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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

#401

Post by 93po »

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

This is demonstrably not true. For over 100 years, advertising has had strong roots in emotional appeal. From wiki:

"In the 1910s and 1920s, many ad men believed that human instincts could be targeted and harnessed – "sublimated" into the desire to purchase commodities"

Just look at smoking ads from this time. Claiming health benefits that didn't exist, covering up health issues they knew existed, and associating smoking with cool people and socially desirable behavior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising#Since_1...

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

#402

Post by JAlexoid »

devjab wrote: post #172
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…

Are you sure there is a line between the tech companies and the governments? We’re in the middle of a massive intelligence scandal here in Denmark. Which at its core is about how a couple of high level figures might’ve leaked that our own government is sharing all our internet data with the US “illegally”. I put “illegally” in quotes because it’s not technically illegal for the US to use surveillance on us. Just like…

> they are also doing it to protect our tech industry

With these laws in place, EU companies face worse conditions than US ones. They may be protecting some bigger EU companies, but they definitely aren't protecting our IT industry.

GPDR was an annoyance for Google, and a complete disaster for anyone small(think companies that can't hire a Chief Data Protection Officer to work full time)

There's a good rationale for placing restrictions and rules on data privacy, but there are also some very ignorant and destructive decisions.

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

#403

Post by xxs »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #364
alexvitkov wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Dark theme

Windows has had themes/color schemes since 3.0 - yes the early 90s

Ray tracing has nothing to do with Windows, either

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

#404

Post by Lutger »

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…

> But Google and Meta in particular have an amazing 15 year track record of basically never leaking user data.

I disagree with almost every sentence in your post, but want to point out this one as it is specifically very surprising to me. There are two ways Meta is a giant leak of user data. First, it just sells user data to third parties, and it was extremely lenient with this in the past. Maybe that was the worlds biggest leak of user data, which we now know was likely instrumental in winning certain elections. Talking about harm...

Second, there actually were cases where hackers got their hands on facebook data. My personal phone number is probably leaked by this. I made the mistake of using my phone number for 2fa. iirc sensitive data from about 500 million user accounts were leaked.

I'm not sure about google but Meta is a leaking like a sieve.

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

#405

Post by SiempreViernes »

nonethewiser wrote: post #363
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 newspaper…

Well, you are correct that the specific Binding Decision by the EDPB has issued to the Irish data regulator about how it should harmonise rulings about the systematic infractions by Facebook across the union is not something that applies to newspapers in general, on account of newspapers not being part of Facebook.

But obviously the GDPR applies to all newspapers, and if any particular newspaper is doing behavioural advertising using the same illegal methods as Meta they'll probably get fined much quicker. But hopefully most are by now not even using illegal methods but properly asking for consent.

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

#406

Post by cobbaut »

Auracle wrote: post #380
wussboy wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace "haircut" with "cancer" and then go apply for health insurance.

Except that doesn't happen, and is against the law.

Against the law, yes. How do you know it does not happen?

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

#407

Post by cowl »

aloe_falsa wrote: post #386
cowl wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

new and old regulation says that you can't track Personal information (and the IP is considered personal information) without the user's explicit consent. And what is useful ad or not is very subjetive. it's useless to be at linustechtips talking for example the black friday deals and you get an add for your local store that is making a 10% discount when the content is talking about the 60-70% discounts available at BestBuy.

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

#408

Post by xxs »

bad_user wrote: post #340
alexvitkov wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For developers, the great addition has been WSL2. But that's about it. For regular users, Windows 7 has been the best, and after noticing how my parents struggled with the updates, nothing can convince me to think otherwise.

While wsl2 is great, it has more to do with developers being forced to use windows/teams to begin with

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

#409

Post by 6510 »

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.

https://sl.bing.net/kic6UBky9mK

Not much apparently. The funniest: icons like chrome, round corners like mac.

edit: On the up side, Bing is actually much better than Google now.

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

#410

Post by anfogoat »

ben_w wrote: post #141
anfogoat wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as they manage to somehow manipulate the government to help them do it.

Being a gatekeeper to something important is sufficient. If Apple and Google both consider you a persona non grata, you will have a tough time getting by when the businesses you use daily (let alone government agencies) start insisting on interacting only via an app. Meta does that, and businesses that use only Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram all suddenly can't see you. Similar effects with money, though at least PayPa…

I don't know about you but ruin your life brings to mind something like what almost happened to Steven Donziger. No corporation is able to do that to you without the help of governments.

Not being able to interact with a business on Facebook or on any of the other equally insignificant platforms simply does not rate.

And if a governmental agency requires you to use Facebook to interact with them, without any stipulations to bind Meta to serve you, well it's alarming that anyone would have time to say a single thing about Meta instead of address the real issue of the agency having the power to in effect force you to interact with facebook.com.

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