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The EU's war on behavioral advertising

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Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#411

Post by [deleted] »

asu_thomas wrote: post #56
jklinger410 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about this free market that everyone talks about? I don't think there are any protections around the reasonable expectation of privacy from a private industry perspective in the US. If you use the internet, or an app, you must protect yourself. I assume everyone is a capitalist, so wouldn't adding laws here somehow subsidize and therefore tarnish the market?

> If you use the internet, or an app, you must protect yourself. As in "choose a strong password"? As in "never accept a terms of service agreement you disagree with"? As in "read all code before running it"? What thoughts were going through your head when you typed that?

[deleted]

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#412

Post by JohnFen »

xNeil wrote: post #241
Const-me wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infinite money glitch for big tech, with dramatic externalities pushed to non-consenting general population. These externalities include death of traditional media, extreme levels of political polarization, and climbing suicide rate of teenagers, girls in particular. These things are caused in very large part by the big tech companies maximizing consumption of ads, and efficiency of ads targeting.

The only non-consenting advertising I can think of is public billboards - and I believe those should be banned, most definitely. Every single other type of advertising requires your explicit consent. YouTube? Google? Newspapers? All have your consent.

> The only non-consenting advertising I can think of is public billboards

There is advertising in public washrooms, there is advertising on people's clothing, there is advertising playing on PA systems, there is advertising embedded in movies, there is advertising presented as news. There is nonconsenting advertising everywhere. In my experience, more of it is nonconsenting than consenting -- probably because very few people would actually consent to it.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#413

Post by JohnFen »

bryan_w wrote: post #229
Const-me wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infinite money glitch for big tech, with dramatic externalities pushed to non-consenting general population. These externalities include death of traditional media, extreme levels of political polarization, and climbing suicide rate of teenagers, girls in particular. These things are caused in very large part by the big tech companies maximizing consumption of ads, and efficiency of ads targeting.

> death of traditional media Well if adverting is so bad, and old media relied on advertising, Tech was doing the world a favor by starving them out. We should be thanking Google for exposing the corruption that was the old media advertising empire

> We should be thanking Google for exposing the corruption that was the old media advertising empire

But they (and the rest of the industry) have replaced it with an even more egregious and abusive advertising system.

Google gets no thanks from me.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#414

Post by JohnFen »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #388
SuperCuber wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"opt-in by default" kinda makes sense as a combination of words, but you're right that people just usually call it "opt-out" (and vice versa)

I think it describes a somewhat common scenario, where it's on by default but there's an effort made to make it seem like you went out of your way to agree to it. Like a pre-checked box on a form about your desire to receive marketing mails.

Which makes it opt-out.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#415

Post by JohnFen »

mrweasel wrote: post #254
JCWasmx86 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you just have to follow the regulations. It's no "war on US companies" or anything like that. They wrote some good law (Albeit it has a few weaknesses), and enforce it now. And if you want to do business in the EU, you have to follow them. I would say it's more a problem of the US companies, if they can't do business without violating EU regulations.

If we're being a bit generous it's easier for the EU to make these rules, because it has very little impact on it's own companies. The majority of the large companies being impacted by these laws are US based. Similarly you could argue that the companies are US based, simply because the US have pretty terrible privacy rules which makes it easy for them to get started with a fair amount of users/targets.

> you could argue that the companies are US based, simply because the US have pretty terrible privacy rules

I do argue this. The state of privacy rules in the US is abominable.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#416

Post by EMIRELADERO »

sib wrote: post #406
EMIRELADERO wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's akin to taking a law prohibiting the (voluntary) sale of organs to mean that everything's free now. Some things are above the concept of "market". Personal data is one of those things. That's the ideology behind these laws.

"Personal data is one of those things" - disagree. When people say "Google isn't free, they provide it in exchange for your data" that is precisely saying that there's a market and a trade involved. You may not like that trade, in which case, don't use Google services...

The mere factual existence of a trade/market does not imply governmental or societal acceptance of that market. Going back to the organ example, if you search deep enough you can probably find sites and examples of people willingly trading their own organs for vast amounts of money. Yet that doesn't stop the practice from being illegal, and in most of society's view, reprehensible. Governments exist, in part, for that reason.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#417

Post by dcow »

ssivark wrote: post #393
dcow wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, personally I’d argue for a stronger stance: the right to not be solicited . I think all advertising is poisonous and insidious and leads to the things you describe, not just targeted behavioral profiling. So I’d say the missing right that we need to codify lies somewhere in that realm. Still I think we’re a little stuck on the consent bit. If 98% of society consents to be solicited, all the problems of…

It’s illegal, in many places, to sell your vote. Extending that example to a general principle — if you have any decision making power/responsibility over others, then allowing it to be subverted (for pecuniary or other benefit) is a dereliction of fiduciary responsibility. If you are only selling consequences on yourself (we can debate the legality of that, and protections necessary against exploitation) that’s a di…

I actually really like this construction/framing. I’ve been wondering for awhile how we claw out of this state where voting is a right not a privilege. You can’t discriminate on anything close to a protected class for obvious reasons, which roundabout includes education. But discriminating on whether you allow yourself to be solicited or not seems kinda brilliant. I don’t want peers who sell their souls to the sexiest corporation casting votes that have been tainted by corporate marketing dollars. I don’t want politicians in office who are exposed to that either. Amd of course I would love to flip a switch and have it be illegal to solicit me and never see another internet ad or receive another flyer or fake important envelope in the mail. Seems like it could be fruitful to draw a hard line between being open to being influenced by advertising and having any sort of political power.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#418

Post by devjab »

gtsop wrote: post #318
devjab wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you come to that conclusion? These laws apply to all EU based companies while non-EU companies have the clear option to opt out of them, which many do. If you want to do business within the EU, then you need to respect citizen privacy. Though I do agree that they should eat their own medicine, but here in the EU, we do tend to view private corporations as less worthy of our data than our own governments. That…

1. The magnitute of effect these laws have on EU companies is miniscule compared to the effect on the US tech giants 2. The EU has no honest respect over the people's privacy as they fully surveil their citizens Thus it ia very safe to conclude that the EU pretends to care about people's privacy as an excuse to protect it's industry against the ultra-high yields of US tech companies

> 2. The EU has no honest respect over the people's privacy as they fully surveil their citizens

What is your source for that? Because that would be illegal in most EU countries.

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#419

Post by LelouBil »

developer93 wrote: post #397
uoaei wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR mandates that they are all already unchecked except for the so-called "essential" or "functional" ones.

Weil, good for GDPR. Meantime, is there anything I can do to report sites that don't follow the letter of it?

https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...

Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising

#420

Post by johndhi »

troupo wrote: post #284
johndhi wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying the laws EU has released are too complex and indirect and cost too much money, and that if they wanted to ban behavioral advertising outright they should have and could have done that instead of what they have done.

> I'm saying the laws EU has released are too complex and indirect and cost too much money No, and no, and no. Most privcy-adjacent laws that EU has released in recent years are neither complex, nor do they cost too much money. Well, they cost some money because businesses have this entrenched idea that they have an inalienable right to your data, so they don't even know which data they collect, sell, exchange, let l…

> Most privcy-adjacent laws that EU has released in recent years are neither complex, nor do they cost too much money.

Please visit https://gdpr-info.eu/ and read the text of the 99 articles that make up the GDPR. You don't think 99 separate statements of the law are too many? Not complex? Add in reading all of the CJEU opinions and the original directive behind GDPR (which remains in force). Also add the e-privacy directive, a 15 year old law that is also still in force. How can you say that isn't complex?

> Well, they cost some money

My argument is that it costs more money than it's worth. Hard to find good statistics, but we can leave it at that.

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