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Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

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Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#91

Post by dspillett »

sieabahlpark wrote: post #87
msla wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? I don't use Twitter, and your reasoning is a complete non-sequitur. I don't play golf, and the President plays lots of it. How is that possible? By... my not playing golf.

What the president says on Twitter affects me or the world, whether or not he uses a 9 iron or a driver to get the ball out of the sand trap does not. You can't even conflate the two. Twitter is his method of communicating to us. He doesn't use the media like previous president's.

> What the president says on Twitter affects me or the world

But will be widely reported in every other media channel anyway, so you lose little or nothing by using Twitter directly. In fact, you might gain a little useful filtering, depending on your range of new outlet choices of course, and conversely there is a sort of reverse filter because you are less likely to miss things that are rather quickly deleted.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#92

Post by mceachen »

dylan604 wrote: post #64
jpollock wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking ads won't stop your info from being shared during the auction. That's a back end data transfer.

Depends on the block really. If you are using a blocker that just removes it from the UI, then yes the auction is still occurring. If you are blocking the JS code from even executing, then no data is transmitted. Unless I'm totally misunderstanding things, if the code doesn't run, then nothing happens.

It depends on the site. For example, a Twitter timeline or Google search engine result page only needs the https request for the auction to take place, as the ads are mixed into the first-party response.

Third-party ads inserted via javascript behave as you describe.

Blocking third-party cookies (by using ublock origin or a pi-hole or firefox) helps prevent more actors from observing your online activity, but simply by being in the ad auction, third parties can get a lot of indirect information (via real-time bidding, or RTB).

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#93

Post by clairity »

move-on-by wrote: post #45

There is no shortage of good reasons to block ads. Passive ads no longer exist, if they ever did. They are all actively exploiting, tracking, and selling you- even if you never interact with them. Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? Beyond Twitter, there is no shortage of school systems, police departments,…

> "...but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform?"

you really have to understand twitter as trump's personal marketing/branding channel, not a presidential communications platform. it's safe to ignore. anything of import will be released through a myriad of other media.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#94

Post by bad_user »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #41
olivierduval wrote: post #30

For me, it looks like the European GDPR - that received a lot of harsh words here, on HN - is a little bit improving the situation for everybody on the net, at least regarding the Big Players. Maybe some regulations is not bad after all (at least for de facto monopolistic business like Google, Amazon & co)...? ;-)

It's super effective and is making all companies pretty damn privacy conscious all of a sudden - except they also still violate it. The problem is that they will find ways to skirt around the edges of the GDPR as much as possible - or straight violate it in the hopes that nobody will find out.

> "The problem is that they will find ways to skirt around the edges of the GDPR as much as possible"

Many companies like to believe that, however the GDPR is pretty strict in certain regards. And such companies continue to operate only because no data protection authority has targeted them yet.

There's also the matter that many US companies have ignored GDPR due to not having a legal entity in the EU, but unfortunately for them there are trade agreements in place between the US and the EU, which makes the GDPR enforceable for companies having EU users / customers, even without a legal entity in the EU.

Give it time. And send complaints to your local DPA about violations that you see, because it does help.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#95

Post by msla »

xmprt wrote: post #89
msla wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? I don't use Twitter, and your reasoning is a complete non-sequitur. I don't play golf, and the President plays lots of it. How is that possible? By... my not playing golf.

Your analogy to golf is completely missing the point. I don't need to play or even care about golf if the President does, but if he tweets something on twitter then the only way I can validate the source of truth is by using twitter. When these tweets can have major policy and economic impacts I think it's a whole lot more important than golf.

Anything important will make the news.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#96

Post by bubble_talk »

tfha wrote: post #69
userbinator wrote: post #16

"We are committed to providing you meaningful privacy choices" -> "We are committed to selling your data if you let us" I hate this sort of pseudo-friendly weasel-wording that's getting increasingly popular these days.

My favorite is from Amazon, when selling Prime. "We are sorry to hear that you do not want FREE two day shipping." It really agitates me. I wish it didn't bother me so much but it cuts pretty deep sometimes.

This is how it went:

Product Manager: And don't forget to add the word free into the copy

Marketer: Make sure you A/B test bold text on some part of the sentence

Copywriter: Preface it with "We are sorry to hear" instead of the simpler "Don't want?" to give it more emotional appeal

Jeff B: Take a deep breath and just imagine what won't change in the next 20 years... OK, f all that, just write whatever the f you need to write so we can sell more stuff

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#97

Post by ianlevesque »

clairity wrote: post #93
move-on-by wrote: post #45

There is no shortage of good reasons to block ads. Passive ads no longer exist, if they ever did. They are all actively exploiting, tracking, and selling you- even if you never interact with them. Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? Beyond Twitter, there is no shortage of school systems, police departments,…

> "...but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform?" you really have to understand twitter as trump's personal marketing/branding channel, not a presidential communications platform. it's safe to ignore. anything of import will be released through a myriad of other media.

Given that there was a court ruling recently that the president cannot block people on Twitter, I think the stature of those communications is more significant than you make out.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#98

Post by zeta0134 »

dylan604 wrote: post #64
jpollock wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking ads won't stop your info from being shared during the auction. That's a back end data transfer.

Depends on the block really. If you are using a blocker that just removes it from the UI, then yes the auction is still occurring. If you are blocking the JS code from even executing, then no data is transmitted. Unless I'm totally misunderstanding things, if the code doesn't run, then nothing happens.

This is why I run uBlock Origin, which blocks the ad-tracking code at the network level. Pretty much anything in a third-party iframe doesn't even get to load from the server; the browser simply doesn't make the request. Doesn't stop anything the origin runs, but most origins don't; the third party embeds are generally the biggest threat.

This is also why Twitter having problems is such a big deal; as far as I'm aware, Twitter is serving their own ad-tracking code, rather than a third-party's code. Thus, it's harder to block completely, and any vulnerabilities might (somewhat) affect even users that are running privacy extensions.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#99

Post by oneepic »

"Confesses"? I'm not a fan of everything Twitter does, but this headline is so biased. I'm actually angry now. Twitter is "disclosing" these on their own, afaik, and I take that as a morally good thing. Also, it's a bug, not intended behavior in the first place. So if I understand this whole thing correctly, they never had to tell anyone they fixed these bugs, but they did anyway and people are still writing articles trying to drum up anger at Twitter for it. Please.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#100

Post by msla »

1986 wrote: post #88
msla wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? I don't use Twitter, and your reasoning is a complete non-sequitur. I don't play golf, and the President plays lots of it. How is that possible? By... my not playing golf.

The difference is that his golf swings aren't statements of government policy.

Despite what the minority thinks, anything which is a statement of government policy will be widely reported in news sources.

Twitter is not a requirement. I don't understand how anyone could possibly think it was, or be insulted by people saying it isn't. It seems like a cack-handed attempt at advertising to insist that everyone must use Twitter.

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