EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram • Hacker News Board

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

#491

Post by nvm0n2 » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 5:00 PM UTC

digging wrote: post #382

officeplant wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that refuses to use Linked In or Facebook it is wild to me that someone would not only use them, but willingly link a dating app to them. It makes me wonder how many more things I'll never get to participate in because I've deleted/avoid social media.

You and I, and probably a few others here on HN, are slowly being sifted into a parallel "unsocial" world, I fear. It's genuinely disgusting to see the kind of personal data we're expected to pass out by the truckload for every little digital trinket and feature, let alone entire facets of society such as dating apps.

It's a dating site. The whole idea is that you upload all kinds of personal details so they can match you with a life partner. What exactly does a privacy-focused dating site look like?

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

#492

Post by SonicScrub » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 5:01 PM UTC

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #341

varispeed wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also don't know if in 10 years time the country gets a radical, religiously fanatical government, that will then order these companies to list users who are non-believers, have "wrong" sexuality or supported the opposition. When Nazis invaded a city, first thing they'd have done was getting to people register and getting names and addresses of "undesirables". People have not learned their lesson.

Your hypothetical evil government isn’t going to go “aw shucks, I guess I can’t kill the unbelievers because Facebook doesn’t track them!” Evil regimes have never had a problem finding lots and lots of citizens to kill in the 99% of human history before the internet.

Big data aggregation makes this process much much easier. We are living in unprecedented times of mass surveillance, and we have yet to have a real reckoning of what that means in the hands of extreme ideologies.

Also things don't have to be as extreme as literally killing all members of a minority group for this to be deemed "bad". It can be as simple as targetted influence campaigns to push certain policies/agenda. The ability to influence on mass scales has never been easier and cheaper. There are many examples throughout the world of how that influence has been used. And while yes influence campaigns have always existed in some form, the degree of targeting and the ease at which this has been made is a case where and difference in scale is a difference in kind. This is a powerful tool that I don't believe anyone should have access to. States, companies, or individuals

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

#493

Post by ActorNightly » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 5:02 PM UTC

MereInterest wrote: post #151

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. A company can bar the exits, letting you burn to death [0]. A company can send private militias to force you to work [1] (or because you were sent the wrong set of MtG cards [2]). A company can improperly store pesticide, until the resulting explosion kills thousands [3]. A company can own every house and store in a town, managing your expenses to ensur…

Try again, but keep things relevant within the past 10 years, and applicable to majority of the population.

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

#494

Post by xigoi » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 5:02 PM UTC

RestlessMind wrote: post #483

xigoi wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Search: Kagi

E-mail: Disroot (but with any provider that supports IMAP, you pretty much never have to visit their website)

Online shopping: while some of the sites may have ads, they could easily survive without ads because, well; they literally sell products

News: if HN stopped allowing links to websites with ads, I certainly wouldn't miss them

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

#495

Post by rcMgD2BwE72F » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 5:02 PM UTC

yoz-y wrote: post #331

thorncorona wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Observationally, facebook ads are the best I’ve seen by a long shot.

Instagram ads is why I started going to live concerts again. Were they not personalised it wouldn't have happened.

I haven't seen any personalized ad for the past 5 years (at least) and yet I'm discovering great artists/bands every now and then.

Advertising is a type of "content", and people like content-, but how one can say it's better than the content recommended by people not paid to promote it?

One, the more people are used to get their content via ads (instead of share by friends), the least they'll be incentivize to share good content.

Two, platforms that are paid by advertisers are certainly incentivize to have the best content in ads vs non ads. Why feature a video in your feed but they can be paid to push the same content from an advertiser?

There are so many reasons why "some ads are great" says nothing about ads being a good thing.

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

#496

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 5:02 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #312

2018 — "GDPR doesn't work, says tech bros"

[deleted]

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

#497

Post by mcpackieh » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 5:02 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #196

poisonborz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until you read about Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica basically didn't work. For all the data it collected, it amounted to trying to build political influence by reading tea leaves. The strongest decider in the outcome of the 2016 election is that the Trump campaign spent something like a factor of three more on advertising across the board than the Clinton campaign. Cambridge Analytica was more representative of the notion that the Republicans were…

> The strongest decider in the outcome of the 2016 election is that the Trump campaign spent something like a factor of three more on advertising across the board than the Clinton campaign.

Can you cite your campaign spending numbers? Wikipedia says the opposite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia... I'm searching for a source that says what you claim and can't find any: https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+campaign+advertising+o... https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+outspent+hillary https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+advertising+spending+v... https://www.google.com/search?q=hillary+spent+less+than+trum...

Is my google-fu shit? Maybe. Regardless...

> The Democratic party as a whole believed Trump to be so unelectable that they pulled money from the presidential campaign

The root cause was their arrogance. Hillary was barely campaigning at all. It would not have cost her much anything to call into the major news channels every day^ but instead Hillary was effectively incommunicado for much of 2016. It's as if she thought campaigning was beneath her.

Also, I don't know how you can break apart Americans disliking women in general and Americans disliking Hillary particularly. She personally has been a popular target for derision for more than 20 years before her 2016 campaign. The DNC may have considered Trump unelectable but they were burying their heads in the sand w.r.t. Hillary's own unelectability problem. Which goes back to the arrogance thing..

At least they've figured it out now. Nobody seriously talked about her for 2020 and nobody is seriously suggesting her for 2024.

^ Most of Trump's 'advertising' was given to him for free in this manner, maybe you're assigning some arbitrary dollar value to this news coverage to say he spent more?

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

#498

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 5:03 PM UTC

lapphi wrote: post #236

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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#499

Post by mcpackieh » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 5:04 PM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #339

ndriscoll wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

The truth is, there are far more complex reasons behind American kids being fed sugary cereal than "the dumb people got duped by the evil advertisers (but not me of course!)." It turns out kids like sugar, incomes have been stagnant for decades, and food deserts exist. What's the cheapest, shelf stable food item on a per-meal basis that your children will voluntarily eat without a fight before work? Sugary cereal. Co…

If advertising isn't actually necessary and has nothing to do with people buying the product, then companies and their sycophants shouldn't whine and scream in terror whenever somebody suggests that advertising be banned.

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

#500

Post by nvm0n2 » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 5:04 PM UTC

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #302

elzbardico wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^this. I don't have anything against personalized ads based on information that I willingly share. If I am following a bunch of groups of kite-surfers, I actually welcome ads for kite-surfing gears and services while browsing those groups. If I explicitly decide to share my address on my social network profile AND, explicitly authorize the use of this information for targeting, I don't mind, and actually welcome seei…

I am curious what widespread legislation on this front is going to cause. Not meaning to defend surveillance capitalism in the slightest, it belongs in the dustbin of history for reasons too numerous to articulate, but merely from the perspective that 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, and now jus…

> I am curious what widespread legislation on this front is going to cause

Everyone will get a prompt that asks them whether they want to consent to personalized advertising or pay $20/month to use the service. Everyone picks the first because nobody outside of HN bubbles and bored EU regulators cares about personalized ads (or actually prefers them).

Then the EU will start claiming that everyone should be able to use Facebook without advertising and without paying for it i.e. for free or for vastly reduced revenue potential. Eventually Zuck will get tired of the EU because visitors from there won't be worth much, and start to degrade or remove service for them entirely. New products and features won't launch there at all, see Threads for a preview of non-coming attractions. HN Euro-posters will assure each other that this is in fact a great victory.