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Comment by gnode | Hacker News Reader

> Obviously this would destroy most "free" online services over night

Why would it? TV and radio advertising is not individually targeted, and still exists.

TV and radio advertising is targeted by region - even by city in some cases.

Banning any and all targeting online would result for example everyone in America seeing advertising only intended for people in London.

Essentially resulting in online advertising being rendered useless.

The article explains specifically that it's referring to advertising targeted on an individual basis, not targeted by location or context. The issue is that using personal information to present adverts is damaging to privacy. Non-individual targeting (what page the advert is on, or where the page request is coming from) is not a personal privacy concern.

except the digital, you're complaining about is also non-individual, and it's anonymized at a much higher threshold. radio points are demographics based buys, TV is demographics based...niche mags etc., same story.

The audience for non-individual web ads is not the entirety of Internet users. For instance, when I make a search on DuckDuckGo my geographic location (although this is optional) and search terms provide a demographic that is useful for specific advertising, without personally identifying or tracking me. Similarly, an online newspaper can include ads appropriate to the story viewed, and the geographic location of the user, without need for tracking.

Facebook and Google (and nearly every other social ads platform that evolved along the same playbook) avoid the 'personal'by aggregating users above certain thresholds. It's fairly precise, and often the only times I can spot an individual is if they're flagging something geographic or contextual (e.g., search) that is unique. (for example, I know when my parents visit my blog because I know their network hostname and location.)

when you say, begin to search for trips to disney and start looking through photos on Facebook, it isn't that an advertiser discovers you, gnode, are looking for a disney trip, it's that the platform adds you to an audience of people interested in disney and to an audience of people who are interested in travel. advertisers engage with those audiences, platforms hold the data.

TV advertising is very very targeted. If you don't think so, spend ten minutes each on commercials from Disney channel, the Food Network, ESPN, and CNBC. You will see very very different ads on each.

That's different. They're selling ads on a channel. Targeted advertising is selling ads for a person.

This is why I said "individually targeted". The TV advertiser doesn't know your name, age, gender, search history, etc.

Right. But they do know what program you are watching (which might be a demographic clue) and they do know a rough geographic area.

If facebook couldn't show chinese products to chinese visitors, they'd have a hard time selling ads. They'd be worse off than a tv station in that case.

Disregarding the fact that Facebook is blocked by the Great Firewall, and virtually unused in China, serving internet ads on a national or township basis is easy to do with IP address based selection. This can be done without tracking users (recording information about them) or otherwise impacting their privacy. It isn't necessary to build a database tying individual identities to nationalities or addresses, to geographically target ads.

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