[HN Gopher] The EU's war on behavioral advertising
___________________________________________________________________
The EU's war on behavioral advertising
Author : curiousbird
Score : 287 points
Date : 2023-08-25 16:07 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thisisunpacked.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thisisunpacked.substack.com)
| seydor wrote:
| ... for no reason , to no effect, except the destruction of the
| entire eu online advertising industry
| brap wrote:
| EU is a huge fan of shooting itself in the foot with useless
| regulations, unable to think 1-2 steps ahead.
|
| Waiting for someone to tell you why "the destruction of the
| entire eu online advertising industry" is actually a good thing
| in their view.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Well, it would be a net positive for society if the
| advertising industry disappeared, so at least this move is
| not short-sighted at all.
| ponderings wrote:
| We wouldn't know which products to buy! We would all be
| standing there at the entrance of the supermarket, hungry
| but not knowing what to buy. We would wait for that old
| lady then follow her around talking amongst our own (on our
| phone ofc), what is she doing? What would she be up to with
| that? Chat GPT would have to baby us though the _apple pie
| from scratch_ as the only one who remembers all those
| marvels of SEO recipe websites from back in the days.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| It's not "online advertising", it's just behavioral. There's
| nothing preventing corporations from advertising the old-
| fashioned way, like they did on TV, radio, newspapers, etc.
|
| Online != behavioral
| seydor wrote:
| all advertising was (and is) always behavioral
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| Not to the extent where advertisers had this level of
| fine-grained information about their target though, which
| is the whole point of contention.
| seydor wrote:
| they always did, to the extent that was allowed by the
| tech of the time
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >they always did, to the extent that was allowed by the
| tech of the time
|
| As someone who spent five years doing advertising market
| research, and whose parents each spent 30+ years doing
| the same prior to ubiquitous internet use, I call
| bullshit on that statement.
|
| While there certainly were efforts (with millions spent
| collecting data) to identify market segments and
| emotional triggers to better target market
| products/services (cf. BSB GlobalScan as an example), the
| idea that it was the right of ad sellers to monitor
| everyone's activities as their right in order to "target"
| advertising was never an option, nor was there ever any
| push to do so.
|
| Convincing folks to participate in telephone/mall
| intercept/door-to-door surveys was used to identify
| consumer preferences and advertising efficacy.
|
| No one _ever_ asked (or did so without asking) to go
| through a consumer 's mail, personal communications or
| effects as a method to determine how to target ads.
|
| Since all those things are pretty much de rigueur these
| days, I'd say that's not a just difference of degree, but
| a completely different mechanism for gathering
| information about consumers.
|
| And just because it wasn't _possible_ to snoop through
| (without a potential breaking /entering and/or burglary
| charge) the private documents and communications of
| consumers, doesn't mean those folks would have done so if
| they could.
|
| So yes, there's a big difference between the market
| research (surveys, focus groups, etc.) done in the past
| and the blatant spying/snooping on people's private
| documents and communications we see now.
|
| You're making an assertion which doesn't match the facts.
|
| Feel free to disagree, but I was there, and that business
| paid for my housing, food, clothes and everything else
| for more than twenty-five years -- both as the child of
| marketers and as a marketer myself.
|
| I'd also point out that the Advertising Market Research
| industry was a very small group of people (perhaps a
| thousand employed by ad agencies/large corporations and a
| few thousand more employed by market research supply
| houses and interviewing/focus group companies.) and, as
| such, if there was a market for breaking into people's
| houses and rifling through their papers/mail, wiretapping
| their phones, etc., I'd know about it.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| And the tech changed and suddenly there was the privacy
| issue. That's... the whole point.
|
| Quantitative changes enabled by technology can present
| qualitative problems.
| [deleted]
| seydor wrote:
| you didnt have to wait long
| laserdancepony wrote:
| That's what you get for making the world a worse place.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| Isn't the destruction of advertising (not just online) a good
| thing? It's skewing markets by creating demands that were not
| there before, but only for the big players who can afford to
| be in peoples faces everywhere. Advertising is often
| misinforming (or not informing) people about the
| products/services. It promotes a throwaway society where
| resources are wasted.
| seydor wrote:
| It s surreal to read this comment in a SV VC supported
| forum
|
| Like anti smoking posters in a phillip morris factory
| piaste wrote:
| That's a brilliant analogy in a way you probably didn't
| intend.
| someplaceguy wrote:
| Exactly... As a general rule, all other things being equal,
| the more informed the participants in a market are, the
| better the efficiency of the market.
|
| Advertising negatively affects markets because it leads
| people to make decisions based on things that are not
| necessarily in their interests, i.e. it leads people to
| make more uninformed (or misinformed) decisions.
|
| In effect, it's basically exploiting a market externality:
| vulnerabilities in human psychology.
|
| I mean, this is not _always_ true. Sometimes, you might
| become aware of a great product or service due to
| advertising. But I am entirely convinced that, in general,
| the negative effects hugely, hugely outweigh the occasional
| benefit, just by observing how people usually make their
| buying decisions in their day-to-day lives (including me, I
| 'm not immune to that!).
| pohuing wrote:
| Sounds great!
| rollcat wrote:
| I wouldn't mind that, especially wherever behavioural profiling
| is involved.
|
| You'd call a person wearing a tinfoil hat a crazy, yet we are
| tolerating what effectively could be considered an effort at
| mass scale, targeted mind control. It's obnoxious on the less
| competent end of the spectrum, and an outright violation on the
| other.
|
| I used to consider advertisements an intellectual equivalent of
| fast-food; I think it's gone far worse than that, and as
| individuals, we are poorly equipped to stand up to it. I do
| understand businesses rely on advertising to stay alive, but
| without regulation, there just seems to be no end to how much
| abuse adtech is ready to inflict upon us.
| throw9away6 wrote:
| Yeah but probably an industry we can live without
| someplaceguy wrote:
| > except the destruction of the entire eu online advertising
| industry
|
| Yes, but what are the negative effects?
| seydor wrote:
| i mentioned the destruction of the eu advertising market. as
| a consequence tech in europe remains unfunded and therefore
| nonexistent (because the silicon valley machine literally
| runs on advertising money)
| mdhb wrote:
| Almost like they are trying to find alternative funding
| models for the web here... I fail to see that as anything
| other than a positive.
| seydor wrote:
| hint: there aren't . the web is like all the media before
| it
| tsimionescu wrote:
| All the media that never tracked its users, yes.
| seydor wrote:
| people should remember that advertising was equally
| vilified at all times , whether it was on TV or print or
| radio. But at the time the EU was wise enough not to
| destroy its media economy. This time it's different
| simiones wrote:
| Sure, and rightly so, but still there needs to be some
| limit to how much the advertising industry is permitted
| to do.
| someplaceguy wrote:
| Ok, but can you provide an actual argument explaining why
| advertising (in general) is a good thing for society and
| the economy?
|
| You've mentioned multiple times the "it's good at
| extracting huge sums of money out of people making
| decisions against their own interests, which goes on to
| fund other endeavors" argument, but I don't think that's
| a good thing on the whole.
|
| If you can forgive a huge exaggeration from my part, to
| me it sounds similar to saying that criminal activities
| are great because the money earned from those activities
| can go on to spur economic activity in the region (I'm
| not saying advertising is a criminal activity, but I
| think you get my point).
| ppsreejith wrote:
| I wrote a reply but since it became too long, posted it
| as a comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37266563
| someplaceguy wrote:
| That was an interesting comparison of behavioral vs non-
| behavioral ads, thanks.
|
| But my question was geared towards the value of
| advertising itself, in general (if there is any).
|
| I am aware of the unknown unknown problem you mentioned
| (I think), but in my experience as a layman, very very
| rarely (if ever) was I introduced to a great product or
| service through advertising that I wouldn't be aware of
| in other ways.
|
| Conversely, the amount of ads for substandard products
| and services (i.e. those which I know for sure there are
| better alternatives, at least for me and others around
| me) is infinitely greater.
|
| And I don't think it's just because the ads are not
| targeted enough. I'm pretty sure I am a hugely
| interesting target for many, many companies, but I am
| simply not interested in them (and never will) because
| other companies have much better products/services (many
| of which I already use).
|
| I am assuming, of course, that the only reason they're
| interested in targeting ads to me, is to influence me to
| make a buying decision that I wouldn't do otherwise, and
| not just because I wasn't aware of the product/service.
| Because if it wasn't for influencing me making a buying
| decision, why would they spend the money to show me an
| ad?
|
| That's why I always try to ignore (and block) ads as much
| as possible, even though that's not always possible (e.g.
| street ads). Yet, I am still being bombarded with non-
| stop ads and I have no question that I'm being negatively
| influenced by them, especially in those areas I know very
| little about (e.g. cleaning products) or am susceptible
| to being influenced against my own interests (e.g. fast
| food or other crappy, addictive food products).
|
| In my experience, the success rate of my own research
| (when looking for a product/service) or even word-of-
| mouth recommendations has far, far outweighed the success
| rate of all the ad campaigns I've ever been a target of,
| from my own perspective (not from the companies'
| perspectives, of course).
|
| So it's not that I don't see any value in advertising,
| which I don't (unless you're the advertiser), it's that I
| think it's actively damaging to society (due to leading
| people to make bad buying decisions) and the economy in
| general (due to increased inefficiency).
| ppsreejith wrote:
| Thanks, this does mirror my experience in many ways so
| I'll try to reply to each of your points. In my comment,
| I did talk about the value of advertising itself (not
| just contextual/behavioural).
|
| Regarding your experience, a lot of advertising is
| retargeting or keeping the brand alive in the minds of
| buyers or remind them constantly (since humans are
| forgetful). This statistically increases the probability
| of purchases made amongst a cohort (very measurable).
| Personally, I think this is user-hostile and is a strong
| case for having more control over the kinds of ads we're
| exposed to or limit/penalise harmful ones. Taken to the
| extreme (going on a slight tangent here), if we really
| owned/controlled our devices and software, which means
| having control over consumption, we'd block all ads which
| would incentivise platforms to remove the distinction
| between content and ads and we'd do more content
| filtering on the client (This is however computationally
| inefficient, a sort of arms race).
|
| Regarding influencing behaviour, it's a lot more
| efficient to match the right seller to the right buyer
| rather than influence buyer behaviour (which is hard).
| However, to achieve that extra marginal gains/returns on
| ad spend, advertisers often do attempt to change buyer
| behaviour (through building brand associations,
| retargeting etc). Again, better user control would help
| here.
|
| Agree on street ads and other public real world ads as
| there is no consent here (Real world movement is a need,
| not a choice).
|
| Regarding ads vs word-of-mouth, Ads really are very
| effective for many people, in a measurable way, both
| quantitative and qualitative. It of course will differ
| from person to person.
|
| Regarding increased inefficiency and effect on the
| economy more generally, ads actually increase efficiency
| in the system as long as they are not rent-seeking (i.e.
| pay to jump the queue) or user-hostile. Eg: It helps many
| niche businesses reach customers which are otherwise very
| hard to reach (due to geographical or novelty
| constraints). Taken to the extreme, all value gained from
| advertising will ultimately flow to the ad platforms.
| Even in this extreme case, overall consumption increases
| (due to buyers buying more) as well as competition (due
| to many more competitive small businesses, innovators
| dilemma theory) which is good for a capitalist economy
| (i.e. makes it more dynamic in both choice and
| inequality) and increases GDP (a poor metric).
|
| As an aside, it's also a progressive tax (I.e rich and
| poor both consume the same good but advertisers pay more
| to reach the rich, thus funding the good for the poor).
|
| Some extreme opinions below on the fundamentals:
|
| <Rant>
|
| Even in localist/anarchist/decentralised utopias, ads
| won't die (especially personalised). It's a fundamental
| need of humans and the only other form of payment (apart
| from paying for compute itself) that doesn't depend on a
| system of violence to enforce it. As long as there exists
| economies of scale, there will be marketing (to increase
| consumption and hence cheapening it per capita i.e. use
| less labor), and hence advertising (to solve the unknown-
| unknown problem or presenting/impressing).
|
| i.e. Even when we eliminate competitive enterprise, build
| localised production of needs, and have full control of
| our devices, if we want to build something cheaply or
| spread an idea, we'd have to advertise. It would look a
| lot more like "advertising on the merits" with full user
| control though considering human nature, there will also
| be a lot of "advertising focused on presentation".
|
| </Rant>
| someplaceguy wrote:
| Wow, thanks for the really long and thoughtful answer!
|
| I think your answer made me realize something which might
| explain some of the different viewpoints we have.
|
| You seem to have the general idea that, with some
| exceptions, ads are useful. This reminds me of my
| experience of doing a coast-to-coast road trip in the US
| and being amazed at how many more signs with ads I would
| see by the road and inside towns, compared to Europe. I
| was also fascinated by the radio ads, as everything was
| so different than what I was used to. The amount,
| creativity and sheer diversity of ads was astounding and
| something to behold.
|
| As a tourist, I associate these ads positively in my mind
| because in many cases, I would have no idea of all the
| different things that there were around me if I didn't
| see those ads, like restaurants, museums, supermarkets,
| local attractions, etc. A few of these ads were extremely
| useful, but many were also interesting because it made me
| experience a part of American culture that I wouldn't
| experience otherwise, including its great capitalistic
| nature (I love capitalism itself) and all the variety of
| businesses that there were. Perhaps with the occasional
| exception, I don't recall these ads being obnoxious.
|
| My experience with ads as a European citizen is the polar
| opposite. Here, I don't find them useful at all. I always
| see all the same ads, all the time. They're repetitive,
| loud, obnoxious, with no creativity, no diversity and
| transmit no useful information.
|
| It's mostly large, multinational companies, with the
| occasional local or national company whose ad you see or
| hear over and over again, thousands of times, to the
| point of exhaustion. This is especially true in TV, radio
| (including online radio) and also the same outdoor signs
| which you always encounter when driving to the same
| spots.
|
| If you've seen one Coca Cola ad, you've seen all the
| other thousand of them, basically. Especially when they
| are exactly the same ad. But I can't turn them off. It
| can get quite maddening when your favorite local radio
| only has 3 ad spots and they're always the exact same
| obnoxious ads, for months on end. Or when you're watching
| TV and it goes to commercials and you always see exactly
| the same $huge_company ads, in the same exact order, over
| and over again.
|
| Online ads, such as in Youtube or social platforms, can
| in most cases be a similar experience. In my subjective
| experience, it seems like I've been exposed to 1000x more
| Coca Cola, Burger King, and $giant_car_brand type ads
| than things which could actually be useful to me.
|
| Really, the only memorable experiences which begin to
| approach your arguments in favor of useful ads is if,
| say, I'm watching some video or podcast about some really
| niche topic and most or all the ads are related to that
| topic. The vast majority of these are still completely
| useless to me, but at least I don't find these as
| obnoxious as the generic ones as long as they're not too
| repetitive or in-your-face (which unfortunately is also
| common).
|
| I also have the anecdotal experience of buying many
| different types of ads for a local business of an
| acquaintance, for extended periods of time, to see what
| worked and what didn't. This includes times when it was
| just physical ads (geographically constrained), or just
| online ads, in different ad platforms, at first somewhat
| generic but later increasingly targeted ads, to the point
| where in the end we were only showing ads to people we
| thought would definitely be interested in the service. We
| also tried a company that specializes in online ads.
| Perhaps our experience was not representative, but I can
| tell you without a doubt that it was a complete waste of
| time and money, as the acquired customers were very few
| and very low quality. What really worked, by far, was
| simply stopping the ads and relying on word-of-mouth
| recommendations. That's how the business really got
| going. This is not a niche business, it is something that
| is occasionally needed by most people, either by going to
| the business physically or online. The competition was
| only small, mostly local businesses, there are exactly
| zero large national or multinational businesses in this
| market.
|
| So I don't know, maybe the ad market here where I live is
| crap or maybe it's simply that it's completely dominated
| by all the giant companies, but all I can tell you is
| that I would praise the Gods if all ads magically
| disappeared tomorrow.
| esafak wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4HkASndEXo&t=40s [SFW]
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| I immediately thought of Ali G, too. But please don't post
| memes on HN, the community really doesn't want that.
|
| (It is also worth pointing out that Ali G's American drugs
| sketch simply used word-for-word the same jokes as the
| original sketch with a British policeman, and most fans
| regard the original British version as superior.)
| [deleted]
| someplaceguy wrote:
| Huge fan. Thanks for reminding me :)
| jacquesm wrote:
| That sounds like an ok reason to me. But I'll settle for
| 'damage them to the point that they come to their senses'.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| What do you mean "no reason"?
|
| The reason is that the user's data privacy rights come first.
| If interests collide, privacy must come out on top. I'm curious
| on how you could have missed this ideological position that
| powers those regulations after years of headlines after
| headlines about the topic.
| seydor wrote:
| europeans did not go to the streets because they were afraid
| of advertising. politicians ran with it because it sounds
| good
|
| instead they go to the streets because of the awful economy,
| unemployment, inaccessible housing. Still waiting for a pan-
| european affordable housing regulation (not gonna happen
| because EU is run by the boomers)
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| Housing is a local, or at least federal matter. EU is about
| interstate commerce. The advertising/consent regulations
| are about commerce so it makes sense. Pan-EU housing
| regulations wouldn't as those are typically in the domain
| of each country/locality.
| seydor wrote:
| eu already affects the housing market with green
| regulations and housing standards, energy standards,
| policy on residence visas etc.
|
| and communications was not among its mandates either
| everdrive wrote:
| You're really not in a position to speak for all Europeans.
| You're painting a complex issue with a broad brush, and of
| course painting it in such a way that it supports your
| position.
| seydor wrote:
| You don't want to go there. EU is not in position to
| speak about all Europeans either.
| LelouBil wrote:
| The European parliament is made of deputees elected from
| each European countries, so why would it not be ?
| sib wrote:
| If that's all it were, then the trade would be "you can get
| this [free like beer] service if you agree to give up some
| personal data, otherwise you don't get the service."
|
| As it is, the law says "You, company, must give users a
| service for free even if they choose not to give you the
| data."
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| That's akin to taking a law prohibiting the (voluntary)
| sale of organs to mean that everything's free now.
|
| Some things are above the concept of "market". Personal
| data is one of those things. That's the ideology behind
| these laws.
| bckygldstn wrote:
| To make life better for people: the end to which economic
| prosperity is the means.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > the destruction of the entire eu online advertising industry
|
| Sounds like a good start to me.
| rolodato wrote:
| Good riddance. Hope it extends beyond the EU as well.
| seydor wrote:
| it will not, because that is unsustainable. but we can shove
| our head even deeper in the sand and hope so
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It's unsustainable to do advertising while maintaing user
| privacy? Someone tell the whole advertising industry from
| 1950 to 2000 or so.
| FredPret wrote:
| It's much less efficient to do mass ads than targeted
| ads. Giving a huge advantage to entrenched firms, and
| cutting off small startups. I guess that's what the EU
| wants though - protecting it's existing elites through
| exorbitant income taxes and regulations like these that
| favours big companies.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| every regulation favours big companies in the trivial
| sense that there's a non zero cost to comply with any
| rule. However this is hardly a reason to not have rules,
| we also don't let startup companies throw waste into the
| river.
|
| Smaller companies aren't somehow inherently virtuous, if
| they can only exist by violating user privacy even more
| so than large companies, I'd rather deal with large
| companies. Small companies aren't an end in itself.
| Banking is another good example of this. Canada has five
| big, heavily regulated banks and has not had one bank
| failure in a century. In the US tax payers bail out SV
| bank
| FredPret wrote:
| I hear you that small companies can suck even harder than
| big ones. But the idea of capitalism is that it's a
| search function, looking for optimal solutions.
|
| So having many firms positioning themselves differently
| is better than having a couple in that you're more likely
| to find a good best solution.
|
| We need some rules, but we need to err on the side of
| fewer not more rules.
|
| My point is that mass ads requires massed capital. There
| will be few, huge, entrenched players. It's much better
| to have a dynamic economy with piles of mom and pops as
| well as a couple of huge companies. This can only happen
| if mom and pop can afford to advertise. This can only
| work with targeted ads.
| mantas wrote:
| Ad targeting may be old good regional advertising. Or
| advertising in specific content rather than trying to
| target specific human beings based on their profiles.
| FredPret wrote:
| What if the target market for your specific content is
| 10k people? And they are spread out geographically?
|
| Let's say you develop a new product/service aimed at a
| thin slice of the population - say, dentists in Chicago,
| or 19 y.o. females across the US, or beginner coders, or
| people with older dogs in the state of Utah.
|
| How do you reach these people?
|
| Not through a national/regional ad campaign - your ad
| budget is likely $10-$100/day. This is why we all need
| targeted ads.
| mantas wrote:
| What could be a product only for such a specific niche?
|
| All dentists is Cervelo market :) Even if you really
| really want to target specifically Chicago dentists,
| you're probably better off doing a presentation at local
| dentists' union or something along those lines. Or just
| doing old good cold calls.
|
| As for 19 year olds, just advertise in whatever is
| popular among such crowd? If 18 or 20 y/o sees it, it's
| probably not far off, eh?
| FredPret wrote:
| Have you ever marketed anything?
|
| If you ever do, I hope you have an unlimited budget and
| time horizon to make your ideas work.
| danbruc wrote:
| Why is it not sustainable?
| [deleted]
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Because he probably works for a tech company who's main
| revenue is advertising.
| slater wrote:
| Found the online marketing person!
|
| And there are plenty of reasons.
| seydor wrote:
| if you re in tech your salary depends on advertising money
| somewhere along the chain
| someplaceguy wrote:
| > if you re in tech your salary depends on advertising
| money somewhere along the chain
|
| You say that like it's a good thing.
| seydor wrote:
| without online media, computers would be in the sector of
| scientific instruments
| someplaceguy wrote:
| > without online media, computers would be in the sector
| of scientific instruments
|
| Computers were already common household items before
| massive online advertising even existed.
|
| So forgive me if I don't find your arguments convincing
| (and it's not just because of this specific argument).
| bigbillheck wrote:
| I have an enjoyable and well-paying job in the sector of
| scientific instruments.
| JohnFen wrote:
| So your assertion is that there would be no online media
| in the absence of behavioral advertising?
|
| I rather suspect that's incorrect, for two reasons. We
| had plenty of online media before online advertising
| existed at all, and there are many ways of doing
| advertising without it being behavioral.
| seydor wrote:
| Not plenty and nowhere near as popular
| slater wrote:
| Good thing I'm not in tech, then. Pheeee-ew!
|
| edit: but to add some substance:
|
| If you (yes you, OP) are in the online advertising sphere,
| surely you're at the losing end of many battles, not just
| this lil EU thing? I'm thinking the ever-growing prevalence
| of adblockers, tracker-blocking, e-mail trackers being
| blocked etc.?
|
| For you it must be like a game of whack-a-mole, except your
| mallet is increasingly smaller, and the moles' velocity is
| approaching lightspeed
| dale_glass wrote:
| Not mine as far as I know. As a consulting company of
| course we advertise, but not really to normal people. At
| least I don't think I've ever seen online ads for services
| that involve a team of programmers and large sums of money.
| everdrive wrote:
| I'd happily take a hit if it meant removing behavioral
| advertising and tracking from the internet. There's more to
| life than making money, but this isn't really something
| that "people" in advertising usually understand.
| dooglius wrote:
| Unless you have unusually good psychological resistance to
| ads, you're ultimately paying that money back in in one way
| or another, since advertising is a net profitable business.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Sure, but not necessarily the terrible sort of advertising
| being addressed.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Not all tech jobs depend on user targeted advertising. Only
| some big-tech ones.
| seydor wrote:
| that s not how it works though, tech is a big ecosystem.
| At least 3 of the trillion-dollar tech companies depend
| on advertising , which feeds money into the content
| system. The rest of the ecosystem is in the business of
| supporting and distributing this content. Advertising is
| very high in the pecking order of the tech business
| sector. Without it, the internet would be the equivalent
| of USSR era Pravda (and we'd probably have a different
| job)
| mantas wrote:
| There's a lot of jobs in boring sectors building all
| sorts of software to run old school businesses. Or
| helping people do all sorts of tasks.
|
| The world does not turn around content (over)consumption.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Without it, the internet would be the equivalent of
| USSR era Pravda_ Yes, remember USSR Windows XP from the
| era when it came without ads? It was so terrible. /s
|
| Didn't know I was using USSR internet in the '90s-'00s
| before the advent of user targeted advertising.
|
| In fact most websites and products were way better back
| then compared to the mess of today.
|
| _> At least 3 of the trillion-dollar tech companies
| depend on advertising_
|
| Boo-hoo, let me play you and them the world's smallest
| violin.
| MandieD wrote:
| Some of us work for big companies that still basically
| make what they did 50-70 years ago, just faster and
| better now, with the help of computers and data science.
| dale_glass wrote:
| I'm not seeing the benefit from behavioral advertising.
|
| I should be an easy person to target -- I buy techy stuff that
| fits into pretty neat categories.
|
| Yet Amazon seems to be completely unable to figure out some
| very simple patterns, like that if you're not a company, you're
| probably not looking to start a collection of printers, cell
| phones, UPSes or monitors, and that buying one is a sign of
| that you're done with the product category for a while.
| btbuildem wrote:
| Interesting how this is forcing these companies to objectively
| improve their products -- chronological feeds, friends and
| follows only, etc is what users have been begging for and being
| ignored, because advertising trash salad is more profitable.
|
| If the long-term effects end up being along the lines of the big
| social corps withdrawing from the EU, I see that as an enormous
| win for that economic zone. The presence of these companies, the
| influence of their products on society and individual mental
| health have been shown to be overall harmful.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| You couldn't be more wrong.
| kmlx wrote:
| > If the long-term effects end up being along the lines of the
| big social corps withdrawing from the EU, I see that as an
| enormous win for that economic zone
|
| it will be a major net loss. the EU is already becoming the
| internet's new china. what you're writing will just make it
| clear the EU is a non-start for internet companies.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| konschubert wrote:
| I want a feed with recommendations and I want a feed that's not
| just friends and follows.
|
| I don't want my government to tell me what I should like.
| permo-w wrote:
| your government is not telling you what you should like,
| they're making people literally spying on you for profit
| something that you aren't opted into by default. if you want
| people to spy on you for profit, click accept, you still have
| that option
| permo-w wrote:
| I suspect "suggested content" is not going anywhere. the profit
| incentive is now lower, but it's still in these company's
| interests to keep you as engaged as possible for as long as
| possible, and the casino model is the best way they've found to
| do that
| legitster wrote:
| > Interesting how this is forcing these companies to
| objectively improve their products
|
| Is it though? Facebook only used to show me content from
| friends and pages I followed. Now it's a nonstop hose of
| garbage content that only exists to stuff the space between
| poorly targeted ads.
| ta1243 wrote:
| I certainly see that, but I think part of it is how rare it
| is for anyone to actually post on facebook nowadays.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Couldn't that be an effect of algorithmic feeds though?
| What's the point of posting something if the people you
| want to see it probably won't because it's buried under a
| mountain of "content". Or worse, the opposite happens: it
| goes "viral" and people you don't want seeing it see it and
| decide to make you the internet's punching bag for the day.
| avianlyric wrote:
| I'm confused, do you prefer chronological feeds from friends
| and family or not?
|
| GP is saying that feeds driven by friends and family would be
| an improvement to their products, and new EU law will drive
| that behaviour by making it hard for companies like Facebook
| to indiscriminately force black box recommendation algorithms
| on people.
|
| Isn't that exactly what you say you want? And thus you agree
| with this statement
|
| > Interesting how this is forcing these companies to
| objectively improve their products
| legitster wrote:
| > I'm confused, do you prefer chronological feeds from
| friends and family or not?
|
| Yes. I would prefer this.
|
| FB _no longer_ gives me a customized feed. I get a generic
| feed tailored to my demographics - brain achingly dumb
| posts about Disney and Marvel and memes I don 't care for.
| And I am unable to unsubscribe from any of them because
| none of them are based on my preferences.
|
| _This_ has been FB 's response to the EU sanctions (as
| well as dropping user engagement) and is the "Non-
| Personalized feed" that the article is describing.
| youngtaff wrote:
| Yeh but that's a fault of FB not the EU law
| LordShredda wrote:
| This is where a EU based competitor could step in and
| give a decent product, while still complying and
| benefiting the local economy
| btbuildem wrote:
| It doesn't even have to be EU based -- just create a
| decent product voluntarily.
| [deleted]
| Moldoteck wrote:
| it was just a way to increase profit, because, you know,
| growth growth growth...
| Symbiote wrote:
| I went through the earlier process of objecting to
| personal data processing.
|
| Since then, my feed has been 25% videos of trains and
| model railways, 50% vaguely sexist or sexual jokes
| (blondes, 'little Johnny' etc) or cartoons, 25% posts
| from random Anglophone police forces showing them
| catching speeding cars, or advising to use seatbelts.
|
| As a whole I think it's good evidence that they no longer
| use anything they know about me to show the adverts.
| chongli wrote:
| _I'm confused, do you prefer chronological feeds from
| friends and family or not?_
|
| Yeah I don't get it either. I've unfollowed most of my
| family and friends. I'm not interested in their re-shared
| political pieces. My Facebook feed has morphed into a
| stream of stuff from my hobbies. It's basically replaced
| Reddit for me.
| legitster wrote:
| > My Facebook feed has morphed into a stream of stuff
| from my hobbies. It's basically replaced Reddit for me.
|
| Is there some sort of setting somewhere I am missing? FB
| has ignored my follows and stated preferences and just
| feeds me random trash.
| spunker540 wrote:
| Why do you think complex algos, complex feeds, across large
| search space (all content instead of friends and family) turns
| out to be more profitable? Are ads suddenly more valuable in
| that context? I don't think so. And it's certainly much more
| expensive to operate than a simple chronological feed of
| friends and family.
|
| It comes down to time spent. People spend more time on the apps
| and see more ads. We can argue over whether that's a sign
| people like the app more... but no one is being forced to
| scroll a feed they don't enjoy. Interesting that people "are
| begging for changes" yet using the apps more and more anyways.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Addictiveness is not necessarily an indicator of utility.
| Drug addicts keep going back to heroin even if it's ruining
| their lives.
|
| Just because I feel compelled to scroll and endless,
| algorithmic feed it does not mean that this is how I want to
| use social media or that such usage reflects the role I want
| it to have in my life.
| spunker540 wrote:
| The average American watches close to 3 hours of tv per
| day-- I just don't see what the fuss is about. It seems
| like you simply don't approve of how other people choose to
| spend their time.
| username135 wrote:
| It's almost a self fulfilling effect at this point.
| itronitron wrote:
| Scrolling a feed doesn't mean a person is watching the feed,
| in fact you could argue the opposite. It seems like the
| content is engineered to be skipped over while still
| registering as a view.
| jancsika wrote:
| > but no one is being forced to scroll a feed they don't
| enjoy
|
| On what do you base this?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling
| andrepd wrote:
| My, thank god people are perfect utility-optimising machines
| and not complex brains with a ton of psychological and
| neurological weaknesses and quirks :-)
|
| If people behaved like you're saying there would be no drug
| addicts or gambling addicts, or even obesity or depression.
| Filligree wrote:
| There's definitely a school of thought that goes "If
| they're gambling, then gambling must be their highest
| value; and they're lying if they say otherwise."
|
| "Revealed preferences", if you want something to search
| for. The most obvious issue is that humans aren't utility-
| maximizers.
| petre wrote:
| I'd really like Meta and TikTok threaten with withdrawal from
| the EU, after subsidizing the EU budget with violation fees.
| The thing is that then it might create a junk information void
| which will be promptly filled by Russian propaganda. They're
| already vehicles for propaganda distribution but more easy to
| regulate and control than lots of other small channels
| spreading misinformation.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Twitter and youtube had chronological feeds for years.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| 5 min on yt shorts and I'm fed a diet of Andrew-Tate, Joe
| Rogan, or if I disagree with this genre and rage-click it
| away, I get left-wing US hate on why aren't you outraged
| about Dave Chapelle - because you should be?
|
| Youtube feed for content discovery of intelligent men has
| died long time ago. It is US propaganda at it's finest but
| for a global audience.
| cmarschner wrote:
| I only get puppies all along
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| YT shorts gives me almost exclusively shuffle dance videos,
| language learning / expat videos and super uplifting stuff
| like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Yp84ARq7kQ0
|
| I don't want to watch hours of it, but it's definitely a
| positive slice of my day.
| memefrog wrote:
| Don't watch YouTube Shorts then.
| djhn wrote:
| Well out of the people you mention I only recognise Joe
| Rogan By name - never seen anything of his in my
| recommendations. Almost 20 year old YouTube account. I
| watch shorts regularly as well.
| katbyte wrote:
| Are you in the USA? I think it's very country specific
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| good for you if yt knows you and caters to your interest.
| it is well known that if you show up with a new device,
| this isn't the case. and for most newcomers this means
| radicalize in 1 of 2 directions
| pedrosorio wrote:
| here is what I get: track&field, chess, some music
| Tanjreeve wrote:
| And then they enshittified them.
| phailhaus wrote:
| I think the author has the terms "opt-in" and "opt-out" reversed,
| which was a bit confusing. If something is "opt-in", then you
| have to explicitly decide to opt-in, which means that by default
| you won't be included.
|
| A good example of this is organ donation. Some countries have it
| opt-in (i.e., you have to decide to donate), whereas in other
| countries it is opt-out (so you are a donor by default).
| SuperCuber wrote:
| "opt-in by default" kinda makes sense as a combination of
| words, but you're right that people just usually call it "opt-
| out" (and vice versa)
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| I think it describes a somewhat common scenario, where it's
| on by default but there's an effort made to make it seem like
| you went out of your way to agree to it.
|
| Like a pre-checked box on a form about your desire to receive
| marketing mails.
| reneky wrote:
| To opt-in to something means to consent to it, to enable it,
| to take action to have it.
|
| So "opt-in by default" doesn't make any sense.
|
| However, I do see this opposite usage increasingly often,
| which means "opt-in" shouldn't be used any more.
|
| Using "on by default", "enabled by default", "off by
| default", "disabled by default" would be clear and make
| sense.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| just when llm were going to revolutionize eyeballs on ads.
| dweekly wrote:
| I think this will evolve advertising in interesting ways.
|
| "Ads 1.0" had a viewpoint of trying to scrape every last little
| bit of data about a user's interests: from their email, messages,
| calendar, search history, friendships, and discussions. There was
| a mental model that you can't really know what's going to
| resonate with a person until you have their life under a
| microscope. This the "surveillance capitalism" take.
|
| There's a view, perhaps not universally shared, that humans may
| not actually be as complicated as all that. That if you have a
| person play a short game, engage in a chat session a few minutes
| long, swipe on people they find interesting, or even just pay
| careful attention to how much of a video someone watches -- that
| discerning their personality and interests is challenging but
| totally viable.
|
| Let's remember: the Cambridge Analytica debacle didn't stem from
| a full dump of someone's private Facebook history - it was mainly
| personality tests that were very quick to complete. It turned out
| that such a quick & casual test is mostly sufficient signal to be
| actionable re: how they were likely to vote and how to influence
| that vote.
|
| In this mode, we'll see the rise of superapps that have rich ways
| of engaging and rich telemetry to discern your interests without
| having to "snoop" on you. They'll just engage you directly.
|
| In this way, privacy is preserved nicely but ads can still be
| well-targeted.
| _nalply wrote:
| I am profoundly anti-advertisement because I believe in the
| pull model: if I want something I ask. So I think about 95% or
| more of advertisement today is annoying if not outright evil.
|
| But your comment got me thinking. Is there a world where
| advertisement is, um, just simply good?
|
| In other words, what makes advertisement bad today and how
| would these superapps make advertisement good?
| dweekly wrote:
| We've definitely seen a rise of "advertising as content"
| where the ad itself is just so good that people will watch it
| for its own right vs having it imposed on them.
|
| The Superbowl is a classic example here - some meaningful
| fraction of those watching are doing so for the ads vs any
| interest in football! But YouTube, TikTok, etc have all seen
| great success in organic/viral campaigns (Old Spice comes to
| mind).
|
| To answer your question - how might a superapp make
| advertisement "good" would probably be not only showing you
| an ad that you're likely to commercially engage (to purchase
| the good/service) based on your observed interests but also
| where the ad itself is something you're likely to find
| interesting/educational/amusing and not annoying, because in
| the latter case you'll like/comment/reshare to percolate it
| "for free" and amplify their campaign. And the
| interestingness can be judged based on your history of
| interactions.
| kmlx wrote:
| > if I want something I ask
|
| what if you don't know what you want?
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Is there a world where advertisement is, um, just simply
| good?
|
| I think there can be. The fundamental idea of advertising is
| certainly a win-win sort of deal: informing people of
| products and services they may not be aware of.
|
| But most advertising is not that. Most of it is not
| informative or useful for making purchase decisions, most of
| it is manipulative to the extreme, and a lot of it relies on
| surveilling people without their consent. That sort of
| advertising isn't anything I can support.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| In concept advertising is good, I'd love to know about good
| products that serve my purposes for good prices, the problem
| is that as far as the people in these companies are concerned
| they just want to sell stuff.
|
| Many companies don't make great products, so what ends up
| happening is they compensate with advertising that's just
| borderline false. Filled with emotive words, gish gallop etc
| that doesn't actually provide very useful or accurate info
| but hopefully convinces you to buy anyway.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I can imagine a world where advertising is good in the sense
| that it's always relevant, but such a world places heavier
| weight on ad "fit" than on the advertiser's bid for that ad
| inventory. For example, it's a bad user experience when you
| search for a product/vendor and the first result is their
| competitor instead because they bid more for that ad
| placement.
|
| Unfortunately, I don't see how "good" advertising can exist
| outside of small niches with the economic incentives being
| what they are.
| _nalply wrote:
| Replying to myself.
|
| Inherently there's a conflict in advertisement. The consumer
| expects entertaining and unbiased information and the
| advertiser expects the consumer to buy something.
|
| One example how this conflict plays out: The youtuber Colin
| Furze tells people about Surfshark, a VPN solution. The way
| he does is funny (being in a bathtub with a shark mascot and
| his dark grey tie on), but I am not sure whether this is
| enlightening and useful information,
|
| Because of this conflict I think there will always be some
| tension. One example is that one extension for Youtube marks
| these parts as advertisement and enables skipping it. And
| sometimes I feel the need to skip it. When thinking about it,
| it is because I don't want to listen to it and try to
| separate the information I am after from advertisement I am
| not willing to listen to it.
|
| So I still think that the pull model is the best way. When I
| am ready I am willing to listen to what companies tell me.
|
| It's like learning. If your mind is ready, learning is quick
| and easy.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > rich telemetry to discern your interests
|
| and
|
| > privacy is preserved nicely
|
| Seem to be contradictory to me. What am I missing?
| dweekly wrote:
| That the data about you is not flowing from one party to
| another.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Ah, OK. That doesn't really count as "privacy-preserving"
| in my book, but I understand what you're saying.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Your second model of advertising ("humans may not be as
| complicated") is how advertising worked for thousands of years,
| and how it continues to work today. Even for Google and
| Facebook, the vast majority of ad spend is not narrowly
| targeted.
|
| What you call "Ads 1.0" is a snakeoil fad and isn't successful
| in the industry.
|
| The reason the big Internet giants collect user data isn't
| really for advertising (that's only a justification), they do
| it to have leverage when dealing with nation-states and
| governments.
|
| t. Working in the ad industry for the last 17 years.
| Barraketh wrote:
| So one issue that this article glosses over is how contextual
| advertising interacts with attribution.
|
| Essentially, as an advertiser, in order to do effective
| contextual advertisement, you need to have some idea of how ads
| perform in a particular context - on a particular web page or
| app. So what you would really like to say is that "people who saw
| our ad on X were Y% more likely to visit or website, or buy our
| product". However, in order to actually measure that, when a user
| comes to your website you need to know which of your ads they've
| seen. Traditionally, you'd just serve the ad from your domain and
| set a cookie, but now you can't do that.
|
| This is more relevant to brand advertising than "click here and
| buy product X" (direct response), but I think that the people
| saying "oh, just use contextual advertising" are underestimating
| the extent to which GDPR makes contextual advertising difficult.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > However, in order to actually measure that, when a user comes
| to your website you need to know which of your ads they've
| seen.
|
| That may be the case, but so what? If an industry can't
| function without abusing people, I would argue that it
| shouldn't function.
|
| But this doesn't mean the industry can't function. It just
| means that advertising becomes less efficient (i.e., more
| expensive). Which is fine -- if it's more expensive to operate
| in a manner that approaches being ethical, I don't see that as
| a real problem.
| kmlx wrote:
| > If an industry can't function without abusing people
|
| what abuse? clicks? page views?
| Barraketh wrote:
| You're right, it's just that the word "abuse" is doing a lot
| of work in that statement. I've still never seen any example
| of any person being actually damaged by the "tracking", so
| calling it "abuse" feels pretty harsh.
| mehlmao wrote:
| Off the top of my head: targeted ads towards people who are
| predisposed to gambling addictions or alcoholism
| uxp8u61q wrote:
| Society as a whole is damaged by the tracking. https://en.w
| ikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think "abuse" is a fair term, but I acknowledge that it's
| emotionally loaded. If a company is spying on me
| (collecting data about me, my machines, or my use of my
| machines without my informed consent), then I think it's
| not out of line to call that abusive.
| memefrog wrote:
| Every web server logs request information. Is that spying
| on you too? If you go to a website, they aren't "spying"
| on you, you are volunteering your information to them.
| Stop hitting yourself.
| hnhg wrote:
| I would rather be the subject of behavioral advertising and keep
| privately encrypted comms than the other way around, but
| apparently the EU has other ideas.
| [deleted]
| sealeck wrote:
| Why not both??
| kvdveer wrote:
| That means that we're living in your ideal world then... :)
|
| Right now, behavioral ads are on their last legs, and privately
| encrypted comms are still around. Proposals to limit encryption
| are being thrown around, but they are met with serious
| resistance, and none of them are currently close to
| implementation.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| I have no doubt that Signal is now compromised, since its
| board was overhauled recently and now includes people with a
| US government background. Yes, the encryption model
| theoretically remains secure, but 1) Signal now uploads your
| contact list to their servers and claims it is secured by
| Intel's secure enclave, but multiple vulnerabilities have
| been found in that, and 2) if targeted, most users are
| defenseless against a malicious update. Meanwhile, WhatsApp,
| which is heavily used by EU citizens, claims end-to-end
| encryption, but it leaks metadata and also chat content is
| leaked through the automated backups that most users don't
| disable.
|
| The only question is to what extent Five Eyes members besides
| the US get access to all that. Unfortunately, there doesn't
| seem to be any initiative inside the EU to protect users
| better, while also letting us enjoy an internet without
| behavioral advertising.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| End to end encryption can be implemented in open source
| protocols. More than that - you can be sure it's actually there
| instead trusting marketing.
| riversflow wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| Having thought about this long and hard, lucrative behavioral
| advertising seems like a fair price to pay for an open, free
| (as in beer), internet.
|
| I fear this type of regulation will only serve to make the
| internet become much less equitable.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Without trying to dismiss your opinion: Was the internet
| before Google/ad-tech not "open, free (as in beer)"?
| riversflow wrote:
| Well it certainly wasn't equitable, connected computers
| were the realm of the rich. The problem with free services
| is scaling them to significant portions of the entire
| population.
| phatfish wrote:
| My family wasn't rich and we had a "connected computer"
| in 97/98 before ad-tech really took over. Getting online
| was far less costly than the computer itself.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Did you also have access to free email (beyond a measly
| few MBs), maps, video hosting, and private data storage?
| Because that's what ad-tech enabled. Getting online
| wasn't the hard part.
|
| Not saying that ad-tech is purely good, of course.
| mcmoor wrote:
| Damn an in my country (Indonesia) even in 2010 it's still
| the other way around. Even to this day I can't see my
| fellow countrymen paid for anything online partly because
| everything used to be so expensive we always have to find
| cheaper (pirated) version. By comparison privacy is
| worthless (for us).
| Cyph0n wrote:
| EU legislators are experts at coming up with a bunch of good
| regulations but then cancelling it all out with a hefty dash of
| blanket, pro-surveillance legislation.
| johndhi wrote:
| As a lawyer working on these topics, this is a poor phrasing. EU
| regulators don't need to "war" with advertisers - they have
| complete control over them. There's no other side of this war,
| just regulators issuing commands that industry tries to follow.
|
| It's confusing as a war is because the regulators decided not to
| make the law say, 'behavioral advertising is illegal,' and
| instead have spent years slowly awakening to that conclusion, at
| the cost of zillions of dollars in legal fees.
| stevage wrote:
| Surely the other side is public opinion. If corporations
| convince the public that the regulators are going to make their
| life worse, the regulators lose.
| jmilloy wrote:
| This doesn't make sense to me. You make it sound like a rosy
| cooperative relationship where advertisers want to follow the
| rules and regulators just haven't made them. Even so,
| regulation isn't "complete control" in any way. It seems more
| like the advertisers are always going to try to make the
| advertisements as effective as possible while toeing the letter
| of the law as closely as possible and ignoring the spirit of
| the law completely. What are you actually trying to say here?
| johndhi wrote:
| I'm saying the laws EU has released are too complex and
| indirect and cost too much money, and that if they wanted to
| ban behavioral advertising outright they should have and
| could have done that instead of what they have done.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > if they wanted to ban behavioral advertising outright
| they should have and could have done that instead of what
| they have done
|
| Yes they could, so the question is why didn't they?
|
| I suspect the answer is that there are lots of factions
| within the EU, some want to ban it and some don't and what
| they've done is a compromise.
| troupo wrote:
| > I'm saying the laws EU has released are too complex and
| indirect and cost too much money
|
| No, and no, and no.
|
| Most privcy-adjacent laws that EU has released in recent
| years are neither complex, nor do they cost too much money.
|
| Well, they cost some money because businesses have this
| entrenched idea that they have an inalienable right to your
| data, so they don't even know which data they collect,
| sell, exchange, let leak, or use throughout their systems.
| Well, boo-hoo. Spend some time and money to get rid of this
| idea.
|
| And the laws are "indirect" in the sense that all laws are
| indirect. They have to be general enough to be applicable
| not just in the year they were released to the technology
| of the time.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| This papers over the realities a bit too much.
|
| If they were to "ban behavioural advertising", then
| advertisers would simply rebrand it: "oh no it's not
| behavioural advertising, it's 'interest-centric'
| advertising, completely different".
|
| The point is to ban it in "spirit" not in "letter", because
| a ban in the lette would simply get lawyered around and end
| up not being worth the paper it's written on.
|
| The advertisers know that these regulations ban behavioural
| advertising effectively, which is why their immediate
| tactic is to decry the wording as "too hard" and "too
| confusing". This is an obfuscation tactic. Like with GDPR,
| it's actually shockingly easy to comply with:
|
| Just don't track users and sell their data.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Any idea as to way they'd opt for this indirectness, rather
| than an outright ban? I'd imagine it would be to protect
| some niche, or to avoid getting the law dragged through
| courts for ten year.
| blackbeans wrote:
| As far as I know, the EU legislation is primarily aimed
| to protect privacy. Behavioral advertising is related
| because it requires tracking, and tracking requires the
| consent and understanding of users in the EU. There was
| (is) a huge dependence on US software in Europe, that's
| probably why there was some reluctance at the start in
| enforcing it. However since "America first" the EU is
| trying to be more independent and boost its own European
| made software, that's likely why the climate for other
| software has worsened.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| Could you give some details about which provisions of those
| laws are too complex/cost too much money to comply with,
| and why?
| dgb23 wrote:
| The actually ridiculous part is not that.
|
| It's the fact that our browsers don't solve this issue in a
| standardized way.
|
| Everyone who serves HTTP in the Eu and includes third party
| tracking, shows you an idiosyncratic consent banner. Often
| these things download a large amount of JS as well.
|
| That's completely and utterly idiotic.
|
| - It's confusing for users.
|
| - It interrupts the user's flow everytime they visit a
| site.
|
| - It's bad for overall performance.
|
| - It's bad for people who publish content.
|
| - Developers have to defer to legal experts for trivial
| stuff out of FUD.
|
| - It doesn't work correctly on the technical side.
|
| - It doesn't work from a user's perspective, because they
| just get annoyed or uncertain and falsely consent!
|
| Nobody wins.
|
| It should just be a standard, global feature in browsers. A
| site should only ask you _once_, if at all from a user's
| perspective.
|
| The browser should send a "profiling and tracking"
| whitelist, or simply make it available via a JS API.
|
| Why is this not the case?
| troupo wrote:
| > Everyone who serves HTTP in the Eu and includes third
| party tracking, shows you an idiosyncratic consent
| banner. Often these things download a large amount of JS
| as well.
|
| > That's completely and utterly idiotic.
|
| Yes. And that's not the fault of the law, but the fault
| of the companies.
|
| 1. The law doesn't talk about browsers, or cookies, or
| banners. It's a _General_ Data Protection Regulation. It
| applies in equal measure to browsers, apps, VR, AR,
| offline interactions, and whatever you can think of
|
| 2. The law is ridicuously simple for 99% of use cases,
| and is extremely cheap to implement. It says, "Only use
| data you need for the operation of your business. If you
| collect any other data, you have to ask users for
| consent. Consent has to be informed, and it must be as
| easy to say no as it is to say yes"
|
| > Why is this not the case?
|
| Because the companies think that tracking you and selling
| your data on theopen market is their god-given right.
|
| And the standard is literally already there: it's called
| GDPR.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I'm not attacking the law. I'm attacking the
| implementation and the lack of Web standards to
| accommodate user privacy.
| troupo wrote:
| They had such a standard called Do Not Track. It was used
| by the ad industry to track users. So Do Not Track was
| removed.
|
| So why would companies who don't give two shits about
| user privacy bother with any implementation or standards?
| The law already tells them to provide a yes/no option,
| and yet here we are.
| developer93 wrote:
| As a very much devils advocate, one could argue that some
| companies make a revenue steam or of serving ads, so
| taking steps to do that is their legitimate business. I
| personally think that's a screwed up business model but
| there you are. I've always found legitimate business to
| be annoyingly vague.
| janosdebugs wrote:
| It does not seem that argument will fly:
| https://edpb.europa.eu/news/national-news/2022/tiktok-
| italia...
| troupo wrote:
| You can still serve ads without tracking, collecting
| enormous amounts of data etc.
|
| "Legitimate interest" is there to cover areas that are
| too numerous to cover in a law. E.g. combating fraud is a
| legitimate activity, and it requires more data than you
| strictly need to operate your business.
|
| However, as with all things, companies will try and
| exploit any and all loopholes possible.
| curtisf wrote:
| Legitimate interest is defined by GDPR.
|
| "I can make money by collecting this data" is not a
| legitimate interest.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > Why is this not the case?
|
| It's an EU law what did you expect?
| veave wrote:
| >Nobody wins.
|
| You just described regulations.
| chopin wrote:
| Without regulations I'd need to grow my own food, though.
| martin8412 wrote:
| There's already DNT(Do not track) in the browsers, but
| nobody respects it.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| So would a law that makes illegal to respect it + actual
| enforcement of said law be the missing approach here?
| dgb23 wrote:
| So there's the problem. This should be sufficient?
| troupo wrote:
| Browsers removed the Do Not Track header because it
| was... used to track users.
|
| This should give you the answer to "why this isn't
| sufficient". The ads industry does not respect anything
| until it's driven out of existence by fines.
| abwizz wrote:
| exactly
|
| and top is complaining that his industry was instead
| given unholy ammounts of money to agrue that it isn't.
| specialist wrote:
| > _There 's no other side of this war, just regulators issuing
| commands that industry tries to follow._
|
| Data aggregators and advertisers don't have agency?
| mordae wrote:
| Not quite. Ad companies win the elections, so the pressure on
| the elected politicians is to have really good relationship
| with them.
|
| What that means for the clerks trying to regulate the ad
| business... Well...
| troupo wrote:
| > There's no other side of this war, just regulators issuing
| commands that industry tries to follow.
|
| We know how well the industry "tries to follow" from how
| industry follows GDPR and how Facebook keeps pretending that
| it's their god-given right to use tracking data in
| advertisment.
|
| > It's confusing as a war is because the regulators decided not
| to make the law say, 'behavioral advertising is illegal,' and
| instead have spent years slowly awakening to that conclusion,
| at the cost of zillions of dollars in legal fees.
|
| It's not confusing. Regulators do what they always do: they let
| companies do whatever companies do. And when the companies keep
| doing shitty things, regulators regulate.
| [deleted]
| mikro2nd wrote:
| You're right, but "war" is so much better clickbait.
| imglorp wrote:
| The megacorporations are at war against humanity and won't stop
| until forced: they must profit and grow at the expense of
| civilization, climate, and biosphere.
|
| It's true the EU does not recognize it's in a war yet but they
| are at least trying to slow them down. The US is further
| behind.
| mantas wrote:
| Is EU really trying to slow it down? TikTok ban in US seems
| to be a common talking point. Meanwhile here very few people
| talk about it and those are seen as lunatics in most cases.
|
| Most people seem to happily approve all the GDPR dialogs too.
| While doomscrolling TikTok/Instagram/FB.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| The only reason TikTok was banned in US is because its
| Chinese company. Have you completely missed all-out
| trade/informational/technology war US has declared on China
| in past few years? Huawei, ban on chips and so on and on.
|
| Facebook is doing exactly the same and wish to emulate
| TikTok as much as possible, sharing all data with US
| 3-letter agencies as required (most probably meaning
| everything all the time). They are just behind and lost the
| social momentum. Haven't heard anything about Meta products
| ban in US, probably because it will never ever happen.
| mantas wrote:
| And here in europe we can't even deal with the Chinese
| because muh German car market. Let alone local and
| murican corporations who have a lot of leverage.
| LelouBil wrote:
| When you have a truly compliant gdpr dialog, aka simple
| yes/no, I found lots of non tech people around me click no.
| I'd say about 50%
| filipheremans wrote:
| We serve a web application for logistics so our users are
| planners, administrative people, drivers, etc and we see
| the same behaviour. A lot of users ignore the dialog (so
| no analytics can be used, default to answering no) and
| learn to live with the cookie pop-up in the corner of the
| screen.. :-D
| troupo wrote:
| When Apple implemented "Ask app to not track", the click
| through on "Ask to not track" was 90%.
|
| People care about this, so no wonders the industry as a
| whole is up in arms about it.
| developer93 wrote:
| Personally I nearly always take the time to scroll
| through and untick all the permissions, or find a
| different site because screw them, that's why. I realise
| I'm in the minority.
| malermeister wrote:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-
| mat...
|
| This should make it a lot easier :) It auto-handles most
| gdpr permission walls, and yes, you can set it to reject
| all - that's what I do!
|
| (I'm sure this exists for Chrome, too, but if you care
| about this sort of thing you really should be using
| Firefox!)
| drakonka wrote:
| Thank you for this; I've been manually unticking
| everything since these regulations came into effect and
| have to admit it was getting a bit tiring (plus sometimes
| I was too hasty and accidentally clicked "Accept" when
| the cookie buttons were in a weird order or had non-
| standard wording.) I hope this helps me decline all the
| things more efficiently.
| folmar wrote:
| Just remove the dialogs with ublock filters; this is
| supposed to mean no consent. Most spy networks don't care
| and track before you click anyway.
| uoaei wrote:
| GDPR mandates that they are all already unchecked except
| for the so-called "essential" or "functional" ones.
| frereubu wrote:
| I wish I had more time and / or money because this is
| commonly ignored, and I would love to take all
| organisations who don't abide by this to court just for
| the hell of it. Many times it's under the guise of
| "legitimate interest" under a separate unselected tab and
| I would love to test that in court.
| mantas wrote:
| I rarely see yes/no. Websites doing no tracking (thus no
| dialog) seem more common. Usually it's ,,accept
| recommended trackers" or customize by unchecking trackers
| one by one.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Most people seem to happily approve all the GDPR dialogs
| too.
|
| What's a "GDPR dialog"? Do you mean a cookie banner?
| Nothing in GDPR requires a cookie banner.
| mantas wrote:
| The cookie banner 2.0. Where you either approve all the
| ,,recommended" tracking. Or have to go to advanced
| dialog, uncheck all trackers and then click non-primary
| submit button.
| martin8412 wrote:
| Which is illegal.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Except it's not. Which is why people aren't being
| punished for it and more sites adopt it daily.
| Xelbair wrote:
| >If informed consent is used as the lawful basis for
| processing, consent must have been explicit for data
| collected and each purpose data is used for (Article 7;
| defined in Article 4).[11][12] Consent must be a
| specific, freely given, plainly worded, and unambiguous
| affirmation given by the data subject; an online form
| which has consent options structured as an opt-out
| selected by default is a violation of the GDPR, as the
| consent is not unambiguously affirmed by the user. In
| addition, multiple types of processing may not be
| "bundled" together into a single affirmation prompt, as
| this is not specific to each use of data, and the
| individual permissions are not freely given. (Recital 32)
| dns_snek wrote:
| Opting out must be just as easy as opting in.
|
| Companies aren't being punished for it often enough
| (yet), that is true, but it's absolutely illegal.
| Sayrus wrote:
| There may not be many fines but Facebook, Google, TikTok
| and Microsoft were all fined due to making it hard to
| refuse cookies.
|
| Amazon was also fined for not properly asking consent. If
| I remember correctly, one of the company making those
| annoying cookies banners where you have a list of
| trackers to uncheck was also fined for this behavior.
|
| It is illegal to not offer a clear and unambiguous opt
| out.
| folmar wrote:
| Poland already has a case against the most malevolent
| one, IAB, in progress.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I thought only 10-15% of people approved all GDPR dialogs.
| ThomPete wrote:
| Replace megacorp with capitalist and humanity with workers
| and you got a perfect foundation for a communist revolution.
|
| Those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.
| kmlx wrote:
| wait till you find out about politicians. the corps have
| nothing on them.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Really? How about that politicians constantly spamming
| antisocial networks? What would they do without those tech
| corpos? Big tech literary give them a power. And manipulate
| with politicians as well. You'll not free once you caught
| into trap of likes and virtual audience dopamine.
| kmlx wrote:
| that's exactly my point. they took that power that those
| companies gave them and used it for their own goals.
| they're infinitely worse than any company just by the
| power they yield. the abuse part is the cherry on top.
| sib wrote:
| Unfortunately, it's really the EU regulators at war with
| companies' abilities to make better products.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Advertising is not a product
| glitchc wrote:
| According to what definition? It has clients, it needs to
| be marketed. Budgets are assigned to deliver it. A good ad
| campaign gets awards. A commercial is intellectual
| property.
|
| By all attributes, it is a product.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Of course it is. Start your own business and see how far
| you get without a quality advertising product.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| It's proof that advertised product is not good enough to be
| advertisement by itself.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| _gestures broadly at advertising everywhere_
|
| OK, I'll bite, then what is it?
| hightrix wrote:
| Visual and mental pollution.
| awsation wrote:
| They Live with the glasses on.
| justinclift wrote:
| Infectious attention cancer?
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| product information
| Const-me wrote:
| Infinite money glitch for big tech, with dramatic
| externalities pushed to non-consenting general
| population.
|
| These externalities include death of traditional media,
| extreme levels of political polarization, and climbing
| suicide rate of teenagers, girls in particular. These
| things are caused in very large part by the big tech
| companies maximizing consumption of ads, and efficiency
| of ads targeting.
| xNeil wrote:
| The only non-consenting advertising I can think of is
| public billboards - and I believe those should be banned,
| most definitely.
|
| Every single other type of advertising requires your
| explicit consent. YouTube? Google? Newspapers? All have
| your consent.
| troupo wrote:
| > Every single other type of advertising requires your
| explicit consent. YouTube? Google? Newspapers? All have
| your consent.
|
| How exactly do they have that "consent"?
| dgb23 wrote:
| This is actually a good point.
|
| I can't avoid billboards. But I can trivially avoid
| FB/Google/YT etc.
|
| I can also use things like uBlock.
|
| The internet is open and inherently client focused.
| That's a huge feature. We're ultimately in control.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| This is good in theory, but does not hold for day-to-day
| reality.
|
| News reports, announcements, updates, etc are often
| announced and hosted on social media and YouTube. The
| main news outlets hardly host their own video, and half
| the useful announcements got made on Twitter first
| (before Musk torched it lol), so unless "remain
| deliberately ignorant" is the alternative - which I don't
| think it is, then the reality is that you end up on one
| of these tech giants real quick.
| developer93 wrote:
| Or take some mildly grey area technical steps to get
| around it. I don't see too many ads these days between
| the pihole & newpipe & whatever adblockers I've got on
| Firefox. Traditional TV when we watch the news is
| basically it. That not open to everyone I know since you
| need some technical knowledge to set it up.
| bryan_w wrote:
| > death of traditional media
|
| Well if adverting is so bad, and old media relied on
| advertising, Tech was doing the world a favor by starving
| them out.
|
| We should be thanking Google for exposing the corruption
| that was the old media advertising empire
| krapp wrote:
| As bad as advertising in old media was, at least it
| wasn't a platform of targeted surveillance and
| psychological manipulation. An advertisement was just an
| advertisement, you could pay attention to it or not, and
| your attention if it was noted at all was only noted in
| aggregate. Your radio or tv didn't know who you are, know
| where you live, develop complex behavioral profiles on
| you, record all of your browsing, shopping and
| communication data, listen in on your with microphones or
| watch you with cameras.
|
| Google didn't expose the corruption of old media, rather
| it supplanted it with even deeper and more insidious
| corruption.
| sellmesoap wrote:
| I wouldn't underestimate the psychological manipulation
| of old media, but you're right there's a whole industry
| around gathering and leveraging metrics, it still feels
| primitive but my imagination always wanders into how you
| can tie data points together. Maybe I'm on the wrong side
| of the fence.
| hedora wrote:
| The article is about behavioral advertising, which was
| not feasible with old media technologies.
|
| The problem isn't the ads. The problem is the ad
| targeting.
| ehnto wrote:
| It is a product, just not for consumers. Other companies
| buy the product and it is applied onto the consumer, to
| the consumers distaste.
|
| Advertising is itself always balancing on the tradeoff
| between disgruntling the consumer and the benefit the
| consumer gets from the media/tool they're actually trying
| to engage with. It's an implicit bargain for most people,
| not an explicit one.
|
| For me, advertising crossed that line a long time ago. If
| I had to watch the amount of ads YouTube actually puts in
| front of you, I wouldn't use it. Thank goodness for ad
| blockers.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Fair. It's a business product that's anti-consumer
| goodpoint wrote:
| If anything it's an antiproduct.
| paulmd wrote:
| inverse product
| prox wrote:
| "It's lying for money." - my marketing teacher
| kibwen wrote:
| Try "socially acceptable brainwashing".
| [deleted]
| baq wrote:
| It's as if they actually don't want to introduce unnecessary
| regulation!
|
| Or they weren't paid enough in legal and illegal bribes before,
| if you prefer the cynical take.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| And/or they realize that trying to introduce too large
| changes in one go will throw the markets into damage control
| mode, and the results will not be favorable to the
| legislators and their constituents. Better boil the frog
| gradually than have it jump out and take its money elsewhere.
| dcsommer wrote:
| I don't really understand singling out the specific combination
| of (advertising, behavioral targeting). The problems with
| behaviorally tailored content delivery products exist even if
| advertisers cannot _directly_ monetize it. I think the focus on
| advertising is a real red-herring.
| suyash wrote:
| Better title suggestion : EU's effort to defend user privacy from
| social media network manipulators
| thih9 wrote:
| > Prior to ATT, every app by default had access to your
| advertising ID, i.e. it was opt-in by default.
|
| Nitpicking, it was not opt in, as the user did not opt in. It
| would be more accurate to say: "consent was implicit", or even
| "the app could access the user's advertising ID without the
| user's consent".
|
| I feel that it's important to distinguish "opt in" as something
| that requires explicit user action.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| I think that's not just a nitpick - it's a misuse of the word.
| "Opt-in by default" should just say "opt-out". You can see the
| same misunderstanding, I think, in the strapline of the
| article.
| [deleted]
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Just wanted to say I thought this was an excellent description of
| the Internet ad market and the recent changes that have occurred.
| I don't work in the ad space (though I've worked on consumer
| sites so I have a fairly decent understanding), so I thought this
| article did a great job thoroughly and clearly explaining the
| details.
| legitster wrote:
| Uh... hmmm. I work in the industry and this article is very even
| handed but still a bit off.
|
| We don't really have have a term for "behavioral" advertising. So
| a lot of things are being lumped together that don't necessarily
| fit.
|
| For example, Facebook USED to be highly valued because of the
| amount of "targeting" (again, we don't use the term "behavioral")
| data they had. When you went to tell FB what you liked and didn't
| like they used that. They also kept that valuable data under lock
| and key - they have no interest in sharing it.
|
| Things are a bit different now. Since they and everyone else
| switched to an endless "doomscrolling" experience, all that data
| is worthless. No one keeps their likes up to date, no one engages
| with content. So there's really not that much targeting
| ("behavioral") data out of FB anymore. So native ads are less
| effective, but people look at _much more_.
|
| "Data brokerages" are pretty niche. They don't exist to the
| extent that people think they do. And the data they provide is
| often absolute garbage. Users switch phones, emails, numbers way
| too often to actually get anything resembling a permanent "lock".
| Marketing data ages FAST. Do you go to a store and find they have
| an address that is like 4 moves old? That's kind of the quality
| of brokerage data - it's good for filling in gaps, but is not
| nearly as valuable as first-party data.
|
| So part of what you are seeing is not necessarily advertisers
| responding to upcoming EU regulations, but organic changes in
| what sort of advertising is even effective anymore. Third party
| cookies are not as useful as they used to be, and they cut into
| the big advertisers' monopolies on user data. So they are being
| phased out anyway.
|
| > Attribution / measurement of advertising campaigns became more
| and more precise
|
| This is the exact _opposite_ of what is happening in the
| industry. There are so many different data sources that all
| conflict that data quality is often very dire in most large
| organizations. So there is a ton of fraud and snake oil used to
| justify advertising budgets.
|
| However, where the author hits the nail on the head I think are
| future outcomes: EU markets _are_ being deprioritized (it doesn
| 't hurt that economically, consumer wealth in Europe is falling
| like a rock). Users _are_ opting in to more advertisements
| (Instagram is quickly becoming the QVC of the internet). One
| thing he misses is the rising importance of sponsorships and
| physical marketing..
| yabatopia wrote:
| > it doesn't hurt that economically, consumer wealth in Europe
| is falling like a rock
|
| Falling like a rock? Where is this comming from? What Europe
| are you talking about? The EU, the continent, the eurozone, the
| UK, Russia?
|
| Granted, high inflation, primarily caused by higher energy
| prices after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has slowed down
| consumer spending in the EU, but generally speaking the outlook
| isn't that bad.
|
| - Total financial assets of EU households grew almost
| continuously during the period 2011-2021, falling only in 2018.
| Their total value increased from EUR21 331 billion in 2011 to
| EUR34 982 billion in 2021, a 64.0 % overall increase. (Source:
| https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
| explained/index.php...)
|
| - Consumer Spending in European Union is expected to be 1804.00
| EUR Billion by the end of this quarter, according to Trading
| Economics global macro models and analysts expectations. In the
| long-term, the European Union Consumer Spending is projected to
| trend around 1836.00 EUR Billion in 2024 and 1869.00 EUR
| Billion in 2025, according to our econometric models. (Source:
| https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/consumer-
| spendin...)
|
| - In June, Eurosystem staff revised down slightly the outlook
| for growth in the euro area for the next two years. The economy
| is expected to slow to 0.9% in 2023 before rebounding to 1.5%
| in 2024 and 1.6% in 2025 as energy prices moderate, foreign
| demand strengthens and real incomes improve. (Source: https://w
| ww.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2023/html/ecb.sp230...)
| abwizz wrote:
| i think parent was refering to growing wealth inequality. the
| average might be fine.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Damn I knew the EU wasn't in a great place from the last few
| years but I didn't realize it's post covid recovery was so
| horrible compared to the USA. Hopefully they can turn it
| around!
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| We won't. We don't have much resources anymore to extract
| from the soil, unlike the US. Most Europe is not like
| Norway and Findland with their oil.
|
| We barely invest in the important revolutions, like machine
| learning.
|
| We constantly make our talents flee. Did you know hugging
| face founders were French? But they went to the US to be
| able to raise money.
|
| Will will hold, because weather and land are very
| favorable, and education is not yet completely destroyed.
| But that's it.
|
| Ironically, if you have money, it makes it a very nice
| place to live in because everything is protected at some
| level.
| JohnFen wrote:
| If what you say here is accurate, that's all very good news.
| But how does that square with the fact that the online ad
| industry continues to be at war with people who don't want to
| be tracked?
| jaclaz wrote:
| The two things do not seem to me as contrasting, there is an
| industry gathering the data and selling them (with promises
| and snake-oil) and other people buying those data.
|
| Whether what is sold is accurate or not is another thing, as
| long as it is perceived as "good enough" by the buyers it
| will be bought anyway.
|
| I don't think that many companies (buyers) have the guts to
| stop for - say - 6 months all advertising on a given channel
| and see what happens.
| legitster wrote:
| Again, take the data buying and selling and set it aside.
| That's kind of like a whole separate thing.
|
| Even without data brokers, there is tons of fraud and
| snake-oil. When you are comparing advertising success,
| website traffic, email delivery, product usage, etc -
| actually getting consistent user data between them is a
| nightmare. Everyone has incentive to pump up their own
| numbers. And oftentimes the reporting you are engaging in
| is so complicated that a lot of companies rely on
| consultants to do all of the work.
|
| > I don't think that many companies (buyers) have the guts
| to stop for - say - 6 months all advertising on a given
| channel and see what happens.
|
| Our company had a _broken_ ad run on LinkedIn for 6 months.
| It cost us over $100k. The manager 's response was "Can we
| turn them on again until we fix them? I need to spend the
| budget or I will lose it."
| jaclaz wrote:
| Yes, we are saying exactly the same things, though in a
| slightly different way.
|
| The results of this (or that) advertising are either non-
| measurable or poorly measured, and the way advertising
| budgets are calculated (and spent) is - to say the least
| - perverse.
| legitster wrote:
| > If what you say here is accurate, that's all very good
| news.
|
| Ummm. Except for the part where basically a few players will
| have a monopoly on online advertising. It's really a slow
| return to how TV advertising and etc worked.
|
| > continues to be at war with people who don't want to be
| tracked
|
| How so? There are infinitely more privacy rules and
| safeguards than there were a decade ago. Let alone the amount
| of tools like AdBlocker or Ghostery or Brave or etc.
|
| Keep in mind that the _awareness_ of your online presence is
| probably growing faster than your actual online presence.
|
| In fact, just like standard of living, it's easy to lose
| perspective of just how fast our entire idea of privacy has
| changed. 100 years ago, hotel beds used to be shared amongst
| strangers. _Within our lifetimes_ , books with every person
| in town's name, number, and address _used to be delivered to
| everyone 's home_.
| watwut wrote:
| I find both hotel and phone book examples pretty weak.
| Neither proves we got a lot of privacy. Temporary sleeping
| with a stranger while traveling is loss of fonfort, but nit
| meaningful loss of privacy.
|
| With phonebook, you could ask to be omitted and more famous
| people routinelly did that. Also, information about you was
| very limited. Stalker or violent ex could use it, but it
| would be impossible to si thousands of strangers into
| harrasing you. It was nit the same as posting address on 4
| Chan.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| The examples were about awareness of the concept of
| privacy, not privacy per se.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Except for the part where basically a few players will
| have a monopoly on online advertising.
|
| Not being in the ad industry, this seems a lateral change
| to me. I can see how it would be problematic to others in
| the industry, though.
|
| > How so? There are infinitely more privacy rules and
| safeguards than there were a decade ago.
|
| The online ad industry has poured enormous amounts of time,
| money, effort, and even lobbying to bypass efforts from end
| users to prevent being tracked. And that effort continues.
|
| There are more privacy rules and tools than before, but
| that's just because of the back-and-forth nature of the
| battle. Sometimes privacy edges ahead, then the ad
| companies push the gains back or route around them, then
| privacy edges ahead, etc.
|
| > Within our lifetimes, books with every person in town's
| name, number, and address used to be delivered to
| everyone's home.
|
| I'm old enough to remember phone books. And I remember that
| people who didn't want to be listed, or only wanted limited
| information in them, had that option. Those books never had
| every person's information. They were, in modern parlance,
| opt-out (although you did have to pay a fee to be omitted,
| which was considered outrageous in the day, but there
| wasn't a way around that.)
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Within our lifetimes, books with every person in town's
| name, number, and address used to be delivered to
| everyone's home.
|
| This example is only half-hearted at best I feel. Anyone
| touting this as an example also leaves out it was very
| possible to be omitted from this book or have a name other
| than your legal name listed. It is absolutely not possible
| with online tracking. Anyone throwing out this as an
| example of how "not bad" their industry is can take a long
| walk off a short pier.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > It's really a slow return to how TV advertising and etc
| worked.
|
| TV advertising is the opposite of targeted. Literally every
| person picking up a broadcast signal sees the same ads.
|
| My neighbors having my name and address in the phone book
| doesn't bother me the way Google tracking every damn thing
| I see on the internet does. People don't notice it, but the
| latter is far more invasive.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| it was but tv is now a specific audience: people who
| don't care what they watch. Sounds terrific for
| advertising?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| This isn't true, at least, it's not true of me.
|
| Most of my viewing is Freesat, i.e. free-to-air satellite
| broadcasts, which I receive via a Sky box with 2Tb of
| storage. I scan the schedules daily, and mark what
| interests me for recording. Periodically I go through my
| recordings, and delete stuff I'm never likely to watch.
|
| I used to have a Netflix subscription; I cancelled it
| when I realized that there's nothing worth watching (for
| me) on Netflix. Very occasionally I head to YT, but
| content discoverability on YT is poor.
|
| I do care what I watch; sometimes I find that I've run
| out of pre-recorded shows that I'm interested in; then I
| stop watching. And I never have TV on "in the
| background".
| bostik wrote:
| > _Literally every person picking up a broadcast signal
| sees the same ads._
|
| This is technically true, but only because it implies the
| word "same" before broadcast too.
|
| Regional ads injected into the ad slots were definitely a
| thing with TV already back in ~2005. So households
| getting their signal from the same transmitter got the
| same ads, but just a few kilometres away you could see
| entirely different ads during the advertising break.
| BartjeD wrote:
| Could you give me a source for: `(it doesn't hurt that
| economically, consumer wealth in Europe is falling like a
| rock).`
|
| Where in Europe is consumer wealth falling, by how much, and
| why is this a trend?
|
| I could say the same about the US or Brazil or any other place,
| barring a source.
| mantas wrote:
| Median consumer is getting fucked by central bank loan rates,
| sky-high housing prices wherever jobs are and overall
| inflation. Talking from EU perspective, but probably applies
| to most of the world pretty well.
| johndhi wrote:
| Great post. Adding that the article misreads the legal events
| too. The Norwegian decision for FB isn't a watershed moment.
| The Irish enforcement against them is not.
| cm2012 wrote:
| As someone who works in advertising, this comment is wrong in
| many many ways.
| veave wrote:
| [flagged]
| jacquesm wrote:
| I agree, but it would be better to spell out the many many
| ways than to leave it dangling.
| legitster wrote:
| I don't work in advertising - I just use it as a customer.
|
| To the extent that it is wrong it is because we, as an
| average customer, have a pretty bad customer experience using
| the products. Educate me.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > I work in the industry
|
| > I don't work in advertising
|
| ??
| ilkke wrote:
| Not the same person
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, it _is_ the same person.
|
| Both are quotes from 'legitster':
|
| > I don't work in advertising
|
| from
|
| > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37266627
|
| and
|
| > I work in the industry
|
| from
|
| > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264230
|
| >
| ppsreejith wrote:
| Seeing many folks ITT questing the value of advertising
| (behavioural/contextual) so some points:
|
| 1. Advertising ideally works as match making by connecting buyers
| to sellers where the seller is unaware of the buyer. (i.e. the
| unknown unknown problem). Companies usually collect
| advertisements and place them on limited ad slots.
|
| 2. In earlier, physical, forms of advertising such as newspapers,
| TV, Retail Stores etc, the same ad used to be shown to everyone
| so ad slots were fewer, much more expensive, and typically only
| big businesses could afford them.
|
| 3. In Digital ads where ads can be personalised to users, there
| are now a lot more ad slots and small businesses could
| effectively reach out to niche buyers who otherwise wouldn't be
| aware of them. The ads are thus cheaper as their budget is better
| focused on the right users.
|
| 4. Digital ads are broadly of 2 types: Intent ads, where the user
| submits their intent (Eg: Google search, Amazon, Maps etc) or
| Discovery ads, where the user is typically not present for any
| single intent (Eg: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc)
|
| 5. Discovery based ads in particular can help open up completely
| new behaviours (in an ideal world) where the seller wasn't aware
| of the buyer's product but found it very useful (i.e. The unknown
| unknown problem)
|
| 6. Both Intent and discovery ads can be harmful to the user.
| Intent ads basically charge a tax to prioritise their results
| (i.e. rent seeking: pay more to jump the queue). Discover ads
| degrade the user experience (i.e They could've shown you
| something more interesting but decided to show you something less
| interesting to you and received money for it from a 3rd party).
|
| Some opinions below:
|
| 1. Making digital ads more like physical ads (Eg: By removing
| personalisation) will probably benefit big businesses by
| increasing ad prices and making it harder to match sellers to
| buyers. It's often small businesses who have a niche which
| increase competition in a market (The Innovators Dilemma)
|
| 2. In the EU's case, the ads can be personalised, just not based
| on behaviour but on context. So this will probably still
| increases prices but still not change digital ads fundamentally
| (i.e. they can still be personalised somewhat to the user) at
| least for now.
| spookie wrote:
| > In earlier, physical, forms of advertising such as
| newspapers, TV, Retail Stores etc, the same ad used to be shown
| to everyone so ad slots were fewer, much more expensive, and
| typically only big businesses could afford them.
|
| Well, my local newspaper shows ads for family businesses, and
| they don't pay that much for it. I've found my local newspaper
| quite interesting as well, diverse in political articles, with
| good cultural recommendations, and generally of higher
| (content) quality than the ones sold nation wide.
|
| I think your point applies to those with most eyes on them,
| but... The same is true in the digital age. We often give too
| much credit to the content we partake in. I don't think much
| has changed on that regard, I just think it's much more
| obtrusive now.
| ponderings wrote:
| It's about margins. We have a box of paperclips that costs 10
| euro. 100 people sell it for prices ranging from 11 to 100
| euro. 11 is probably to low to build a reliable business, 13 is
| within reason, 15 would allow for some advertisement budget.
| Everything below is out. Then we have a market with
| advertisement budgets ranging from 1 to 85 euro per box. These
| expensive boxes make a hell of a lot of noise! The customer is
| left choosing between the 80+ and the 60-70 euro screamers.
|
| And then, then they go to AliExpress and buy it for 8 euro from
| someone who wants out and you've made us all look stupid.
|
| And now a moment of silence for the thousands who failed to
| want paperclips regardless of systemic encouragement.
| [deleted]
| di4na wrote:
| Note that you have an unshown assumption here.
|
| That none of the participants lie and that you can infer niche
| effectively from the data. And that the ad can deliver the
| behaviour change
|
| The ads are only cheaper if they actually find the niche people
| and change the behaviour. Otherwise you spent money for
| nothing.
|
| The problem is that we have pretty good hunch from a bundle of
| clues that the data and org that validate these assumptions are
| lying.
|
| We also have pretty good bundle of clues from the consumers
| that the ads are not hitting their niche pretty well.
|
| So... We have an industry that breach privacy and lie, for a
| purported benefit based on seemingly false assumptions.
|
| Maybe the results are not achieved.
| ppsreejith wrote:
| 1. Modern digital ads can be very well measured. At least the
| ones focused on direct conversion and not branding.
| Advertisers can measure the impact of their spending
| independently and the results can be seen fairly quickly.
| (Again, not brand advertising).
|
| 2. Advertisement match-making isn't perfect (which is why I
| wrote "in an ideal world"). There is some time and signal
| buffer till we get enough signal to show the right ad to the
| user (if ever). The intentions of the ad platform also have
| to be taken into consideration (Often not the case for Big
| Tech but even here).
|
| 3. Advertisements do have negative consequences. We can also
| target drugs, cults, gambling etc more effectively as well.
| Often the law has to play catch-up with the more
| controversial categories. Advertisers can also dupe/defraud
| buyers with false/misleading advertisements.
| Krasnol wrote:
| You've missed the main negative part: the attack on our
| attention and mindfulness.
|
| I really hope that the results of neurologic research won't
| take much longer to put an end to this disgusting behavior,
| which attacks central parts of the consciousness of every
| victim.
|
| (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Metzinger)
| summerlight wrote:
| Contextual targeting hasn't been a thing because it's not very
| easy to accurately extract structured targeting signals from
| unstructured documents. At best for now, we may extract a set of
| word embedding per page which likely misses precise contexts as
| well as subtle nuances. Now we have LLM which has objectively
| better capabilities to do that job and everyone is now forced to
| invest more into contextual targeting, I guess there will be
| significant developments on targeting systems. The question would
| be how to make super cheap models which can handle both pre-
| processed offline web page context as well as online usage
| contexts.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Meta recently conceded that in-app behavioral advertising in the
| EU can no longer be opt-in by default, marking the end of an era.
| The regulators won, at least for now."
|
| "Opt-in by default". In other words, "opt-out". Is this some
| wordplay designed to "comply" with regulations against opt-out.
|
| Yes, it's opt-in, with the opt-in box already checked to save
| people the trouble.
|
| Sounds like a so-called "dark pattern".
| [deleted]
| PeterStuer wrote:
| "Legitimate interest" is the universal GDPR loophole. This one
| needs to be closed asap.
| Too wrote:
| Along with the dark patterns of "confirm my choices", where my
| "choices" are an endless list of checkboxes hidden under
| expandable sections of complete gibberish.
| troupo wrote:
| Those dark patterns are not GDPR-compliant. GDPR says, "it
| should be as easy to say yes as it is to say know" and on top
| of that those huge lists do not present informed consent.
|
| NOYB has a bit on that: https://noyb.eu/en/where-did-all-
| reject-buttons-come
| LelouBil wrote:
| This is easily fined for non compliance, however the process
| is currently very slow but it depends on the country you
| signal it.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Usually one button in the end is some vaguely stated "accept
| all spying" too that sounds like you don't accept. E.g.
| "Accept all choices" or whatever.
| midasuni wrote:
| The main one is it's not enforced.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I still don't understand what legitimate interest even means.
| BlackFly wrote:
| I think the preamble to the legislation sort of goes over it.
| I remember a section talking about marketing and it seemed to
| imply that businesses have a legitimate interest to market
| their own products to their own customers. For example, a
| Dutch company might look at address data and see that they
| get a lot of orders online to ship to Germany and they can
| use that to open a store there. Obviously the business is
| interested in selling to its consumers effectively and
| obviously those consumers are interested in those products.
| When they start selling that information to other people, it
| isn't really legitimate anymore.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Hmmm.
|
| https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-
| re...
|
| Until I read that, I held the belief that GDPR was really
| pretty clear and easy to implement. But reading that, it
| seems to me that the ICO doesn't really have a clue how
| you're supposed to distinguish a legitimate interest from an
| illegitimate one.
|
| Perhaps the "legitimate interest" base needs to be deleted.
| It looks like a deliberate loophole.
| cccbbbaaa wrote:
| It's a loophole because enforcement is a joke, but I would
| agree to say the basis is too vague to be useful.
| duringmath wrote:
| The EU's war is on US companies. They wouldn't be playing fast
| and loose with these regulations if their home born companies
| were the ones getting disadvantaged.
|
| They push draconian surveillance laws then claim sainthood when
| they go after Facebook.
|
| I guess you can hate Facebook et al and welcome this stuff but
| it's hard to deny how these laws are basically trade barriers
| aimed at the US tech industry.
| pksebben wrote:
| Funny, then, how as a US citizen I'm all about this.
|
| I don't want to undermine Facebook's business model because I
| hate them. I hate them because they run on a business model I
| want undermined.
|
| There are real, present dangers to having your data hucked
| around like it's going out of style.
|
| <Tinfoil hat section>
|
| Let's also think for a second about the unprecedented level of
| propaganda and general bullshittery this stuff enables.
|
| The whole reason we're so desperately divided right now is
| because the marketing managers in politics have been able to
| see with fine-grit granularity what makes people tick, so they
| know precisely which buttons to push to start the next
| distraction/flamewar every time people start talking about
| dangerous topics like election reform, lobbying, and antitrust
| - all stuff that people on both sides of the aisle have no
| trouble getting behind. Quick, get em talking about guns and
| gays!
|
| </Tinfoil>
| cccbbbaaa wrote:
| The EU is not an uniform entity. Yes, you have citizens who sue
| Facebook, but then you have some members of the commission that
| wants to ban E2E encryption; but then, you have other members
| that absolutely don't want that, and the EDPS reminding
| everyone that it's actually illegal.
| rank0 wrote:
| I violently agree with you and am stunned at the amount of pro
| EU/anti US rhetoric on this forum.
|
| You make an excellent point about the EU surveillance laws.
| They clearly don't give a shit about privacy. None of the folks
| disagreeing ITT seem to be willing to discuss that point.
|
| The EU spends more resources regulating US corporations than
| they do building their own. If they want to reverse course on
| their economic trajectory they're gonna have to start competing
| in a genuine way.
| devjab wrote:
| > You make an excellent point about the EU surveillance laws.
| They clearly don't give a shit about privacy. None of the
| folks disagreeing ITT seem to be willing to discuss that
| point.
|
| You can be for privacy and against survailance. Often the
| politicians who work to implement data protection laws and
| politicians who work to increase survailance come from
| opposite sites of the political middle. So it's not really a
| very good point unless you can only deal in black and white.
|
| The EU can clearly be good on some areas and terrible on
| others. As it is with most things. Another example could be
| how the green party members of the EU are working toward
| clean energy while the conservative branch is working to
| increase the markets for fossil energy simultaneously. They
| do so by positioning them in the legalislative branches where
| they get the most influence acording to their political
| agenda, and while that may be "weird" to people from a
| "winner-takes-all" sort of system, it's how the vast majority
| of the EU democracies work.
| rank0 wrote:
| > You can be for privacy and against survailance.
|
| Is this a typo? Of course you can they're literally
| opposites.
|
| You're performing mental gymnastics if you think that the
| EU is somehow "pro privacy" just because they created
| cookie banners via GDPR. State sponsored surveillance is
| FAR worse than corporate sponsored surveillance.
| midasuni wrote:
| The EU didn't create those banners. HN doesn't have such
| banners.
|
| The companies tried to track you created those banners.
| devjab wrote:
| How do you come to that conclusion? These laws apply to all EU
| based companies while non-EU companies have the clear option to
| opt out of them, which many do. If you want to do business
| within the EU, then you need to respect citizen privacy. Though
| I do agree that they should eat their own medicine, but here in
| the EU, we do tend to view private corporations as less worthy
| of our data than our own governments.
|
| That being said. The branches that are working to secure
| citizen privacy and the branches that are working to ruin
| online encryption and monitor everything we do are often very
| sepperate parts of the government. So it's not exactly the same
| people.
| gtsop wrote:
| 1. The magnitute of effect these laws have on EU companies is
| miniscule compared to the effect on the US tech giants
|
| 2. The EU has no honest respect over the people's privacy as
| they fully surveil their citizens
|
| Thus it ia very safe to conclude that the EU pretends to care
| about people's privacy as an excuse to protect it's industry
| against the ultra-high yields of US tech companies
| JCWasmx86 wrote:
| No, you just have to follow the regulations. It's no "war on US
| companies" or anything like that. They wrote some good law
| (Albeit it has a few weaknesses), and enforce it now. And if
| you want to do business in the EU, you have to follow them.
|
| I would say it's more a problem of the US companies, if they
| can't do business without violating EU regulations.
| nceqs3 wrote:
| Have you read how vague the laws are. It's all designed to
| extract fines from US companies.
| troupo wrote:
| No. Its all designed against the predators that modern
| companies have become.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| The TL:DR of GDPR is "just don't drack your users without
| their consent". Why is that difficult for US corporations
| to follow? Even '90s web was by default GDPR complaint.
| nceqs3 wrote:
| Yes, the huge and profitable 90s web.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Plenty of people were making money off the internet in
| the 90s.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _" Won't someone please think of the big-tech ad
| profits?"_ - You
|
| Why should the web's profitability or lack thereof, be my
| problem as a user? That the SV elite can't buy platinum
| plating on their yachts? Are they sharing that wealth
| with me? Then, good riddance! My privacy is more
| important than your wealth.
|
| There's been profitable SW companies and careers before
| user tracking became the norm. Remember when Windows came
| without any ads and blogs and forums had generic non-
| targeted ads?
|
| Same how the big tobacco industry got kneecapped for our
| own health and the greater good, a similar tech industry
| correction is long overdue. Is this the world you want
| for your kids?
| johndhi wrote:
| I've implemented gdpr. It's much more than that.
| bee_rider wrote:
| How so?
| midasuni wrote:
| Don't set cookies. Don't capture Personal data. You're
| 90% there.
| cccbbbaaa wrote:
| Oh, no, there's more.
|
| You must list all kinds of data processing you perform,
| find the appropriate legal basis (and data retention
| duration, etc.), make sure you only gather data you need
| (data minimization), know to who you transfer data, make
| your services secure by default, monitor for unauthorized
| access, and tell affected people when there is a breach.
| Perhaps make a risk assessment, but it depends on the
| processing you do.
|
| Yes, it's work. But quite frankly, I'm cool with a law
| that expects anyone who processes personal data to secure
| their service, to properly inform people, and holds them
| accountable.
| midasuni wrote:
| So you are choosing to capture personal data.
| cccbbbaaa wrote:
| Personal data has a very wide definition under GDPR:
|
| >'personal data' means any information relating to an
| identified or identifiable natural person ('data
| subject'); an identifiable natural person is one who can
| be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by
| reference to an identifier such as a name, an
| identification number, location data, an online
| identifier or to one or more factors specific to the
| physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic,
| cultural or social identity of that natural person;
|
| An IP address, or an email address is personal data. Even
| a pseudonym or a session ID is personal data. Yes, having
| a log for security purposes (GDPR recital 49) captures
| personal data (even just access dates and requested URLs
| may be considered to be personal data). Yes, a comment
| section on a blog may capture personal data.
|
| Once again, I'm fine with all of this. But ignoring GDPR
| by not capturing personal data is more complex that it
| might seem.
| jahav wrote:
| Spoken like a person who never even touched it even on a
| small project.
|
| No cookies... so no language preferences. That is a
| profile cookie.
|
| Right to erasure. What about invoices and orders? When
| can it be anonymous and when is it old enough to
| anonymize.
|
| Do I get away with replacing personal data random data?
| Do I replace references to real people with 'anonymous
| person'? Will my sql constraints still work?
|
| When I restore data from backup and someone has been
| anonymized in the meantime, what mechanism will be used
| to anonymize the user after restore?
|
| Right to data portability. How much of the database and
| in what format?
| cccbbbaaa wrote:
| > Spoken like a person who never even touched it even on
| a small project.
|
| You can find guidance or good advice online for all of
| your questions.
|
| > No cookies... so no language preferences. That is a
| profile cookie.
|
| This is one of the examples of "strictly necessary"
| cookies, which do not require consent. See section 3.6
| here: https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentati
| on/opinio...
|
| > Right to erasure. What about invoices and orders? When
| can it be anonymous and when is it old enough to
| anonymize.
|
| Invoices should typically fall under the "legal
| obligation" legal basis (article 6(1)c). See for how long
| the law requires you to keep them. In my country, it's 10
| years.
|
| >Do I get away with replacing personal data random data?
|
| Yes, see WP216.
|
| >Do I replace references to real people with 'anonymous
| person'? Will my sql constraints still work?
|
| How do you do when someone deletes their account?
|
| >When I restore data from backup and someone has been
| anonymized in the meantime, what mechanism will be used
| to anonymize the user after restore?
|
| It's up to you to decide.
|
| >Right to data portability. How much of the database and
| in what format?
|
| The same as for a DSAR. As for the format, it's up to you
| to decide, provided it is a commonly used format.
| esperent wrote:
| I've also implemented GDPR. Of course it's complex, it's
| a continent wide law, how could it not be complicated?
|
| But I still think that "don't track your users without
| their informed consent" is a good summary of the
| _intention_ of the law.
|
| And I would also say that's it's only really complex to
| implement if you were already tracking your users and now
| you need to change everything. If you weren't doing that,
| you'd probably find it remarkably easy to implement.
| mrweasel wrote:
| If we're being a bit generous it's easier for the EU to make
| these rules, because it has very little impact on it's own
| companies. The majority of the large companies being impacted
| by these laws are US based.
|
| Similarly you could argue that the companies are US based,
| simply because the US have pretty terrible privacy rules
| which makes it easy for them to get started with a fair
| amount of users/targets.
| stevage wrote:
| The whole idea of user consent for tracking seems a bit like
| "clean coal". Isn't it just nonsense? Why would any user ever
| consent to this?
|
| Users only "consent" when they are tricked into it or have a gun
| to their head.
| nologic01 wrote:
| So many words to defend the indefensible. Its not a "war", it is
| asserting the collective will of an entire continent (made up of
| fairly diverse cultures and a long history of painful social
| strife, political and racial oppression and persecution). The aim
| is to close Pandora's box that was (as it happened) opened by the
| amoral and asocial advertising industry that cannot see beyond
| its (admittedly long) nose.
|
| The issue is not advertising, the issue is the construction,
| classification and use of human profiles through the collection
| of behavioral data, by-and-large without the subjects being aware
| or cognizant of the possible short and long-term implications.
| Once that practice has been legitimized and proven ultra-
| lucrative and empowering for its practitioners it has undermined
| the very foundation of digital society.
|
| Just to be clear, there is nothing the adtech industry can do to
| assure us that behavioral targeting can be made safe. The large
| scale processing of human behavioral data followed by the direct
| algorithmic application of real life actions is a weapon of mass
| social destruction. It is inherently dangerous and should be
| outlawed. Full stop.
|
| There is a case to be made for taming the nuclear energy of
| behavioral data in reactors (as opposed to bombs). But the
| architecture of such systems will be dramatically different to
| the digital wild-west regime that has been inflicted on society.
| Consequently also highly regulated with countless lead layers of
| protection (and thus also far less lucrative / interesting for
| the digital cowboys).
| dcow wrote:
| Let's play devils advocate for a moment:
|
| Why should I be able to _control_ what someone else knows about
| me? Seriously? If you sit in a park bench and watch me running
| around on a hot day I can't compel you to "forget I was there".
| And if you use that knowledge as data to support opening a
| lemonade stand, and even to reach out to me directly and offer
| a discount on cold drinks, who is being socially harmed? Where
| is the "social atomic bomb" here?
|
| And, if I consent to this because you can offer me better
| prices if I allow you to cookie me, and I don't see a problem,
| it seems everything is humming along ethically and harmlessly.
|
| So I'm not sure I buy the conclusion that "behavioral
| advertising is ethically bankrupt". Notice in your comment you
| have to evoke the idea of "mass behavioral knowledge". What
| does this mean and how is it bad or different from "minor or
| regular behavior knowledge"?
|
| Please understand I'm not writing this comment to defend the
| advertising industry. I'm writing it because I also believe
| this stuff _is_ potentially grievously detrimental, but I don't
| think we have a good foundational construction today for _why_.
| And we can't say _what_ is wrong. If we could, we could more
| easily point a finger at it, declare it unethical, and make
| laws against it.
|
| But, no, I don't think we've yet landed on the answer. It's not
| some innate "right to be forgotten" and it's not GDPR telling
| everyone abstractly that "you can't use PII in your
| application". (The GDPR bit is kinda moot because you argue
| that it's unilaterally not okay regardless of consent and the
| GDPR argues it's okay with consent, so the GDPR is not a
| solution to your argument.) There's something else here to
| build a case against.
|
| If real harm is impacting individuals or society then shine a
| light on it! Otherwise it's just ra ra we hate behavioral
| advertising because it's spooky. Which while fun to rally
| around, doesn't really carry social and legal weight. Pointing
| this out does not bring me snarky joy, rather it frustrates me
| because I think we'll be stuck banging our tech heads trying to
| make every internet standard and protocol 100% anonymous
| fighting the digital boogie man until we try a new approach. In
| order to make social and legal progress, because I do suspect
| the solution is social and legal, we need a really clear
| understanding of the problem.
|
| In the face of a globally connected world, what new fundamental
| right do humans have, that behavioral advertising robs them of,
| that we must take extreme measures to protect as a society?
| zenapollo wrote:
| Great question. Let me first answer the meta question that i
| see all the time, from someone who studies systems science.
| There's a supposed "crisis" with the scaling of X that
| involves millions or billions of people, and our largest
| societal institutions. Here's a simple folksy example of x
| that's not really much of a problem, how is that different
| from X? The answer is always the same, because scale matters,
| always.
|
| In this case, here's why scale matters. We know these ads
| work. On an individual basis let's say you have a 0.31%
| chance of buying a thing you wouldn't have otherwise. On this
| individual scale it seems like no big deal, certainly no
| amoral or unethical undue influence. On a massive scale
| however a 0.31% increase makes the advertiser a lot. AND
| there's a network effect because desire is contagious, so the
| more people that buy, the more others will want - double
| winner. Now let's say there's a organization that wants to
| push some new technology into people's lives, let's say voice
| assistant smart speakers. At scale this doesn't just sell
| smart speakers, now 5% of homes have one, and this now has
| the power to fundamentally change a small slice of culture
| more broadly as it becomes more common, ubiquitous, and
| relied upon. And the drift in a small slice of culture drifts
| the ultimate the trajectory of our civilization - simply by
| using small but statistically proven edge to influence
| people. Not to mention in this case, it further entrenches
| this power of corporate data collection and influence! And
| now, imagine instead of selling smart speakers, an
| organization wants to push a political idea, let's say for
| example, that democracy is an conspiracy built by elite
| bankers. I think you can see where this goes.
| umate wrote:
| i would also recommend the podcast called "Undivided
| Attention" from the same authors
| zenapollo wrote:
| Further (replying to my own comment), watch The Social
| Dilemma on Netflix. I almost didn't watch it because I
| thought I've heard it all before. But it really shocks the
| conscious when you see it all laid out clearly with strong
| real world examples - building from the mental health
| crisis, to the culture wars, to the erosion of worldwide
| democracy writ large - all driven by the power of adtech.
| dcow wrote:
| To be honest, personally I'd argue for a stronger stance:
| the _right to not be solicited_. I think _all_
| advertising is poisonous and insidious and leads to the
| things you describe, not just targeted behavioral
| profiling. So I'd say the missing right that we need to
| codify lies somewhere in that realm.
|
| Still I think we're a little stuck on the consent bit. If
| 98% of society consents to be solicited, all the problems
| of scale come back. So we need a framework to declare
| that the _power_ granted to solicitation networks, if
| centralized, is too great and either reserve it for the
| gov't or ideally outlaw it.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| It's the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative
| changes. It's one thing if a single lemonade stand keeps
| track of its customers. When the same lemonade stand can
| almost instantly access its customers' complete life history,
| it's a completely different thing.
|
| Imagine being hailed by a random lemonade vendor, "Hello Mr.
| dcow, I have some cold lemonade for you! It's sugar-free, so
| don't worry about your diabetes. I can even put it on your
| tab, since I know you've never been late with your payments
| and you pass through here every Saturday"
|
| It sure might be convenient, but that doesn't make it less
| creepy.
| nologic01 wrote:
| Try going around a park photographing what everyone is doing.
| Further, start giving selectively (to kids and other
| vulnerable people) lollipops in exchange for them identifying
| everybody in their friends and family circle by name. At best
| you would be chased out of the park. At worst you would be
| lynched.
|
| The cry to identify "real harm" is insidius and malevolent.
| There have already been documented instances of political
| manipulation. Given the opaque nature of the sector and the
| massive leverage it affords its very likely this was just the
| tip of the iceberg. Risk management is not just making sure
| you dont die of food poissoning today. It is also about
| avoiding that heart attack that will come decades early.
|
| Again, its not about the act of advertising as such. It is
| the behavioral profiling that is the toxic practice. What
| grave harm can behavioral profiling possibly insert into
| policing, medicine, finance, education, relations with state
| and corporate employers etc? Its not even a rhetorical
| question. Its a societal disaster of historic proportions.
|
| The moral bankruptcy of the adtech industry is not just the
| original sin of rolling this practice out, but, (after they
| have been outed) to pretend that they have this under
| control. That it is a sandboxed environment. It is not. The
| digital domain is interconnected and leaky. Economic and
| political dynamics is unpredictable and all the above
| mentioned domains come into play with adtech itching to
| expand its reach.
|
| Its not a "new right" that people to defend, the framing is
| again odius. Who gave the right to certain entities to
| institute mass surveillance? They simply abused the lack of
| regulation. Moved fast and broke things.
|
| At stake are fundamental questions about human agency,
| transparency and accountability of the actions of organised
| enterprise (and public sector), and the very nature of our
| social systems as we move deeper into the digital era.
|
| The start of that era is certainly dystopic-looking with
| unscrupulous private sector and captured governments. The
| major question is if the (unexpected to be honest) principled
| stance of the European Union will help boot into an
| alternative operating system.
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| > If you sit in a park bench and watch me running around on a
| hot day I can't compel you to "forget I was there".
|
| I will naturally forget because I'm a human with fuzzy memory
| / storage.
|
| I am not an highly consistent, available and resilient
| database which will store the information for the next 5 / 10
| / 15 / 30 / N years.
|
| Appreciate this is a bit of a nit pick on your argument, but
| I feel it is also important because it highlights the massive
| risk / impact difference.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Why should I be able to control what someone else knows
| about me?
|
| Why should companies be allowed to relentlessly spy on
| everything you do without your consent?
|
| For instance, Google literally buys a copy of everyone's
| credit/debit card transaction data.
|
| > as Google said in a blog post on its new service for
| marketers, it has partnered with "third parties" that give
| them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card
| purchases.
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-
| no...
|
| I fully support a requirement that citizens must give consent
| before a company is allowed to invade privacy to this extent.
| dcow wrote:
| Note that the GGP is arguing a stronger stance: that no
| amount of consent makes this okay. You're saying "it's okay
| with consent". You're taking a weaker stance, one which I
| don't necessarily disagree with, but that's besides the
| point.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| This is the stance the EU has taken. The Surveillance
| Capitalism business model requires informed consent.
| specialist wrote:
| > _Why should I be able to control what someone else knows
| about me?_
|
| The right to privacy is:
|
| - complete sovereignty over oneself, including data about
| oneself
|
| - control over public knowledge about oneself
|
| In other words: I am my data, my data is me. I own myself.
|
| To deny my fundamental right to privacy is to deny my
| personhood, to deny my membership in a society of equals.
|
| --
|
| It's corny, but I sometimes liken privacy to the "true name"
| plot device. In fantasy, knowing a person's "true name" gives
| one power over them. In sci-fi, the "true name" would be
| something like a password or root private key.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > The issue is not advertising, the issue is the construction,
| classification and use of human profiles through the collection
| of behavioral data, by-and-large without the subjects being
| aware or cognizant of the possible short and long-term
| implications.
|
| I don't disagree that collection of data isn't bad, but two
| things:
|
| 1. The collection of data isn't the goal, the advertising is.
| The data is only practically valuable to do advertising better
| (and of course for surveillance, but I suspect the market for
| data for surveillance is orders of magnitude smaller). If you
| kill the advertising, you kill the need for data. If you kill
| the data, the advertisers will just find other ways to make
| their advertising convert better.
|
| 2. We should all be outraged at the idea of corporations using
| psychological tricks to influence our behavior. The human mind
| was not pentested before shipping to production. Some ads just
| remind you that a product exists, but many try to create
| positive associations to make the product more appealing or to
| make you think of it later.
|
| We just _let this happen_ and don 't care. Mostly because we
| don't really notice it working. You don't think "oh yeah, I'll
| buy the name brand paper towels because I saw that commercial",
| you just buy them because they're the ones that your brain has
| an association with cleaning up the whole dribble of blue
| liquid. Of course you'll buy the one that works. Our brains are
| unpatched Linux kernels and advertisers are botnets.
|
| Like, be outraged at the data mining and selling. But be more
| outraged at _why_ it 's happening.
| nologic01 wrote:
| I too see issues with advertising as such. It has created an
| unsatiable society that cannot find balance even though it
| churns through an ever growing slice of the planet. But I
| feel it is a longer term problem about how to organize
| markets and disseminate product availability in a less
| manipulative way. In a strange way the internet is actually a
| pull medium that should orient people more towards seeking
| information rather than being pushed stuff. In a sense the
| walled gardens and the timelines aim to replicate a push
| relationship (that was at its heyday during the TV era).
|
| But I really think the risks from personal data based
| profiling are more serious and broad based. If these
| practises get normalized for adtech they are normalized,
| period. Every industry will want to get in the act. Car
| manufacturers will want to grab and sell behavior,
| supermarkets, banks, toothbrushes, fridges, thermostats and
| doorbells will want to do the same.
|
| But ultimately I think we might be agreeing on the _why_
| things are happening as thus underlies everything: Unhinged
| pursuit of profit (= claims on society) without any care
| about the impact on that same society.
|
| The various risks we are discussing will only keep
| multiplying and aggravating if we dont find more effective
| harnesses to channel these behaviors towards more positive
| goals.
| dcow wrote:
| Exactly. I essentially think we need an amendment to the
| constitution that protects an individual's _right to not be
| solicited_.
|
| What law would stop Google and Facebook in their tracks is
| more the question we need to answer.
|
| Data collection is a means to an end for advertisers and not
| in and of itself bad (nor are applications and/protocols that
| use PII or globally unique IDs, etc.), which is why GDPR
| hasn't really moved the needle much. It's fighting the
| symptom not the cause. Invasion of privacy and "spooky"
| knowledge about individuals is all downstream.
|
| And if I want to be solicited and psychologically manipulated
| into consume consume consume, then I really want it to be as
| relevant and effective as possible, don't I? Yet another
| reason why attacking the data collection is ultimately
| barking up the wrong tree. But solicitation definitely
| shouldn't be legal without my consent and probably broadly
| illegal to do to children.
| speleding wrote:
| > the collective will of an entire continent
|
| If you ask the average man on the content "would you like your
| behaviour tracked?" he will indeed reply "No!"
|
| But if you ask him "If you have to choose between seeing ads
| for women's clothing or ads relevant to your interest, which
| would you choose?", then he will pick the option that requires
| behavioural tracking.
| FuckButtons wrote:
| I don't think that's true, I think most people would actually
| choose to have adverts that are irrelevant, much easier to
| tune them out if the signal to noise ratio is low. I think
| most people don't like or want adverts in their lives at all.
| nologic01 wrote:
| The case you describe can be served with contextual ads, no
| need to know anything more than what I have searched for just
| now.
|
| No history, no fingerprinting, no profile that follows me
| everywhere, that gets sold, stolen, triangulated and
| potentially used against me without me even even knowing.
|
| Maybe I take human history too seriously. Maybe others are
| morally bankrupt and will try mental and moral somersaults to
| justify their stance. You judge.
| speleding wrote:
| I can think of many searches that do not at all make clear
| which ads I would find interesting.
|
| I don't think anybody is claiming you should be tracked
| against your will. The more interesting question is if we
| should force everybody to oppose tracking, which is what's
| happening now, with the consequence of less relevant ads
| being shown.
|
| I don't work for Google, I'm just annoyed that the ads I'm
| forced to watch are getting less and less relevant as a
| consequence of (well intentioned) privacy measures.
| malwrar wrote:
| I think he'd probably prefer to not see the ad altogether.
| Who actually wants advertising besides the people attempting
| to sell things.
| speleding wrote:
| If you ask him "would you like to see ads", then the answer
| will indeed be "No!"
|
| But if you ask the more realistic question "would you like
| to pay for Google or would you rather see ads", then I
| think most will choose ads.
| mediumsmart wrote:
| 11 years ago Apple bought a patent for something that would work
| great with personal llms to turn behavioral advertising into a
| circus. But they will probably keep it buried so a Hacker will
| have to build a _clone_ of this and become the real John Connor
| in our fight against the machines.
|
| https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_granted_patent...
|
| _if you liked this comment we would appreciate a thumbs up from
| one of your Bostonareamidthirtylessthan65kincome Identities,
| thanks_
| dasv wrote:
| https://adnauseam.io/
| JohnFen wrote:
| This is a wonderful start. Here's hoping it catches on outside of
| the EU as well!
| jklinger410 wrote:
| What about this free market that everyone talks about?
|
| I don't think there are any protections around the reasonable
| expectation of privacy from a private industry perspective in
| the US.
|
| If you use the internet, or an app, you must protect yourself.
|
| I assume everyone is a capitalist, so wouldn't adding laws here
| somehow subsidize and therefore tarnish the market?
| omginternets wrote:
| Most people balance the ideal of a free market with other
| ideals, such as freedom from corporate predation.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Not to mention that Adam Smith himself made the point that
| there can be no free market in the absence of regulation.
| asu_thomas wrote:
| Small businesses use this kind of advertising as much or
| more, proportionally speaking, as corporations. And with a
| virtual guarantee of worse data security/privacy practices
| when applicable.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Your point is unclear. Small businesses are corporations.
| Advertising services are run by corporations. Tracking is
| predatory.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > If you use the internet, or an app, you must protect
| yourself.
|
| That's easier said than done when it comes to the tracking
| that enables this sort of advertising. What method do you
| suggest?
|
| > I assume everyone is a capitalist
|
| I don't think that's a valid assumption. Also, there are many
| different kinds of capitalists. I'm a capitalist in the most
| basic sense, being an entrepreneur, but I see a lot of things
| asserted under the banner of "capitalism" that I disagree
| with.
|
| > so wouldn't adding laws here somehow subsidize and
| therefore tarnish the market?
|
| I honestly don't understand what you're getting at here.
| asu_thomas wrote:
| > _If you use the internet, or an app, you must protect
| yourself._
|
| As in "choose a strong password"?
|
| As in "never accept a terms of service agreement you disagree
| with"?
|
| As in "read all code before running it"?
|
| What thoughts were going through your head when you typed
| that?
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > I assume everyone is a capitalist,
|
| I assure you that I am not.
| Lammy wrote:
| > What about this free market that everyone talks about?
|
| Never existed https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/
| article-1/#ar...
| mustafa_pasi wrote:
| Does it impinge on your personal freedom, if the government
| decides to put up special privacy protections for groups it
| deems too vulnerable?
| adasdasdas wrote:
| They're not special if they affect everyone
| master-lincoln wrote:
| Liberals lied when they told you about it. There is no free
| market and the whole concept would only work if actors had
| equal powers which is not the case. Why do you think adding
| laws that forbid advertisements in certain configurations are
| a subsidy?
| asu_thomas wrote:
| Why would it? The EU is just protecting its own member states'
| IT industries and its own interest in undermining encrypted
| communications.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > The EU is just protecting its own partner states' IT
| industries
|
| Doesn't the GDPR go back to a largely grassroots effort,
| including from members of the Pirate Party phenomenon that
| people initially scoffed at? I have no doubt that there has
| been local IT lobbying, but one cannot deny some level of
| true popular will.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes it does. The whole idea that grassroots organizations
| and - gasp - actual voters are behind the DPD and later the
| GDPR is something that some people have problems with, they
| would prefer it if the EU government was playing some shady
| protectionist game rather than to work on behalf of EU
| citizens, who very much appreciate them standing up to big
| telcos and big tech.
|
| Google is so afraid of the EU legislators that they have
| literally plastered the whole of Brussels Airport
| ('Zaventem' for the locals) with wall to wall ads on how
| fantastically pro-end-user privacy they are. It's comical.
| seydor wrote:
| The green party was a small german party with lots of
| access to powerful eu people
|
| I very much doubt this was anywhere near "grassroots" to
| the italians
|
| That is not even how eu politics work
| orwin wrote:
| The pirate party, not the green party, had a bit of
| support in Scandinavia, a lot less in Germany, and in
| France, in 2011, they could barely present 200 candidates
| in 50k areas, and i'm pretty sure their only access to
| 'powerful' people was the condescending sympathy of a
| single billionaire and maybe some secret service.
|
| And a single member in the French parliament (900+) ever
| listened to pro-liberty lobbies like lqdn, and fought for
| it. So yes, it's pretty grassroots.
| seydor wrote:
| the gdpr was initiated by german greens
| orwin wrote:
| Legislatively, yes. Politically, it's from ex-members of
| the 2011 pirate party (many of its members ended up in
| the greens).
|
| And I'm arguing against 'it's not grassroot'. My argument
| is that it's as grassroot as support for Snowden,
| wikilealks, whistle-blower protection. Because all of the
| was in the 2011 pirate party manifesto. It happened that
| only this legislation caught interest of other parties,
| but it's origin is grassroot. Have you heard of
| framasoft?
| asu_thomas wrote:
| > _one cannot deny some level of true popular will_
|
| I have never even heard anyone suggest such a thing.
| Whether a fringe grassroots privacy politics effort existed
| in Sweden at the time is not up for debate. It absolutely
| did, but it was not "popular" by any stretch of the
| imagination. Average voters simply don't care about
| privacy, no matter which country you're in.
|
| The EU was explicitly formed to compete with the US
| economically. Nobody should be surprised if their most
| flagship legislation to date is motivated by the same
| intent.
|
| Furthermore, it is being generous to say the EU is a
| pseudo-democratic institution. If an actually popular
| privacy movement did exist in Sweden at some point, the
| chances of it penetrating the EU are slim to none, and the
| chances of it having any political influence in the EU are
| even lower.
| troupo wrote:
| > It absolutely did, but it was not "popular" by any
| stretch of the imagination. Average voters simply don't
| care about privacy, no matter which country you're in.
|
| Go tell Germans that with their very recent memories of
| Stasi. You can even tell Swedes that with their very
| explicit laws against mixing and accessing various
| government databases.
|
| > Nobody should be surprised if their most flagship
| legislation to date is motivated by the same intent.
|
| Instead of parroting whatever the latest internet
| conspiracy is, you could actually go and read the
| legislation, and have an opinion of your own.
| BartjeD wrote:
| The GDPR is part of a much longer and older saga concerning
| 'data sovereignty'.
|
| US courts have in the past repeatedly forced EU companies to
| divulge personal data and business information, in US
| lawsuits (discovery etc..). The reasons the US justices
| always gave for allowing this, was that there were no
| sanctions for these EU companies making it illegal to
| cooperate with such judicial processes.
|
| The GDPR expressly forbids this and also applies tough
| sanctions on companies and regimes that try to force it. By
| making it illegal to do business with such countries.
|
| This is why Privacy Shield is so important for the US and the
| EU, it hashes out to what extent the US may infringe on EU
| data sovereignty. And vice-versa.
| troupo wrote:
| Ah yes. It should just ... checks notes ... let corporations
| do whatever they want to do
| btbuildem wrote:
| I really wish Canada would grow a pair, and stand up to the big
| social media platforms -- especially in the light of the latest
| shenanigans with the availability of / paying for news.
| Whichever side of that debate you fall on, you have to admit
| that meta et al are in a position to strong-arm a country and
| have an impact on its laws. That's a terrible precedent,
| already having played out in Australia.
|
| Anything that chokes off the flow of money via advertising to
| these companies is a two-tier win in my book.
| legitster wrote:
| Canada is saying FB has to pay if they want news on their
| platform. FB doesn't make any money off of promoting news
| articles for free, so they take news off their platform.
| What's the controversy? Was FB just supposed to pay for news
| out of their own goodwill?
|
| I'm no Meta defender but I'm also very confused about what
| the legislators thought the law was supposed to do.
| troad wrote:
| > I'm no Meta defender but I'm also very confused about
| what the legislators thought the law was supposed to do.
|
| _Cui bono?_
|
| The law was supposed to siphon funding from foreign
| companies to Canadian media, who the Canadian government
| are in bed with. That's why it doesn't appear to make
| sense: it's not public-benefit lawmaking, it's plain ol'
| corruption. Same as the earlier Australian law (there, it
| was Rupert Murdoch leaning on the Coalition government
| which he largely kept in power with his local media
| empire).
|
| It's why the Canadian government is so apoplectic about it;
| Meta's unexpected pushback exposes the law to scrutiny it
| simply cannot withstand, and highlights a rather unsavoury
| side of the government in having ever passed it.
| btbuildem wrote:
| Yeah, that law and the govt's response seems so absurd
| until you line up their incentives with the incentives of
| the Canadian communications oligopoly and suddenly things
| make sense.
| M95D wrote:
| > what the legislators thought the law was supposed to do.
|
| I suppose it was to protect the (online) newspapers? In a
| more general way, not let the internet become facebooknet?
| memefrog wrote:
| How does it protect online news websites to prevent
| people from sharing links to their articles on social
| media? That's a major discovery mechanism for their
| content.
| nceqs3 wrote:
| >Anything that chokes off the flow of money via advertising
| to these companies is a two-tier win in my book.
|
| So you want paywalls for every service?
| hightrix wrote:
| I want to consume content that was made by people who
| simply want to make that content for the sake of sharing
| information.
|
| I don't care if content that is made by people that only
| make content to make money is pay walled. They can have
| their 10:01 long YouTube videos and recipes with a preamble
| of their life story behind a paywall. Sounds good to me.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I want to see what business models people come up with
| without ads sucking up all the oxygen in the room. We tried
| ad supported content, it was bad, let's roll the dice again
| and see what we get.
| celnardur wrote:
| You don't need to track people to pay for things with ads.
| You can advertise based on the surrounding content pretty
| effectively. It's what TV channels have done for years.
|
| Behavior ads or paywall is a false dichotomy.
| bostik wrote:
| And news papers. And a long time ago, that's how Google
| ads worked too.
|
| Contextually relevant, non-intrusive, respectfully done
| untargeted advertising is acceptable. Quoting myself from
| earlier times:
| https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html
| tomComb wrote:
| I'm no fan of the power of big tech, well, except when it
| involves standing fast against the blatant political
| corruption of a government devising a bizarre and nonsensical
| law to funnel money to their corporate buddies (according to
| PBO analysis the most money goes to bell, rogers and Shaw).
|
| Yes, Canada should develop strong privacy and competition
| laws, but I've lost hope that they wouldn't just be whatever
| serves the interests of our local oligopolies.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Big companies are not standing against corruption. They are
| the ones pushing the biggest envelopes.
| tomComb wrote:
| Their influence (and the size of their envelopes) is puny
| here compared to our telecoms.
| goodpoint wrote:
| No: GAFAMs are massively wealthy and powerful, also
| telecoms are big companies as well.
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