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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

#411

Post by thmsths »

kibwen wrote: post #197
lefstathiou wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, as can Apple, Google, every cable company, every telecom, the credit card companies, Grindr, health clinics

Yes, and the handling all of that personal data should be strictly regulated. Ideally, companies would be treating all of it as toxic waste, and disposing of it as soon as possible.

This, exactly this. A big part of what got us into this mess is that data is very very cheap to collect, store and process with modern computing. And there is basically no other cost or downside to dealing with the data. This has led to a gold rush where every company became obsessed with data, thinking that any piece of data was valuable and could be monetized eventually.

If however there were strict liabilities for data leaks or privacy breaches, businesses would collect just the bare minimum data and get rid of it as soon as it is not strictly needed.

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

#412

Post by PaulHoule »

teachrdan wrote: post #394
PaulHoule wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't mean to sound flip, but I don't think identifying pathological psychological conditions via web browsing habits is all that difficult. I have a friend who went through a severe depressive episode. As soon as he started watching YouTube at 2am, he started getting ads for depression meds.

It's not difficult at all. That's the point. A system like that collects a lot of data and very few people are going to feel that they need to dissimulate.

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

#413

Post by JAlexoid »

vharuck wrote: post #158
pembrook wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the government is the solution to when business gets too much power. I totally agree with this. But are personalized Facebook ads really an example of this? And what's the solution when the government gets too much power? Especially in a "democracy," when the people have implicitly given approval for this by voting in the people who are attempting to consolidate power?

>And what's the solution when the government gets too much power? Elections and courts. Compared to private entities, the government is very restricted in what it can do. When a company says, "We won't share your data with anyone," there's nothing you can do when they change their mind. But you can sue the government for damages.

> the government is very restricted in what it can do

The government is no more or less restricted than a corporation.

> "We won't share your data with anyone," there's nothing you can do when they change their mind

You can, you can sue for breach of contract. If the government tomorrow gets a law passed that they can share or institute a sharing system(like Five Eyes) - you literally can't even sue over anything.

> But you can sue the government for damages.

That's absolutely not true.

In government individuals carry more responsibility than "government". German government can fail to protect your tax data tomorrow and you'll have no way to sue them. You'll be pointed to the individual who'll be blamed and may even go to prison. But you'll get FA.

You have way more chances in winning a lawsuit against a corporation, than "a government".(barring some exceptions)

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

#414

Post by hutzlibu »

PaulHoule wrote: post #388
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…

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…

"if a person is highly active on social media "

.. then the diagnosis of one of their problems sounds quite trivial.

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

#416

Post by alkonaut »

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.

It's lots and lots. Just around things like DPI scaling and multi monitor there is quite a bit. You might not notice because maybe when you ran Win7 you had one non HDR standard def. Then maybe you had two. But today you might have multiple monitors with different scaling, some being HDR and so on. And that mostly just works in the later versions of Win10/11 where as the features just weren't there in Win7. When you dragged a window between a screen with 100% scaling to one with 200% scaling in Win7, it became tiny. Or it became blurry. Now the OS sends the app the info that needs in order to resize and stay crisp as it switches screens.

Windows Defender while not being great, at least means you don't need to start off by installing a third party Antivirus. DirectX 12 also comes to mind.

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

#417

Post by ketzo »

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

Instantly invalidates everything you said

Attributing all of these ills to better ads is just comical

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

#418

Post by Semaphor »

xigoi wrote: post #371
tzs wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If what you're describing is free consent, then what does non-free consent look like?

The current solution at facebook: You will be tracked.

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

#419

Post by JAlexoid »

mportela wrote: post #352
chroma wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compared to private entities, the government is very restricted in what it can do. Companies can’t point guns at me and put me in a cage. They can’t go into my home without my permission and search my stuff. And if I don’t want to deal with a company, I can simply stop interacting with them. If I don’t want to deal with a government, I have to emigrate and renounce my citizenship.

> Companies can’t point guns at me and put me in a cage. But they used to, once upon a time, until they were limited from doing so. > And if I don’t want to deal with a company, I can simply stop interacting with them. Except when you can't. There's no "stop interacting" for a bunch of things in today's society. Google/Facebook tracks you even when you're not using their products. If you want a non-tech example, try…

> Google/Facebook tracks you even when you're not using their products

> If you want a non-tech example, try stop interacting with Experian, for instance.

Use cash, homestead, etc. Yes - you can, in fact, stop any data going to credit rating agencies.

There's absolutely nothing you can do to stop being of interest to one or another level of government in US, while living in the US.

I know it's a radical example, but your statement is false.

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

#420

Post by alkonaut »

xxs wrote: post #403
the_pwner224 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Dark theme isn't the windows color theming that always existed. It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode. It's in UXTheme.dll (an OS lib) and the function app devs use to query it is ShouldSystemUseDarkMode(). This was introduced in Windows 10 1903.

Drawing the line between the OS and "not the OS" is really difficult. Direct X is included with the OS and DX12 is not compatible with Windows 7 so basically DirectX 12 is something you did not have in Win7 and do Have in Win10.

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