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GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

blogs.harvard.edu

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Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#401
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP and browser information are definitely PII, which is Personally Identifiable Information. Those are PII, because they can be used to personally identify an individual.

PII is not a GDPR term, by the way.

Correct. There is a similar concept, but it is not the same as PII in the US.

Recital 26:

To determine whether a natural person is identifiable, account should be taken of all the means reasonably likely to be used, such as singling out, either by the controller or by another person to identify the natural person directly or indirectly. To ascertain whether means are reasonably likely to be used to identify the natural person, account should be taken of all objective factors, such as the costs of and the amount of time required for identification, taking into consideration the available technology at the time of the processing and technological developments.

Since the concepts mentioned in the comment, IP and browser information, are already being used to single people out for tracking, those particular types of information can definitely be viewed as the equivalent concept under GDPR, as defined in Recital 26.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#402
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By and large, it doesn't, very well. I know Twitter isn't known for being the best at advertising, but it was made exceptionally clear to me that online advertising is a massive bunch of lies when I did my GDPR Twitter data export and it included me in a bunch of incorrect, non-sensical and contradictory ad targeting groups. Twitter claims I: * Own a cat, dog and other animal (I don't) * Have between $100k- $999k l…

Have they got the following mostly right: * Your age bracket; * The fact that your net worth is positive (not deep in debt); * Whether you live in a city / suburb / countryside; * Which part of country is that; * Your gender; * Your race / ethnicity, broadly? If so, they still have an immensely precise focus on you, compared to TV, radio, or paper media, even if they're mistaken about your cat.

I don't know about the person in question, but in order:

* Yes, but the age bracket for me is _very_ wide (it says "alive and not in need of new knees yet probably", but not much more)

* They didn't have this info

* This was wrong

* No, they didn't have this (although the country itself was correct)

* Wrong

* They did not have this

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#403
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, I am sure it wont be abused. It would be the first time in history that such a law has not been abused. The fear is real and fully warranted. I am sure warning will come first There is no mandate written into the GDPR requiring warnings before fines, nor is there anything preventing multimillion-dollar fines for first-time, minor violations.

It's not a law it's a regulation and EU regulation is largely intended to be more of a carrot before the unpack the stick. See the Smartphone Charger regulation. It requires all smartphones vendors to come up with a standard for charging, everyone picked microUSB (though moving to USB C now). The EU is fine with that and the smartphone vendors know that if they start pulling the "everyone has their own port" shit aga…

Now you can pick which one you want.

I don’t have to pick either. My company is not subject to the GDPR, and we will never put ourselves in a position to be subject to it. I will not be dictated to or threatened by a foreign government.

Art. 83 of the GDPR details this. Art. 78 details what rights you have against them imposing a fine.

People keep saying things like this, and yet neither article a) requires that a warning be issued before they seek a fine or b) limits fines in any way, except for a top cap of $10 million/$20 million (or percentages of revenue, but the caps are more than 100% of the revenue of most companies).

I would love for someone to just say “yes, technically there are no required warnings or limits other than the $10/$20 million”. Because that’s the only true statement that there is about GDPR fines.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#404

It won't do much. It'll definitely get rid of some low-value companies but that's about it. People think that adtech has some incredible insights but 99% of data is terrible. If you check your profile at any major site, you'll quickly find that you're probably in several conflicting segments that have nothing to do with you. Context is still king for any marketer who knows what they're doing, but unfortunately the in…

What you're describing sounds very much like a bubble that is going to pop...

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the hundreds of mostly incorrect or irrelevant demographics that Twitter has be in, I would still say there’s a huge amount of waste going on. At least with offline advertising (like TV or print) the “fuzziness” is very explicit. Here, Twitter sells you that you can target “dog owners”, but nowhere through the Twitter ad buy process does it tell you how BS that targeting is.

And that's why Twitter is not doing as well as Facebook. Facebook doesn't need algorithms to know what you are interested in, where you like to eat, etc. You explicitly tell them in your info and by what types of articles you like and share, and what you post.

Well I’ve told Twitter that I hate Blockchain and think it’s all BS, yet I still get ads for ICOs and “Uber for the blockchain” - whatever the fuck that is.

Again, I guess this is because Twitter sucks at advertising.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#406
post #61
post #14

From one of the references in the article: The Google consent interface greets site visitors with a request to use data to tailor advertising, with equally prominent “no” and “yes” buttons. If a reader declines to be tracked, he or she sees a notice saying the ads will be less relevant and asking to “agree” or go back to the previous page.

Which is certainly fine with me. I'm always amused that the notion that I will regret not having "relevant" ads. Where "relevant" means more likely to get me to buy things I was not intending to buy. Ads make sense to me in the age of information scarcity. But now if I need a thing, searching always turns up what I want. If I need to figure out what kind of thing to buy, I can read review at places like The Wirecutte…

Actually Google doesn't just say the ads will be less relevant, it also says you won't be able to block or mute some ads. Are you still happy to opt out?

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#407
GDPR may cause a drop in tracking-based ads, but websites can then just increase the number of ad slots for display and content-based ads. So what's changing is that the user is forced to choose between "less ads with tracking" and "more ads , no tracking". That 's not against the GDPR.

So, expect more ad-tech, not less.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#408
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adtech is a joke. Even targeted ads are so irrelevant to the point where I don't think most people can tell if they're random or not. Except when the creepiness kicks in, because they show you ads for this one thing you googled a week ago. Google can't get it right. Their ads suck, and their Youtube suggestions aren't much better. Amazon can't get suggestions right in their own store. The whole ad industry is a joke.…

I had that "creepy" moment but it was more silly than creepy to me. I was googling a lot about a certain piece of software (config, how to set this and that up with other things to work together, etc.) and that resulted in me getting ads for it from there on. I mean yes, the targeting 'worked' - it's a software that interested me at the time, I even own a copy already . Targeted ad money well spent..? The surgery was…

What bugs me even more is booking.com

Case in point: I book a hotel for next weekend in Sapporo and they won't stop pestering me with ads for hotels on said weekend in Sapporo.

Hello! I just booked a hotel and don't need another one!

What seems even more seedy is their emails:

Hello CaptainZapp; Prices just went down in Sapporo!

Which, first, is a lie. I know that because I was in Japan during golden week. And prices are very high and certainly don't get any lower for those days.

Secondly it seems fundamentally unfair towards the hotels that (have to) sign up with them.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring them to check an "I agree to be tracked" checkbox and signing an agreement (which has just happened to me yesterday in an EU country in accordance to GDPR) before they can use a product/service is hardly much better. That's specifically not allowed under the GDPR. Either the information is needed to provide the service (and needed means actually needed, not "my business model depends on it"), in which case…

How is "my business model depends on it" not a bona fide legitimate purpose for information collection? Nobody is forcing anyone to patronize a business that relies on data collection for profitability. I'm extremely skeptical of regulation that interferes with consensual deals between economic actors. You want transparency? Fine. But you don't get to randomly outlaw certain entire classes of business.

> consensual deals between economic actors

For web, most people don't understand the scope of tracking and privacy. None of the people I know understand what these web companies are doing, how they are being tracked and what data companies have about them. Nobody reads the privacy notice in those websites. Even after someone tells them facebook is tracking everything, they don't understand and just ignores it. There are no consensual deals on web. So GDPR is for all of them (and for people who understand and wants protection).

Also in America a company is more important than people. That's why there are so much negativity towards GDPR.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#410
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took ten minutes to implement GDPR on a small ecommerce website: we deleted Google Analytics (HTTP logs and carts tracking is more than enough) and replaced Facebook widgets by a simple link. Newsletter was already opt-in only, we don't sell private data, and user account deletion was already possible.

That seems extraordinarily flippant. I can't imagine giving up Google Analytics for http logs on a content-driven site.

Our advanced use of GA was cart tracking from first visit to payment. Reviewing our use of the tool, we determined that anonymous tracking of carts evolution was more than enough for our needs. That means a) almost same feature set as what was used before and b) no nagging cookie screen for our users unlike our competitors (really small and near-insignificant improvement in itself, I know, but our biggest competitor uses a TRUSTe cookie screen which blocks the full view and is quite slow)
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