Live data from Hacker News

GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

blogs.harvard.edu

51–60 of 454 posts

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What site you run and why you need to log my personal data(IP,browser,other identifying data) do you have good reasons to keep it forever or you purge it after you analyze it?

How is IP and browser personal data ? If you think it is, you should not be on the internet.

IP address alone on an anonymous web access log need not be. Start combining it with persistent cookies or a logged in user etc and it clearly becomes personal data as it is then enough to identify someone.

The clause in the regulation is quite clearly worded:

"Natural persons may be associated with online identifiers provided by their devices, applications, tools and protocols, such as internet protocol addresses, cookie identifiers or other identifiers such as radio frequency identification tags. This may leave traces which, in particular when combined with unique identifiers and other information received by the servers, may be used to create profiles of the natural persons and identify them."

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IS there a good reason why you can't analyze the page you put your ad in and decide what category on ads will fit, so on tech pages put tech related ads. There isn't and this is what many people do. But that isn't the argument is it? Can you tell me why observing what people do on my website is unethical and why it should be made illegal? Also can you explain why information that is placed on my server belongs to s…

If someone has access to your laptop and downloads their photos onto it, who do those photos belong to? Good analogy! They belong to the person who took them, as per copyright law, not to the owner of the laptop.

The author of a creative work doesn't have the right to force me to delete something from my laptop if I obtained it lawfully. If a creator downloads their entire collection onto my laptop I can use that to train my models and target ads as I see fit.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#53
post #2

And that’s on top of the main problem: tracking people without their knowledge, approval or a court order is just flat-out wrong. The fact that it can be done is no excuse. Nor is the monstrous sum of money made by it. I use Piwik ( https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo ) and track visitors without their knowledge or consent, because I need analytics. Piwik is also configured to respect the "Do not track" header, so o…

Serious question: What are the odds of someone offical even noticing that you are in violation of GDPR? It's not like they'll enforce GDPR and collect $7.89 in fines from small businesses.

Minimum fine is $20 million, isn’t it?

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#54
post #33
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how self-hosting has anything to do with it honestly. This is about tracking people without their consent. It's about preserving rights of individuals. Self hosting is no more or less acceptable than third party hosting. It's not a technical issue.

So is your position that website owners should have no visiblity at all on their visitors, and no way of knowing how many people are using it?

Website owners can have visibility on their visitors if those visitors explicitly consent to it.

Not sure what is so difficult to understand about this.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#55
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under GDPR guidance, IP addresses are considered personal data because they can be used to identify an individual in a moment in time. Personal data consists of things that identify individuals, but also things that can be used in conjunction with other information to identify individuals. You might not like that, but the regulators are pretty clear on this point.

The ICO does not consider IP addresses personal data since more than one person could use a computer in a household.

Currently, or in relation to GDPR? What's your source?

https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/data-protection-r... (20th Oct 2017):

> Like the DPA, the GDPR applies to ‘personal data’. However, the GDPR’s definition is more detailed and makes it clear that information such as an online identifier – eg an IP address – can be personal data

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#57

One surprising side effect of this might be that the hordes of machine learners and data scientists who used to work for adtech might go to healthcare/bioinformatics where we might get new breakthroughs.

A lot will just move to finance...

However, financial firms are usually pretty against open academic research that would allow publication of papers. Many researchers truly value the ability to contribute to this field openly. Perhaps you are right and they will move to health.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#58
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is IP and browser personal data ? If you think it is, you should not be on the internet.

IP and browser information are definitely PII, which is Personally Identifiable Information. Those are PII, because they can be used to personally identify an individual.

PII is not a GDPR term, by the way.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#59
Oddly, I think the article underestimates the size of the change coming. I think one side affect of the surge of IT into advertising, is that it has become easier to measure exactly how well advertising works. By and large, it doesn't, very well.

I am reminded of this, from Paul Graham, about his time at Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

"...The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If Yahoo merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less."

I'm pretty sure that, the more we learn about how well advertising works, the less money people will be willing to pay for it. What's happening to billboards and newspapers right now is probably coming to several other industries soon.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#60

It’s kind of interesting that the company that ads that people think are the most intrusive are from Criteo, a french company, while GDPR do its best to target US companies.

> GDPR do its best to target US companies

Citation needed.

Post reply on HN