Hacker News Reader

Comment by taysic | Hacker News Reader

Simply because it forces companies to give the same service away without personalized ads. As long as the options are clear, most people would choose non-personalized because there is nothing they get out of handing their data over.

So under this system a user who doesn't mind personalized ads doesn't have the option to 'pay'. They have the ability to 'donate' their personal information but there would be no reason to do this.

Now if GDPR had allowed companies to either choose personalized ads or pay for the content, that would have been different.

View on HN

If personalised ads are so marvellous, and people are happy with them, surely they will be happy to "donate" their data in order to receive these incisive topical ads purely as they give such a better experience? My experience is they are just as terrible - just sometimes terrible in different ways.

The inexorable rise of ad blocking, the increasing pace of adoption recently, and not solely amongst citizens of the EU makes me think most people's trust has been burnt out.

I suspect many people in the US would be in favour of more consideration of their privacy and data security if given a choice.

>So under this system a user who doesn't mind personalized ads doesn't have the option to 'pay'. They have the ability to 'donate' their personal information but there would be no reason to do this.

If a web business can still remain profitable with personalized ads being optional, then the targeting behind those ads was never paying for that content to begin with, it was always a 'donation.'

Not sure what 'can still function' means. If a business is unable to make enough of a profit from its new business model, it simply shuts down. It was certainly not always a 'donation'.

>Not sure what 'can still function' means.

Sorry, I've edited for clarity.

>If a business is unable to make enough of a profit from its new business model, it simply shuts down. It was certainly not always a 'donation'.

What's debatable is whether targeted advertising is necessary for a business to maintain that profit. The GDPR suggests it isn't.

>What's debatable is whether targeted advertising is necessary for a business to maintain that profit. The GDPR suggests it isn't.

You're right to a degree. You're right, because ad revenue from the EU is a lot lower than the US. Even if targeted ads in the EU aren't a thing, then a service that mostly gets US ad clicks and ad views will be able to handle it just fine. However, this means that EU viewers/readers will be treated as second class citizens.

>However, this means that EU viewers/readers will be treated as second class citizens.

Doesn't the fact that the rest of the world is scrambling to come to grips with an EU regulation and European privacy standards suggest the opposite?

It's hard to tell what fraction of websites have made shifts out of the enormous amount of businesses that exist on the web and serve EU consumers. On top of that, it's still too early to tell what the effects of the law will be. Many are waiting to see how it will be implemented.

History suggests that every time a political entity chooses the winners and losers in a market that bad things happen -- usually in the form of a small number of increasingly larger companies capturing the market.

Google and FB (with their small army of lawyers) can afford to jump through all the hoops to make the regulators happy while "a small Belgian newspaper" will probably just get steamrolled.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com