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EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

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

#721

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The truth is, there are far more complex reasons behind American kids being fed sugary cereal than "the dumb people got duped by the evil advertisers (but not me of course!)." It turns out kids like sugar, incomes have been stagnant for decades, and food deserts exist. What's the cheapest, shelf stable food item on a per-meal basis that your children will voluntarily eat without a fight before work? Sugary cereal. Co…

If advertising isn't actually necessary and has nothing to do with people buying the product, then companies and their sycophants shouldn't whine and scream in terror whenever somebody suggests that advertising be banned.

I didn't say advertising is not necessary, just that it does not create demand. It only directs it.

Again, products are created in response to consumer needs/wants, not the other way around. Look at the history of Kellogg to see why cereal exists.

Pick even the most frivolous of products, a $12,000 handbag. You probably believe the reason people desire such an object is due to advertising, and they otherwise would be more rational like you -- they must be being tricked right?

Wrong. Women want to signal their social class and that they are successful in attracting high value mates/power, and have since the beginning of time. The 12k handbag exists to meet that existing demand.

Advertising simply directs that existing demand towards a specific frivolous luxury good over another. It didn't create the demand. Before advertising & handbags even existed...social climbers and aristocrats used other things like silk fabrics, spices, servants, etc to meet the same demand.

What you're actually upset about is that other humans want things you don't agree with. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but making you dictator and removing all advertising will not change human nature.

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

#722
post #649

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Sellers and marketers don't want you opting into their market (eg. by checking a box that says "I want ads for computers"). They want to target their customers with fine-tuned, data-driven assumptions. Age, gender, income, interests, career... This is the value Facebook delivers (targeting and measuring), and it's about to go up in smoke. Nobody will pay the same price for a billboard.

Where would Facebook be getting income data from?

Tax software is one way. Payroll companies another. This is why these fuckers can’t be trusted even a bit as you might like. Give an inch and they take a mile.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/meta-wont-say-wh...

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

#723
post #421

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The current solution at facebook: You will be tracked.

That's not non-free consent, that's not consent at all.

You can not use it. That’s the logic here, that for free consent, a workable alternative has to exist, and some regulators say that "paying" is one, while "not using the biggest social network in the western world" is not.

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

#724

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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…

Terminal is cool, but it's just an app that's not even shipping with Windows. The best terminal app for macOS, iTerm2, isn't built by Apple. It says something about the Windows ecosystem that it took Microsoft to come up with Windows Terminal.

Visual Studio is a good IDE, but at least back in the day it needed ReSharper to have the smarts that Jetbrains IDEs usually have. And the fact that it only works on Windows is a dealbreaker for me, as many people want to develop on the same operating system that they target for deployment.

I can certainly buy into small improvements, such as Notepad having tabs. And I'm not the one that mentioned telemetry. But now that you've mentioned it, I'll say ... such marginal improvements aren't worth the creepy spyware, or the ads, or the useless breakage in UX.

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

#725

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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.

It’s strange that Telemetry would be treated differently in those versions. If its’s truly anonymous then there would be no real reason for the difference, and if it’s not well then all versions needs the notice in the EU.

The GDPR has the concept of “intended to be sold to people in the European Union”. As in, if you have a product that is sold in the EU, that product must be GDPR compliant, but if you happen to have a very similar product which is not sold in the EU, not available for download if the website detects you are in the EU, not able to be purchased if your CC is from an EU country, and the only way to get it would be to self-import, that product does not have to be GDPR compliant. The N version of Windows, and only the N version, is sold in the EU. (There are N SKUs for every additonal SKU elsewhere, it’d a matrix)

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

#726

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Taste in food, the supplements you take, and things like whether you like Elvis Presely, can absolutely be used to out you in ways that you may not want. The famous example I remember from growing up was a teen girl whose parents found out she was pregnant from a personalized (mailed) Target ad: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ... . There seem to be some skepticism in later articles that t…

but judging how awful the targetting is, I don't think anyone watching your screen as you browse should be able to make any kind of conclusions of you. if anything, the ads we receive are a reflection of human beings at large or at least what advertisers think of them. you wouldn't believe how irrelevant to me, the ads i get are.

Yes but that data never gets deleted really. So going forward you’ll have like profiles that are decades old and still available for analysis. For instance if you have depression they could show you ads for Prozac. Then if you get married and have kids, they know that your children are probably more prone to depression. Oh, and you live in a rural area and occasionally hunt. So your kid is now on some list. Or the other way, your kids phone gets sent ads from prager u. These are far fetched examples but 30 years from it’s absolutely within the realm of possibility. We only keep adding to the mountain with devices like the Apple Watch.

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

#727

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Anything is easy if you can take people's money and assign it to companies deemed worthy by a bureaucrat. But now you have a much bigger problem.

Got some news for you about the history of currently existing society.

...yes?

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

#728
post #614
post #64

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They could still show ads without all the invasiveness. For example: advertisers could pay to place ads in specific Facebook groups and they would show to people visiting those pages. Like it has been done for decades in magazines and other physical media. The internet did not invent advertising.

They don't work effectively if they aren't targeted on who you are. It would be like TV ads. Biggest example is the IOS privacy which has hit whole industry in terms of marketing effectiveness and cost.

Any reference proving this?

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

#729

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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.

Any proofs?

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

#730

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>No, the worst thing a company can do is to influence your desires, feelings and behaviours, causing you to spend money irresponsibly, getting your kids addicted to useless games, I dunno if you realize this but this sentiment is by FAR the most dangerous opinion in regards to advertising one can have. Because you are essentially saying that humans have no personal agency and that every decision we make is influenced…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

You can't just declare an outcome you don't like as Strawman.

We already see the result of this happening in San Francisco - the policies that led to the state of the homelessness population and crime all stemmed from taking away agency from people. "Its not their fault that they are addicted to drugs. Its not their fault that they feel so desperate to turn to life of crime".

Now, with the recent shenanigans of Cambridge Analytica, if you follow this claim, you are essentially saying that people can't be trusted to make rational decisions on their own because they are so influenced by information that they see, so that information must be controlled.

None of this is farfetched. Privacy is simply being used as a political tool for people to gain control, it has no implications in the real world.

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