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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

#531

Post by redleader55 »

usrbinbash wrote: post #309
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 real entities we need to be afraid of in regards to privacy are governments & politicians, not companies & entrepreneurs. Why not both? > The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap No, the worst thing a company can do is to propagate the recorded data, willingly or otherwise (companies get hacked, forced by governments, etc.), to entities that won't be content with just using that data to sel…

Maybe this is why EU has a problem with "Big Tech", while US doesn't?

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

#532

Post by School-Cotton »

Lutger wrote: post #404
cm2012 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data privacy is one of the least important issues of our day. People (especially on HN) get very passionate about it but are unable to produce specific harms Google and Meta ad tracking creates. Could there be an issue in the future? Possibly. Are privacy laws like GDPR worth the economic and other harms? Probably not. The amount of wasted programmer hours alone has far overcome the negative impacts of big tech ad tr…

> But Google and Meta in particular have an amazing 15 year track record of basically never leaking user data. I disagree with almost every sentence in your post, but want to point out this one as it is specifically very surprising to me. There are two ways Meta is a giant leak of user data. First, it just sells user data to third parties, and it was extremely lenient with this in the past. Maybe that was the worlds…

> First, it just sells user data to third parties

I very much doubt that this is true, and if it is, it needs a source.

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

#533

Post by _Algernon_ »

savanaly wrote: post #516
josephg wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. And when I’m unhappy with my government, I can vote them out or, if I want to, get politically active. I can’t vote out Google. Their customers are advertisers, not me. And I don’t know which apps on my phone send my information to Facebook or what they do with it.

It's much easier to change what company you do business with than what government you're under. I can't believe you're managing to turn this simple fact on its head and imply the exact opposite.

That's not true. Governments most likely have your data within the management of private companies right at this moment (especially Microsoft through Azure, Amazon through AWS, or as a student Google, due to Chromebooks). Changing the private companies that have your data, in some cases has changing your government as a prerequisite.

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

#534

Post by manuelabeledo »

quest88 wrote: post #478
manuelabeledo wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And honestly, I prefer the relevant and targeted ads compared to what we had before. I don't mind ads that are relevant, according to the context . I mind ads that are generated based on a profile one or more companies have built about me. Yeah, let's see ads about RC models in a forum about RC models, or ads about Bluetooth modules in a website about microelectronics. That's fine. They will still make money, and t…

I agree with you that it would be favorable experience. But sites are going to offer you the ads that make them the most money if their goal is to make money. This may mean if it's between an RC car or viagra ads, you're gonna get the viagra ads (or insert non-context ad in place of viagra). With kindness, I guess pay for the news then? In a more general sense, if one doesn't want to see so many ads then one should s…

> But sites are going to offer you the ads that make them the most money if their goal is to make money. This may mean if it's between an RC car or viagra ads, you're gonna get the viagra ads (or insert non-context ad in place of viagra).

Interesting choice, either give up and let them monetize my online persona, or be exposed to crappy ads.

I'll take the crappy, non targeted ads, then.

> In a more general sense, if one doesn't want to see so many ads then one should spend less time online, or try to visit sources that don't depend on ads.

That is definitely not what I said.

The issue isn't ads themselves, but targeted ads. Targeted ads rely on intensive and continuous user profiling, even outside of the sites showing those ads, i.e. there is a third party spying on every single move you make online, then selling that to others.

> But for some reason people don't want to pay for the things they value.

That's honestly funny, because I value my privacy, yet the suggestion is that I'm not entitled to it if I use online services supported by ads?

We have been seeing ads on TV, newspapers, magazines, since forever, but I have never got any targeted ads on those. That business seemed to work fine without having to profile every single consumer.

What's the reasoning behind telling someone to "spend less time online" if they don't want to contribute for free to a perverse multibillion industry, when the alternative has been there for centuries?

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

#535

Post by freeone3000 »

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?

Obviously none, but that’s the point — you cannot have one without the other in the rest of the world. The EU believes this to be wrong to the point of being illegal. Which is why EU versions of windows — the N SKUs — ship without it.

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

#536

Post by School-Cotton »

josephg wrote: post #165
MereInterest wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yep. And when I’m unhappy with my government, I can vote them out or, if I want to, get politically active. I can’t vote out Google. Their customers are advertisers, not me. And I don’t know which apps on my phone send my information to Facebook or what they do with it.

> when I’m unhappy with my government, I can vote them out

No, you actually can’t, in a very real and practical sense.

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

#537

Post by masswerk »

JAlexoid wrote: post #527
masswerk wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the business of data brokers is effectively selling such profiles. It would be crazy, if the wouldn't… (Mind that this isn't about Meta in particular, it's just that Meta has been found in violation of general regulations, which are now enforced.)

If governments force Google and Facebook out of advertising, then they will start selling this information... I would rather Google and Facebook have an financial interest in keeping that data to themselves, than having a financial incentive to sell it outright.

So, because they are likely to commit a much more severe crime, we must let them violating these regulations? Isn't this already a high-risk lock-in?

Also, behavioural tracking is by no means the only road to advertising. We have managed to do this for centuries with much less intrusion and risk.

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

#538

Post by _Algernon_ »

pb7 wrote: post #238
josephg wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. And when I’m unhappy with my government, I can vote them out or, if I want to, get politically active. I can’t vote out Google. Their customers are advertisers, not me. And I don’t know which apps on my phone send my information to Facebook or what they do with it.

It’s infinitely easier to avoid the companies you don’t like than it is to vote out any part of government. You have near zero power to remove someone you don’t like because your vote is worth next to nothing. However, you have full power to avoid the products and services of a company.

Bullshit. My government has my data stored on Azure or AWS or Google Cloud. If I would have children their data would be be collected by their Chromebooks through the public school they go to. You wont find a utility provider that doesn't store your private data in some private company's systems. Same for employers.

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

#539

Post by wholinator2 »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #359
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe FAANG salaries will fall and teams of phds will have to spend their time on something other than raising ad targeting effectiveness by a fraction of a percent.

This is the largest damage in my opinion. How many thousands, millions of hours of some of the most brilliant minds of our generations have we dedicated to making the experience of lived daily life worse? Ads are a scourge upon the actual usability and safety of the internet. I understand the current necessity of the economics, it doesn't change the fact that the web without ads is an infinitely more pleasant and self-paced place without all the flashing imagery and psychological subterfuge surrounding every single piece of useful information you could ever find.

This massive wealth of intelligence, drive, ambition, all spent on something as useless as banner ads everyone explicitly tries to ignore or block anyway. It's insane. But money is the primordial force that allows the planet to keep rotating so inevitably someone will dedicate their intelligence to whatever cheap money they come up with. That's fine, that's good. I just imagine all that money could've cured some diseases, built better telescopes, put more powerful technology in the hands of the disadvantaged, maybe even, i dunno, fed some hungry people or something. What the fuck is the metaverse gonna do for anyone besides exploit them for maximum profit driven by distraction

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

#540

Post by mcpackieh »

ndriscoll wrote: post #130
thorncorona wrote: post #4

Hot take, it’s hard to have a free internet without ads. Lots of websites have marginal utility, but can be paid for with ads. And those websites will disappear when CPM rates go down the drain.

Lots of things like niche review sites might die, but those are impossible to find thanks to SEO spam (which is fueled by ads) anyway. Something like forums? The entire reddit database (excluding media) fits on a $150 SSD, and a used laptop can serve tens of thousands of requests/second for such a simple site. Something like a Ryzen 7950X with a few NVMe drives could probably do more than you could reasonably get a n…

Product review sites seem like the perfect case for contextual advertising; no user tracking necessary at all.
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