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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

#481

Post by taway1237 »

d3w4s9 wrote: post #424
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…

"non-consensual tracking" Pretty sure it is written in the ToS. Maybe don't agree with that legal agreement and continue to sign up for the service in the first place?

This is not a reasonable expectation. GDPR got this right and the consent must be explicit. When almost everyone has abusive ToS you might as well advice people to build their own internet.

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

#482

Post by rcMgD2BwE72F »

prmoustache wrote: post #161

At the same time EU wants to break SSL and facilitate man of the middle attacks. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/fr/policies/discover-e... https://nce.mpi-sp.org/index.php/s/cG88cptFdaDNyRr

What does this have to do with GDPR?

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

#483

Post by RestlessMind »

xigoi wrote: post #471
RestlessMind wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please share the list of websites you use which don't serve ads? Would love to see an internet experience without ads and without stealing the content via adblockers.

It's not possible to provide an exhaustive list, but for example: * Hacker News (has promoted content, but without tracking) * Lobste.rs * Wikipedia * Mastodon * Project Euler * Notabug.org * Lingva Translate * Documentation for numerous FOSS projects * Various personal blogs Honestly, it's hard for me to find websites that I regularly voluntarily use and do contain ads.

What do you use for - search, emails, online shopping, news (you mentioned HN but links submitted on HN have ads on them, unless you read only the HN comments)

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

#484

Post by prophesi »

magnusmundus wrote: post #369
troupo wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am curious what widespread legislation on this front is going to cause Nothing. More dark patterns to trick people into accepting tracking. Look to how the industry reacted yo GDPR. > personalized ads that creep on you were essentially made a load-bearing column of the Internet before anyone knew how creepy they were going to get with it You can have personalized ads without invasive and pervasive tracking

> Look to how the industry reacted yo GDPR. Anecdotal observation from big-ish corps in EU: everyone started trying to look very mindful about what data they ask for in the first place, what gets stored where, what is shared with whom. In some cases, this led to actually being more mindful about those. At least in e-commerce, GDPR worked in the privacy-minded consumer's benefit to some extent, and not quite against a…

It was helpful for CA's GDPR-like law for Mozilla to find out about the whole sexual activity debacle. But it certainly didn't go far enough, because who would willingly allow a car company to collect that information? And why did such an outrageous data point not make its way to the public until Mozilla's investigations?

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

#485

Post by [deleted] »

Garvi wrote: post #76
gatinsama wrote: post #45

I have mixed feelings about this. I hate that Europe leads in regulation and lags so much in innovation. At the same time, this is a step in the right direction. True, people don't care about privacy, but it's mostly because they don't understand the extent and implications of letting companies control your data.

If we had been smart, we would have banned Google, Facebook and Amazon on our continent and made our own like the Chinese did. It's telling how ridiculed they still are for this obvious move.

[deleted]

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

#486

Post by alkonaut »

xxs wrote: post #438
alkonaut wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode. Dark mode being use as a short hand - pretty much all "standard" controls used to have colors and font size defined. So if an application wants to draw text - it'd use the text area background and color, likewise for buttons. Being replaced with a single boolean configuration option is just a lazy downgrade. Also I don't quite see it as an OS func…

The fact remains there was no system setting for dark mode before Win 10 that apps could use to ask “does this user prefer dark mode”. Now it exists in windows as well as iOS, MacOs etc so its a pretty established standard by now to have that as a Boolean system wide (and that system apps follow it while third party apps can query it of course).

Even if dx12 is an arbitrary restriction to only work in w10 that’s beside the point. It’s a feature of win10 no matter how arbitrary.

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

#487

Post by JAlexoid »

ndriscoll wrote: post #210
pembrook wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments have a monopoly on violence. And as history has proven (especially in the EU), they tend to use it. Even in good times, in countries with mostly balanced institutions, the government can lock you up in prison and throw away the key if you piss off the wrong people. On the other hand, I can assure you the only thing Unilever is aspiring to do is get you to buy more toilet bowl cleaner. And I know the rebut…

Others have addressed the surveillance issue plenty (but in case it's still not clear, if your data is for sale commercially, then your government will buy it), but I think it's important to also stress the insidiousness of repeated mass consumer propaganda, given your toilet bowl cleaner example. Consider Oreo O's: a breakfast "food" with 11.5 g sugar and 1.3 g protein. Allegedly (according to the Wikipedia article)…

You're missing an important point in your example - the reason why high sugar cereals were so successful was because of government interventions (buying up grain supplies, unreasonably propping up certain crops, etc)

The utter failures of governments to provide any meaningful guidance, or intentionally boosting certain product consumption.

We can have an argument on how effective that propaganda was, but in the end governments in EU and US make bad food much more available than traditional diets.

We can all rant about how evil corporations are for putting HFCS into their products in the US, but it's disingenuous to disregard the fact that US government spends billions on propping up corn production that makes HFCS more economically viable.

In the end you still choose to buy sugary cereals, but if you are in poverty - you're left without a choice when it comes to calorie sources, because of government interventions.

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

#488

Post by alkonaut »

phone8675309 wrote: post #452
alkonaut wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How many of these are worth the cost of the telemetry?

Depends: If it’s anonymous usage data with little perf overhead then I’d say all of them (I’m pro telemetry so long as my PII stays on my machine).

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

#489

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#490

Post by tsimionescu »

konschubert wrote: post #335
tsimionescu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trade is not a zero-sum game. Advertising is. The fact that advertising sometimes actually helps in discovering a product you actually needed is a coincidence. The main point of advertising is to convince people to prefer a product for reasons other than cost/benefit. Even in your case - did you see the ad and immediately bought the product? Or did you see the ad and then actually went and looked for reviews, competi…

No, advertising isn’t zero sum. There is no reason to assume that the negative effects outweigh the positive effects. There are some forms of advertisement which are maybe bad. I think we would be worse off if all advertising were banned.

Yes it is. Advertising is about convincing you to buy product A instead of product B (which may be no product/investing your money). That's the very definition of a zero-sum game.

Most forms of advertising are bad. There are maybe a few which are decent, but there are far better alternatives (such as business directories and non-paid review sites).

If you believe in the free market to any extent, you should be against advertising. The only thing advertising does is to distort the free market - by making market agents be less rational.

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