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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

#671

Post by avarun »

deutschepost wrote: post #44
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.

Ads are not the discussion. It’s tracking. Some will say that ads hijack your attention and therefore should be blocked by default. This is a different question. But since ad companies wanted to track ROI it became a problem, because it’s pretty easy for them to do that on the internet. That’s why more people are opposed to ads on the internet but not on a busstop. If the busstop ads start taking retina scans to show…

Ads are significantly more useful with tracking. Non-personalized ads are effectively spam and we would be better off without those entirely. Personalized ads can often be as good as the content you're looking for in the first place, if not even better.

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

#672

Post by giancarlostoro »

alexvitkov wrote: post #325
giancarlostoro wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> increasingly microsoft Will the EU fix Windows by banning the insane amount of tracking they do? Would be nice. The OS is literally at its peak in terms of being great, but all the telemetry, forced accounts and Microsoft ads keep the meme alive that Windows is awful, when in fact, if you remove those three things I mentioned, you have an insanely reliable and polished OS, all my issues with Windows have always com…

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.

Notepad has tabs and is insanely fast, Screenshot utilities are built-in, there's a clipboard manager, there's a "Terminal" app that lets you use PowerShell or even CMD and supports tabs. I didn't even need to go out of my way to install a special terminal or WSL just to SSH into another box. There's loads of things in Windows 11 that are useful, but Microsoft spits on the face of all of it by letting Marketing have any say in what goes where. Windows Marketing should happen outside of the software, not inside of it, period.

Much like Apple and Linux, windows even though it always had an API for it, supports Virtual Desktops finally.

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

#673

Post by JAlexoid »

Lutger wrote: post #459
JAlexoid wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are also doing it to protect our tech industry With these laws in place, EU companies face worse conditions than US ones. They may be protecting some bigger EU companies, but they definitely aren't protecting our IT industry. GPDR was an annoyance for Google, and a complete disaster for anyone small(think companies that can't hire a Chief Data Protection Officer to work full time) There's a good rationale for…

I've never had any real problems with this (as a developer). The GDPR isn't that hard to deal with, mostly its quite intuitive and obvious. The spirit of the law is simple, you need a good reason to have data on your customer, and the customer needs to know and consent to you having it, and remain in control in the sense that you must delete it on request. That is the core, which is very reasonable. Of course, there…

GPDR, specifically, expanded the definition of personal data.

If you work in a B2C publicly accessible sector, I can assure you - you store more PII than you'd like to believe.

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

#674

Post by avarun »

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…

> SEO spam (which is fueled by ads)

Huh? SEO exists because companies don't want to pay for ads. If advertising disappears, SEO will just become more prevalent and we'll have to suffer through more and more garbage.

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

#675

Post by PaulHoule »

digging wrote: post #585
PaulHoule wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly because the quality of professional diagnosis is poor. Myself I have a condition which 5-10% of people have. As a child, I had two very high quality psych evaluations for the time where people observed all the signs and symptoms (particularly the first one) but failed to draw a line between them. Since then I saw therapists maybe 6 times in 30 years (sometimes the same one) and it was always “adjustment disord…

That's not exactly strong evidence that "quality of professional diagnosis is poor" though... it's just evidence that quality was poor in cases you're aware of. It's also not evidence at all that being tracked by facebook would have come up with better results sooner.

Back when the problem was too much psychiatric care instead of not enough there was this famous experiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment

This one is more positive but is checking that different diagnosticians get the same answer

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5980511/

and if that was applied to the "Thud" experiment you'd have poor diagnosis with a very high kappa (interrater agreement)

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

#676

Post by giancarlostoro »

bad_user wrote: post #340
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.

For developers, the great addition has been WSL2. But that's about it. For regular users, Windows 7 has been the best, and after noticing how my parents struggled with the updates, nothing can convince me to think otherwise.

Terminal app is another good thing, the clipboard manager that's built-in, snipping tool being built-in, Notepad having tabs, there's all sorts of other enhancements I can't recall. Not to mention Visual Studio is arguably one of the best IDE's I've ever used.

All the really nice bits of Windows 11 are lost to time because you don't notice them, but they all add up. The fact we're mainly worried about telemetry over anything else says it all.

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

#678

Post by ryanblakeley »

avarun wrote: post #671
deutschepost wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads are not the discussion. It’s tracking. Some will say that ads hijack your attention and therefore should be blocked by default. This is a different question. But since ad companies wanted to track ROI it became a problem, because it’s pretty easy for them to do that on the internet. That’s why more people are opposed to ads on the internet but not on a busstop. If the busstop ads start taking retina scans to show…

Ads are significantly more useful with tracking. Non-personalized ads are effectively spam and we would be better off without those entirely. Personalized ads can often be as good as the content you're looking for in the first place, if not even better.

I value privacy above the marginal usefulness of targeted ads. You should be free to opt-in to tracking and personalization if that's what you want. But we shouldn't all be caught in a surveillance dragnet by default.

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

#679

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

deutschepost wrote: post #44
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.

Ads are not the discussion. It’s tracking. Some will say that ads hijack your attention and therefore should be blocked by default. This is a different question. But since ad companies wanted to track ROI it became a problem, because it’s pretty easy for them to do that on the internet. That’s why more people are opposed to ads on the internet but not on a busstop. If the busstop ads start taking retina scans to show…

Funny reading that from someone with your nickname :-)

The Deutsche Post, or DHL is sort of tracking too, since a looong time. By having their delivery minions gather information about the circumstances people live in, and selling that information to interested parties.

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

#680

Post by cowl »

bluelu wrote: post #268

I don't understand why this only applies for Facebook then. 2 1/2 years, ago they opened up a loop hole for newspapers that they are explicitly allowed to do it (Either you pay, or when you use their free version, you must accept to be tracked for behavioural advertising). Are they any better than facebook? Some example news sites: www.zeit.de, www.spiegel.de More information on this: https://www.heise.de/news/E-Priv…

newspapers are trying their hand but it is illegal. see for example: https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-tech-news-site-heisede-illega... in germany or https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-beginning-end in Austria.

Unfortunetly because European cases usually do not involve punitive damages, it costs nothing to these actors to try their hand and keep up for as long as thier turn comes becasue there are a lot and they don't risk practically nothing for being found illegal initially. Only after being found illegal they risk fines for repeat violations.

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