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

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

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Post by hirako2000 » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 7:27 PM UTC

footy wrote: post #80

kackiel wrote: post #8

Why do people hate personalized ads so much? I understand hating ads in general, but why something personalized is worse than just random spam? EDIT --- Ok, I get it now. Personalized ads = surveillance. Fair enough. Doesn't the whole GDPR already cover it though? You can opt out of the surveillance.

I don't like being tracked so that I can be offered personalized ads. I don't like _any_ ads, but at least context ads make sense. Show me ads for waterproof shoes if I'm on a website about what to do with a dog on a rainy day, or for computer parts if I'm looking for instructions on building a computer (I'll still block most of them anyway). The categories are much to broad to be useful. I've been vegan for about 7…

Or mails sent to the entire households with offers for contraceptives products or abortion assistance.

Or infomercials poping about anti depressants.

True anecdotes. Teenage girl tracked by video surveillance and profiled as being likely interested in contraceptives because she stood near the condom shelves for long minutes without purchase. With a good chance of being pregnant.

(Advertisers could mail to the household, yes. because she provided the supermarket with her address to get groceries delivered once)

A certain messaging app offered by a certain social media platform that mine personal conversations to profile users down to their emotional states. Those words you type in and send to your confident are put through real time machine learning.

Don't be too surprised you get an ad about chocolate right after you told your date about your favorite ice cream flavor, that's merely creepy. The obsene mental manipulation usually goes unnoticed.

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

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Post by kaftoy » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 7:28 PM UTC

foota wrote: post #644

polygamous_bat wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s a reason why magazines ads are dying and being replaced by personalized ads. Advertising like that is widely inefficient. Too bad, if your business model can’t make money without breaking laws and harming people’s rights, do you really deserve to stay in business? > It’s as valid alternative as telling people to use horses instead of cars to reduce CO2 emissions. They both get from point A to B, right? More…

When you're debating the merits of the law in question, it doesn't seem like a valid defense to say "if they can't do business under the law then that's their fault". If I say "car dealers can't sell cars that go faster than 10mph and if they go out of business then they shouldn't exist", it's clearly fallacious, and I don't see how this is any different.

It is different. Rules and laws are supposed to make sense, but the one with 10 mph is not. There are limita to 250 kph in Europe and I dont see car dealers going down. Also, for years there are emissions regulators that make life hard for auto makers, but they obey and still sell cars.

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

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Post by papichulo2023 » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

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.

Mostly agree but it is not like adtech is a innovation-pushing industry.

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

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Post by dr_dshiv » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 7:33 PM UTC

mjburgess wrote: post #147

dr_dshiv wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should it be illegal? I don’t understand the moral threat. Personally I feel that privacy gets too much airtime as a value — I see lots of other more direct issues (like political manipulation) that will remain an issue even with “strong privacy.”

The ability to aggregate personal information of large numbers of people is a form of political power. Facebook can, if it so wishes, provide a list of all gay people in an area; all supporters of gaza or of israel; all people who have recently commented on an article about drugs. The very ability to provide that list previously required an expensive secret police; today it does not. This is an extremely dangerous ab…

You can frame it as tracking; but the fact is that the aggregation of data about people happens almost without intent. In order to provide services, you need unique id— and people want to be sharing and posting information. Facebook might be oriented around personalized ads, but even Friendster was based on an enormous amount of shared personal data. When we use tools like Facebook and Instagram and others, we want to provide our data. When I use chatGPT, I want to provide my data.

I think there are very good economic reasons why companies don’t dox their customers. They treat data cautiously even in the absence of regulation— since it would be a loss of business value to lose customer trust.

When we call for “privacy” — what does it mean when we want to share our data? Ok, one might say that you don’t want 3rd party sites tracking etc etc. That’s fine. You don’t want data sold. That’s fine. But if we make a big fuss about privacy in a world where we want to share so much personal information, I think we cloud the issues. We want a lot more than privacy, obviously, when we are so willing to give it up. I want those other desires made more clear and not lumped in as privacy. I think the GDPR just trains people to click “accept.”

Do you see my concern?

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

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Post by JAlexoid » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 7:35 PM UTC

masswerk wrote: post #537

JAlexoid wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do you presume that these regulations are inherently good? I completely disagree on that premise and will not accept that statement as a forgone conclusion.

They used to not build profiles... and we had the most awful ads served... and performing search resulted in pages upon pages of results we're not interested in.

Why do we have to nuke everything and sow the ground with salt, just because some paranoid individuals want everyone to suffer their delusions? Especially, when the governments have more and more power to spy on us?

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

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Post by pb7 » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 7:36 PM UTC

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #567

JAlexoid wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not your websites. If you wish, we should make it way more clear about it. But telling a small newspaper to stop using ads for revenue, when you aren't willing to financially support them is... hypocritical. In short - just like a lot of "this ids good for you" laws, this will definitely impact smaller companies way more than you think.

>But telling a small newspaper to stop using ads for revenue, when you aren't willing to financially support them is... hypocritical. How do you know I am not willing to pay? OK, I'll be the millionth commenter to repeat this viewpoint for the millionth time on HN: nobody has issues with online ads to support their favorite newspaper or creator, people have an issue with tracking and targeting ads. We've had ad suppo…

Targeted ads are more effective and therefore fetch a higher premium and therefore monetize the host site better than non-targeted ads. You would need 10x the ads to make up the revenue and there's not enough space or user patience for that.

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

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Post by feoren » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 7:37 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.

I've heard that countries that kept better records of their population had more Jews captured by invading Nazis than those countries that had worse records. I don't seem to be able to find hard evidence for that though, so maybe it's not true.

Still, I think it's clear that data can very quickly go from harmless to harmful depending on who gets their hands on it. The Nazis absolutely did have a problem finding all the Jews they wanted to kill, and abundantly available data about the religious preferences of literally every citizen being immediately available to them would absolutely have caused much more death than already happened.

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

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Post by taway1237 » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 7:37 PM UTC

JAlexoid wrote: post #381

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.

I would like to vote out my homophobic government, but I can't. I can't avoid not paying taxes to fund the catholic church in my country, that uses that money to lobby homophobic laws... I can block Google and not use them. This is not a simple "just vote them out", unless you're part of the privileged majority that can affect the policy.

You personally can't, but a majority can. My country just did that (voted out a regressive government).

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

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Post by wh0knows » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 7:40 PM UTC

smeej wrote: post #57

repelsteeltje wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personalized advertising should never have been allowed without a specific opt-in. As a thought experiment, let's go back to the time when the internet existed, adds existed, but targeted adds were in their infancy. Now let's imagine they were launched as some sort of op-in Google BETA this in early 0s fashion. Assuming, for a moment that the targeting quality was on part — would that have been a success? Ie. would…

I don't think it would have been this "successful," but remember how long ago Facebook came out. In 2004, if someone had said something on the internet could "magically" surface all the stuff you really might be interested in, just by opting in and clicking a button? And it had worked really well? I think tons of people would have opted in. Back then, before smartphones, before carrying a device in your pocket that c…

Apple conveniently takes the public stance of user protection, but their real position is that they want to be the only ones who can collect and use their users data.

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

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Post by ndriscoll » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 7:43 PM UTC

JAlexoid wrote: post #519

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the company can sell your data to the government too. Googles location history can tell a lot about where you've been and when. Social networks can tell who you've been communicating with and what about. Sites like facebook can sell your interests, google can sell them your search topics, etc. Imagine being an evil dictator, who just got to power after years of trying... what's the easiest way to find your strong…

> Googles location history can tell a lot about where you've been and when. Social networks can tell who you've been communicating with and what about. Notice how those two examples aren't restricted. > Sites like facebook can sell your interests, google can sell them your search topics, etc. Governments don't care for that kind of data, that's why they willing to restrict those. Even though the best reason to use Go…

If you truly believe governments don't care about search data or that the collection is benign, go ahead and log into Google (or use incognito. Probably won't make any difference) and start searching for things like child pornography, how to make pipe bombs, how to convert your guns to full auto, how to build a suppressor at home, how to make a deadly gas bomb, where to find a hitman, how to murder your wife without leaving evidence, etc. Get creative.

I imagine Google filters the bad stuff, so you're not likely to actually see anything life scarring with that first search. But go ahead and run the experiment and see if anything comes of it.