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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

#551

Post by wholinator2 »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #364
alexvitkov wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I have to disagree with the settings app. When i needed to change, fix, or update something in my parents old computer i always knew exactly where to go there was one central hub that contained every useful permission and setting that i could need to change or update to fix a buggy mouse or alter audio settings/devices etc.

Nowadays it's impossible to know exactly where some specific setting is anymore, and the settings app has been so dumbed down that most settings don't even exist anymore. Just the other day i tried to fix my dads touchpad and went on a wild goose chase through every possible setting location, of which there were too many, and kept coming back to the "settings app" in which the touchpad "settings" had only a single checkbox, fully unrelated to anything actually useful at all. The tab was there but there was no fucking settings in it. Nothing useful at all. In the end i tried driver updates, i tried rollbacks, i tried every setting app, i tried everything and the touchpad still doesnt work. You can click, you can't move, you can't scroll. The man didn't install anything, windows released an update and the single most important tool for interacting with the computer, one that is built into the hardware, was broken with no recourse to fix it, I'm simply not allowed access to the settings i require to maintain my own control over a functioning device.

That is the new settings app to me. Maybe if you stay within the ever shrinking bounds of control that Microsoft so graciously barely allows us to utilize, maybe then the buttons are rounder and the categories are better laid out. But if you need to fix anything that exists even slightly outside that toddler playground Microsoft is only ever making that more and more difficult under the guise of UI "improvements".

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

#552

Post by abdullahkhalids »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #500
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…

> 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 us…

Mastodon.social had revenue (donations) of 326K EUR and operating expenses of 127K EUR in 2022 against roughly 191K users [1]. They have paid moderators to manage the server, and by most measures it's a healthy place. This suggests that the free market cost of social media is 0.6 EUR/year. The price charged to consumers shouldn't be much higher than this.

WhatsApp before it was acquired also demanded an optional donation of 1 USD/year from each person.

That is what people will be willing to pay, and what social media should subsist on.

[1] Annual Report 2022 https://www.patreon.com/file?h=90246790&i=16020862

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

#553

Post by ndriscoll »

JAlexoid wrote: post #517
ndriscoll wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep including the (not me of course) parenthetical, but at least my experience was that I grew up on sugar cereal. I vaguely remember schools having things like apple jacks on offer in individual packs. I and other kids brought their boxtops to school. Best I could tell, it was normal. It's still in the aisles and the companies haven't gone out of business, so best I can tell it still is. We bought it in the sam…

You realize that it wasn't the ads that convinced people to consume sugary cereals, right? Ads are there to promote a brand, not a food group. Your local store or General Mills will sell you what you want, at a price that you are comfortable with. They literally don't care and have no interest in pushing any specific recipe. I bet that their low sugar alternatives are their most profitable products. Sugary products a…

Something convinced people that sugary cereals aren't just something you can use to survive in a pinch, but actually contain acceptable nutrition. People think Special K is healthy. Or Slimfast advertising 10g protein (with milk teehee) when it's actually got 2 g protein and 11 g sugar. People think this is "diet" food. Chocolate milk powder. They really buy it. How sheltered are you? And then it causes real harm to people when they think "dieting" just doesn't work for some people.

This isn't just "lol dumb people got tricked". It's fraud. Plenty of apparently reasonable people take the intended (false) meanings from advertisements. These are intentional misrepresentations. And it's not one or two egregious actors. The entire industry is about deceiving to the maximum extent allowed by law, which is a lot.

Like I said the (colloquial) idea of a food desert is plausible, but there is no information on it. The stats are not looking at how many people have a highway blocking the way and you have to go uphill both ways in a wheelchair after working 3 jobs, so actually that 0.5 miles is burdensome. They tell us nothing (well, they tell us how many people don't even have to walk 10 minutes to reach a fully stocked supermarket). If you think that's the scenario being discussed when people talk about food deserts, it's coming from your imagination. Maybe it exists. It's not what the term means. It's almost like the term was chosen to be evocative and paint a certain picture of reality.

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

#555

Post by varispeed »

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.

Thanks to big data you can do it in a very subtle way. For instance, you can call people for vaccination programme, that will make people from your list of undesirables infertile. This way you won't even have to build concentration camps and you can claim "oopsie daisy it was a bad batch, our bad" etc.

That's a more extreme example, but there are lot of other ways creative government could make the lives of people they don't like miserable or impossible.

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

#556

Post by abdullahkhalids »

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…

At this point dozens of elections across the world have been strongly influenced, perhaps determined, by data collection by social media, and the targeted ads on social media.

Anything that moves democracy away from one-person-one-vote to one-dollar-one-vote (which you need to buy ads), needs to be made illegal.

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

#557

Post by hotnfresh »

cm2012 wrote: post #303
mliker wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget Apple has a billion dollar ad business!

They has grown enormously as Apple used its monopoly power to make every other advertiser less effective. Apple still uses the same user targeting they banned for every other advertiser, of course.

Do they track your activity in non-Apple apps in order to feed their ad selection algos? I really don't know, but I would guess not, and that's the thing they banned for others.

(FWIW I find their move into ads alarming because it threatens to ruin everything I like about them)

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

#558

Post by rednerrus »

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…

> It isnt even clear that there's a meaningful sense of 'consent' to what modern ad companies (ie., google, facebook, amazon, increasingly microsoft, etc.) do. There is both an individual harm, but a massive collective arm, to the infrastructure of behavioural tracking that has been built by these companies.

What is the individual and/or collective harm done here?

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

#559

Post by aegypti »

henry2023 wrote: post #508
ActorNightly wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As corporations get bigger. the issues described get more prevalent. South Korea is going through a birth collapse mostly because their corporations's shaping of civil life. We're going through a huge opioid crisis just because of our corporations. Systemic > Isolated instances but also harder to point out.

Still quite the reach. An inverse correlation between income and fertility is observable across the entire developed world and across every form of economic organization present in developed/developing countries over the past century with zero exceptions.

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

#560

Post by rdiddly »

_jal wrote: post #425
digging wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm in the same boat. My internet excludes a bunch of ASs used by surveillance shops. This is what we're asking for. I am refusing to divulge information about me I don't want to share. Other people are building whatever on top of that data. I can hardly complain about lack of inclusion when I am the one refusing to feed their robots. If you want people at Cheers to know your name, you... have to tell them your name.…

Ha ha - Cheers. I always found that lyric to be flat wrong. The place where "everybody knows your name" is the same place where you spend most of your time, and is almost certainly the place where "all your worries" are coming from in the first place, a.k.a. your life. (Which, if you're an alcoholic, could be a bar, sure why not.)

It "sure would help a lot" to go to such a place? Because you're constantly being bothered by total strangers at rates far in excess of the average? Because the first people police interview as murder suspects is everybody who doesn't know the victim? No my friend.

Of course now you can give out your name to total strangers many miles away, with a degree of efficiency undreamt-of in the 80s, yet not even have any fun times spent drinking with those people, so...

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