This is the key point. As the saying goes, on Facebook, you aren't the customer, you are the product.
The GDPR just changed this -- rightfully, in my opinion.
The sad truth though is that the users who are most likely to pay to get rid of ads, are also the users that are most valuable to advertisers, because that's a signal they have more money to spend than the rest.
Facebook's ad targeting can be similarly disabled under https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/?entry_product=ad_s...
I'm genuinely curious: what's so much more annoying to you about untargeted ads? I've never found targeting to be effective at showing me ads that were genuinely better or less annoying.
I feel more comfortable with untargeted ads, since I can be much more confident nothing truly sneaky is going on, especially technology ever gets good enough to reliably manipulate me to buy more now.
I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I think the key difference is this statement. I had untargeted ads on for about a year and they were always irrelevant. Since returning to targeted ads, I now see things all the time that I'm at least mildly interested in (mostly startups and new services, and/or tools/software I want to try out).
I don't care if I'm being coaxed into buying more: the things they're tempting me with are legitimately interesting and I have the ultimate say on whether I buy it or not.
Untargeted ads don't give that choice: they're just always irrelevant to my interests.
In any case, except for a few specific circumstances, I've rigorously used ad-blocker so I haven't had to deal with any ads at all. The last ads that I have seen were on Facebook, but even it couldn't seem do a good job, even though it's purportedly the master of targeting
Really? I kind of despise the targeted Ads. They're typically poor quality, and often it's some website I visited months ago to look at one product constantly dangling that product in my face in a desperate attempt for me to come back and buy it.
Show me the cars and potato chips, please!
That said, I also really don't like seeing ads at all.
I wouldn't think so.
Sadly, Google Contributor is not available outside US. I am eagerly waiting for it.
It won't be cheap.
$20 is cheap.
Seriously though, behemoths do fall and if facebook ceases to exist there will be no harm but good in my book.
The result: 973 of those sites disappear. Diversity of choice just collapsed. Starting a new recipe site or blog just got 100x more difficult. But hey, in Communist Internet, who needs lots of recipe sites.
I guess you mean the kind where either there are users providing those for free or it uses a huge number of compiled one, not some person inventing new ones.
I would wager that 970 of those sites can be run for virtually no cost, either maintained by loyal community or the wide internet.
Furthermore, I agree the sibling commenter in that these sorts of websites usually just publish what community submits anyways, so we can have a bunch of wikis instead.
P.S.: Everybody should know the difference between trying to overcome the status quo which is selling yourself to companies and hoping that they do not abuse you, and things like communism or government overreach. And if businesses will lose money or get closed if they stop bad, malevolent practices of theirs, good riddance. Let the sanity get the better of them.
Various companies will probably still gather and sell data for even more nefarious purposes, like manipulating elections, but that’s a different battle.
Facebook will yield more than $100 per active user in the US and Canada for fiscal 2018. That's going to $200 from here over the next six or seven years (it doubled from 2015 to 2017). No meaningful number of users are paying $15 per month out of pocket for Facebook.
Google search is similarly worth a lot per user in the US. People would be irate if they had to pay $10 or $20 per month to use search engines after commonly enjoying the free utility of that for the last two decades.
If you divide revenue by users you get between $1-$2 USD. I need to know how NA are 50-100 times that.
https://investor.fb.com/financials/default.aspx
Note that it is reported quarterly (I had some numbers but took them out when I realized I was using 1 quarter instead of the year).
I also think it's conceivable in a more equitable arrangement with paid subscriptions that you could easily have a sizable number of paying users not being active in a given month.
Now someone can actually try and compete with a free service. It might not work but its a step closer to happening. For example we have had open source federated social networks, and non-profits that ran email services.
A lot of people don't seem to know that GSuite is both usable (useful, even) and affordable (cheap!) even if you are a solo user.
Here's a quick howto:
1. Go buy your own domain name (~$10/yr, https://www.gandi.net/). Make it something you like, something professional. This is for your personal email address. firstname@lastname is the most common pattern. I recommend everybody do this. Even if you want to stay on gmail, yahoo, aol or whatever you can set up redirects. This becomes an email address you truly own, and your email provider cannot hold you hostage anymore.
2. Create a new GSuite account ($5/mo, https://gsuite.google.com) - The entire setup is guided and completely painless if you're even slightly technically-aware.
3. Migrating from a previous Google account: You can use Google Takeout to get a lot of your data (https://takeout.google.com/). Unfortunately, migrating the data automatically is hard. For email you can set up IMAP from gmail, for Drive there's migration scripts. But you also don't have to migrate immediately, Google is good at multiple accounts.
I know I'm sounding like a Google shill right now, but GSuite really is what people tend to ask for when they talk about Google's handling of data and say they'd pay $5/month to "regain their privacy". Well, here's your occasion to do so.
> 5.2 Scope of Processing. > 5.2.1 Customer’s Instructions. By entering into this Data Processing Amendment, > Customer instructs Google to process Customer Personal Data only in accordance > with applicable law: (a) to provide the Services and related technical support; (b) as > further specified via Customer’s use of the Services (including the Admin Console > and other functionality of the Services) and related technical support; (c) as > documented in the form of the applicable Agreement, including this Data Processing > Amendment; and (d) as further documented in any other written instructions given > by Customer and acknowledged by Google as constituting instructions for purposes > of this Data Processing Amendment.
So no, they probably can't track and feed that into youtube ads, because it is not a cause that provides the service or support.
Afaik Google announced last year that they stopped processing GSuite account emails to a large degree.
Well, that's surely reassuring.
It's hardly yours. Using a custom domain for anything sensitive like banking is not a good idea. Your registrar is almost certainly a lot easier to phish/social engineer/whatever than Google.
Please don't spread unsourced FUD. I'm not saying registrars are perfect (although Gandi, which I linked, has an impeccable track record), but everyone uses registrars for their domain name, even the biggest businesses out there.
If you have a problem with a particular registrar, I invite you to source it and share it. But the general idea that the potential for a point of attack makes the email "not yours" is nonsensical.
What matters is the email address you give out to people. Where that email is stored and ends up doesn't matter. Which registrar owns the domain doesn't matter.
@pinboard has explained on Twitter that registrars can get tricked into letting an attacker into your domain account (of course they can). And from there they can update your zone file to send your mail wherever they want.
This isn't about the storage of your email.
Everyone uses registrars, but in some cases you can be your own registrar. Like in Finland, when .fi domain registrations were moved to exclusively to registrars (initially you would register domains with Finnish FCC equivalent, later option was added to let registrar handle that for you and finally it was moved to just registrars), quite a few companies and individuals registered to become registrar for .fi domain.
b) Who is going through all the trouble to target me specifically with a phishing attempt.
There is no fundamental right allowing tracking or advertising.
There is a fundamental right to privacy.
Can we expect a EU government agency to validate companies on a regular basis? And if not, would they even cooperate with white-hat hackers to find offenders?
Also, from what I read, data protection agencies have been understaffed and overworked for years now.
"Why did this company pay you $x million?"
".. stuff?"
The regulation counts 58 000 words.
IIRC almost _half_ of the actual regulation is about what and how the member countries should set up their internal supervisory authorities and the rest is similarly specific.
There are innumerable checklists, summaries and guides on how to deal with GDPR as well.
The two I like are:
https://blog.varonis.com/gdpr-requirements-list-in-plain-eng...
and
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...
Is a hash of an IP address PII?
What makes it "invalid"? If you can identify a person by their IP, then the IP becomes a part of their personal data. For most websites it's irrelevant, because people just visit and leave. But if someone signs in with their real name, you just need to update the ToS saying that apart from their other data you also store their IP. How complicated is that?
On the other hand, if you plan to sell the IPs associated with some other data to a third party that can easily link it to people (Google and Facebook can), you may want to consult a lawyer.
Can I still have a forum where users submit text?
Those of us in fields regulated prior to GDPR are laughing at you.
If you have to charge money, your chance to overcome the network effect of FB or an established site is difficult, because en masse migration of users to a new service typically goes hand in hand with that new service being offered freely.
Conversely if you don't charge money, your ability to fund the development of a competitor is based on reduced ad income since you can't offer targeted ads, which is going to shorten your runway by a significant amount.
These two things seem to indicate that the likelihood of building something that replaces one of the existing social services goes down. I don't think it makes it impossible, but the law seems to make it less likely that the social app incumbents get replaced (if that was at all possible).
As far as those in other regulated fields having done this for some time, I can't think of many regulated fields where the network effect is so high as social apps, so it is probably a bit apples to oranges. Presumably it is not as large a deal in those markets where social network dynamic is not as strong.