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

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

#681

Post by polygamous_bat » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:47 PM UTC

justapassenger wrote: post #664

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…

> 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? That's not the argument I'm making nor the comment I'm responding to. OP presented non-personalized ads as a viable alternative for their business. It's not. Let's not pretend it is. It's a totally different conversation from one you try to turn it into. > More like banning…

> It's not, unless there have been F1 cars in every suburb for last decade.

So like banning lead from paint? Wouldn’t someone think of the poor paint makers and landlords?

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

#682

Post by quitit » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:57 PM UTC

arbuge wrote: post #631

I might be in the minority here but I personally find personalized ads useful, and am far more annoyed by ads recommending products and services completely irrelevant to my interests and/or needs. (The latter still account for the ads I see most of the time, unfortunately.)

There are types of personalised advertising which aren't deemed harmful, but are still useful. Examples include providing alternatives and suggestions based directly on the user's input/selections, or other non-specific criteria such as the weather, season, holidays etc. This is the equivalent of a shop clerk noticing you're looking at scarves, and showing you alternatives, or bringing more out stock because it's winter. This isn't invasive advertising, and this kind of advertising is not being targeted.

What is being targeted is surveillance-based advertising methods. These involve the collection, brokering and combining of user data. This data is purchasable by anyone - including US government agencies which have been using it as way of obtaining information without oversight(1). There is an expectation that other governments and bad actors are also obtaining this data for advantage.

This type of advertising is also responsible for poorly targeted ads that follow you around the internet. Perhaps you mentioned something in passing on an instagram chat, or you liked a photo from a friend on holiday.

Consumers generally underestimate their digital footprint and the risks associated with having this information available. It's more information than what we'd trust our own governments possessing in a single, or any, database, yet we let others take it without any oversight whatsoever. Additionally the information gathered about them can be wrong or invade their privacy in ways they aren't expecting (E.g. infer their sexuality or private desires) (2). Furthermore individual users can be targeted which beyond being able to prank someone(3), is also ripe for exploitation. (4)

(1) https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23844477-odni-declas... or the easier to read: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-government-buys-dat...

(2) https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/16/facebook-faces-fresh-criti...

(3) https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/roommate-makes-...

(4) https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/15/researchers-show-facebooks...

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

#683

Post by signal11 » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:58 PM UTC

timeon wrote: post #604

estel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the Independent (and presumably elsewhere): > Meta said it has cooperated with regulators and pointed to its announced plans to give Europeans the opportunity to consent to data collection and, later this month, to offer an ad-free subscription service in Europe that will cost 9.99 euros ($10.59) a month for access to all its products > Tobias Judin, head of the international section at the Norwegian Data Protec…

> For instance, he said, consent would have to be freely given, which wouldn't be the case if existing users had to choose between giving up their privacy rights or paying a financial penalty in the form of a subscription. This is already present in EU. Spiegel.de and others are like that. Pay or be tracked.

> This is already present in EU. Spiegel.de and others are like that. Pay or be tracked.

And legal challenges to that are in the works. Some have even been partially upheld. “Pay or okay” done as a binary choice isn’t okay, like anything else, granular consent is important:

https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=DSB_(Austria)_-_2023-0.17...

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

#684

Post by masswerk » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 9:04 PM UTC

JAlexoid wrote: post #655

masswerk wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 indivi…

Well, it may be that I'm biased against that kind of advertising – and that this may be a mutual affair. At least, it doesn't work for me, like most recommendation algorithms. I do feel locked in, I haven't seen anything relevant for years, and businesses are missing out on me as a customer. It may be that this works for things like SaaS-business, but there are various studies suggesting that it does perform worse than traditional advertising in general and that the methodology of the related metrics is at least questionable. Moreover, we lose things like informed markets and shared cultural references as a society. Rather, it incentivises division and polarisation. So, if it introduces significant risks and hurts both customers (at least anecdotally) and businesses, what is strong argument for this, besides building monopolies (which may be arguably bad for the economy as a whole)?

But, I guess, we won't agree on this.

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

#685

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 9:05 PM UTC

kwanbix wrote: post #23

erremerre wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are on your phone showing something to some person, and you get an ad for a new pressure cooking. Well, there it is a nice pressure cooking. Now if you have been looking for something else that you want to keep private (gay clubs, abortion clinics, or anything embarrassing) then your phone has betrayed you. There is also a point that if the ad is more useless, the quantity of ads should decrease because advert…

Incognito mode?

Does not work as imagined by most, and is easily detected by sites. So basically just a convenient way to have your cookies and other site storage deleted. But (meanwhile) basically useless because of other ways of 'fingerprinting' client browsers.

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

#686

Post by FinnKuhn » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

FinnKuhn wrote: post #572

JAlexoid wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Therefore you can't protect your privacy from the government without also protecting it from companies. This is reasonable. Though knowing that the data used to serve ads has very little overlap with the information that governments are interested in, makes this move more pointlessly destructive. Funny enough, the data that governments are interested in isn't getting restricted. There are laws about how to protect…

Well, the EU is telling companies to stop collecting data they themselves are very interested in. For example Google was fined for misleading settings that enabled them to track locations [1]. You can't look at governments, but especially the EU, as a single entity. Some parts of it want to collect all data possible while others want to protect your privacy. Here is a good article on how EU courts and the Irish gover…

edit in regards to "a recent example being the chat-control plans of the European Commission that the European Parliament will hopefully/likely reject", maybe it will still pass, certainly does seem likely [1].

[1] https://last-chance-for-eidas.org/

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

#687

Post by ToucanLoucan » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 9:09 PM UTC

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #552

nvm0n2 wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dona…

Mastodon isn't a real social network though because they don't have seventeen layers of middle management and a C-suite raking in billions of dollars, so obviously this is a non-starter solution.

/s if not clear.

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

#688

Post by ToucanLoucan » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 9:13 PM UTC

wholinator2 wrote: post #539

bcrosby95 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sel…

I mean the banner ads are the tip of the iceberg in terms of what millions of hours of all those brilliant minds are up to. In my mind at least, that goes out to much worse things than banner ads: incitement of all kinds of engagement, the most effective being rage; the infinite scroll that traps people in apps not unlike a slot-machine; the curation algorithms that promote the most insane, bugfuck and completely-detached-from-reality topics, individuals and trends; the normalization of documenting one's life in excruciating detail for no audience, only to find yourself flung into the life of a celebrity at a moments notice without the resources of one to handle it; the weaponization/creation of culture wars and all the monetizable attention that follows them...

It really is no wonder all of this shit has so badly corroded our social structures, given the sheer weight of the resources we've piled into it. If only we could get this kind of effort out for problems that actually need solving, instead of just endlessly punching dopamine out of unsuspecting consumer's brains.

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

#689

Post by avarun » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 9:19 PM UTC

ryanblakeley wrote: post #678

avarun wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You should be free to opt-in to tracking and personalization if that's what you want.

Agreed. So why is the EU making that illegal? I want to be able to use products for free by opting in to personalized ads so that businesses can make enough revenue to justify having an ad-supported free version of their product.

The incompetent bureaucrats at the EU won't allow Meta to offer that.

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

#690

Post by freeone3000 » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 9:24 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #593

freeone3000 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you sure that’s an official difference in N? Thought it was only some bundles like media player, Skype etc that were removed

There’s a separate OOBE where default browser, default media player, and so on must be selected (which was on US SKUs in 10 but removed in 11; it stays in N). One of the screens is asking about telemetry status, and the lowest option is “None”. There is no default selection.