwanbix wrote: post #247
thfuran wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any good reason not to both legally protect privacy and ban the largest part of the market for the invasively collected data (which seems to me to fall nearly under regulating what can be done with the data)?

Are you willing to pay for all internet websites then?

I think the prevalence of free-to-use websites is a collosal market failure. They're a massive distortion to markets, far bigger than Uber running around losing billions a year, and they also put their thumbs on the scale more directly by deciding that certain things/topics can't be advertised or advertised on.

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

#388

Post by PaulHoule »

lapphi wrote: post #236
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…

Upon logging into okcupid today I received a pop up inviting me to join The League (another dating app), with my phone number already pre-propagated. After accepting, they sent me this email. > We use the combination of your Facebook and LinkedIn data plus your About Me and Photos to ensure we are building a balanced, high-achieving and diverse community. Our screening algorithm looks at indicators like social influe…

One of those things y'all never upvote is papers about psychodiagnostic software that uses your social media posts, cell phone location data, etc. to diagnose both chronic and acute psychiatric conditions.

I'm fairly certain that if a person is highly active on social media such a system could produce a better diagnosis than most people get when they see a professional, if only because the quality of psychodiagnosis is poor since it is often seen as a scam to satisfy insurance bureaucrats, common conditions are never diagnosed, there are fads for certain rare conditions, etc.

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

#389

Post by pembrook »

lock-the-spock wrote: post #361
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 incredibl…

> Advertisement used to be fact based, but it's nowaday all emotional trickery...Targeted advertising has already changed governments, caused hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies, family trouble and breakups, and many sucides.

Wow. I guess if we ban it then, we'll be living in a perfect utopia...like we used to have in the past?

Have you ever considered that "Targeted Advertising" could be, for the most part, a way for customers with wants/needs and businesses with products/solutions to efficiently match up? And that the people who have been "duped" by targeted advertising actually just have different wants/desires/needs than you?

I think its more likely that the root cause of all the things you mention, is just normal human nature stuff.

I think you might be using Targeted advertising as a panacea boogieman instead of confronting the uncomfortable real causes for these things (from election results you don't like to family breakups/suicides)?

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

#390

Post by Auracle »

tsimionescu wrote: post #49
kwanbix wrote: post #6

I 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…

Ads are almost universally trying to convince you to do something you shouldn't do. At best, they will convince you to but a subpar product, at worst they'll convince you to buy a product you don't need at all. Personalized ads are better at convincing you personally, so they are worse for you than random ads, or even than content-based ads. Additionally, they depend on building a detailed profile of you, which most…

That's entirely untrue. I'm a photographer (though I'm largely quitting after this year) and advertise on Facebook/Instagram. If someone was in my area and got newly engaged, they might see my ad. They probably need a wedding photographer, and they're only going to actually go with me if they like the look of my photos better than everyone else and my price is within their budget. Without advertising, they might not be exposed to my work and end up with someone that would take worse photos for them.

I also used to 'boost' my high school senior posts to other 16/17/18 year olds in whatever area they're from. Not only did that work as advertising for me, all of the likes that the images got from that probably really boosted the kid's self esteem. Within the past year they made it so that I can no longer target people under the age of 18 by area.

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