Hacker News Reader

Comment by eveningcoffee | Hacker News Reader

I believe that these practices should be completely outlawed.

I could in principle not see it anything less than a form of unlawful surveillance.

That’s a bit extreme. Most of this data gets used for targeted advertising. While that sounds (and sometimes is) shady, it also enables a lot of niche companies that had a much harder time existing before.

For example, what’s the point in showing ads for custom quadcopter parts to an 80 year old grandmother who doesn’t know what a quadcopter is?

Data should be regulated and protected much more than it currently is. But the idea of banning it entirely would have a lot of negative effects. Let’s be smarter than that.

> lot of niche companies that had a much harder time existing before.

Oh the horror.

If I need quadrocopter parts, I'll search for quadrocopter parts. I don't need your ads to push quadrocopter parts on me on the hope that I might be slightly more interested in them than an 80 year old grandmother.

I need you to build a good product and display it in a good store.

Ads are unsolicited untrusted information.

Though sometimes you want to get the word out about a specific thing. But this is where getting people's social circles hearing about something and trying it is important.

I definitely see a few needs for advertisement. But mostly down sides IMO.

This really cuts to the core of the issue. Consumers will naturally seek out the things they wish to buy. Nobody needs to be distracted from their activities to be told what to buy.

All advertising should be strictly confined to designated areas specifically intended for consumer searching.

There are a lot of movies I went to after I saw an ad for it which I never would have searched for on my own (and I can say the same about restaurants and a couple other peoducts). Consumers aren't going to search for something they don't know exists in the first place

Yeah, but if you hadn't seen those ads, and not watched those movies, would your life really be worse than it is now?

> Consumers aren't going to search for something they don't know exists in the first place

If a consumer doesn't buy something they don't know exists, does it really matter?

Life, at least for me and the people I know, doesn't revolve around finding things to spend money on.

The economy does.

For now.

Perhaps this is because I'm not an American, but my life doesn't revolve around "supporting the economy". The economy is supported when I go round living my life, not the other way round.

Exactly. Also: free market works well when the aggregated signals from customers are honest. Then it allocates resources efficiently. Advertising is all about disrupting this mechanism, injecting and generating fake signals that skew the market.

I've found many useful products that I enjoy using, such as my ReMarkable tablet, through targeted ads. I'd have never known it existed despite looking/waiting for exactly this type of product for years.

Personally I've bought a total of 0 products from adverts ever (pretty much since ~1999).

Adding an ad blocker a few years ago this trend is likely to continue, though now my web pages work better and my privacy is enhanced :)

I actually removed my ad blocker recently because I realized most sites I go to either don't have ads or they don't really bother me (hackernews, reddit, facebook, netflix, gmail, stackoverflow, various webcomics, etc...) and they pay for all that free content I consume. My life generally isn't better for the ads themselves but I think it is better for the services that these ad supported sites provide.

For ages there used to be dedicated publications for ads -- why is it not possible to push all ads to only be displayed at a dedicated website, journal, newspaper, etc. where the customer(!) (not consumer) can choose to visit if he/she wants to discover something.

All we need is a push towards criminalization of ads in public spaces where they are forced on people not based on their need, but based on their ability to be manipulated into buying shit they don't need.

Yeah, because screw all these free services people can access that are paid for by ad revenue. The usual counter to this is "but I would gladly pay!" The problem isn't you, the problem is with people who can't afford to pay or aren't able to due to other means. You wouldn't have to pay for services such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, reddit, hackernews etc just for yourself. Your grandma, your spouse, your kids etc have to all pay for it too.

And suppose that happens. Do you know what the system ends up as? Cable TV. Congratulations, net neutrality was unnecessary after all.

Nobody is saying that opting-in to ads should become impossible.

I agree! A lot of what's going on with data is the low-cost ease of intimate access to targeted people. Thus, we get constantly pestered and then it's our job to figure out how to get peace from stuff that we didn't ask for.

I've had to turn off alerts and miss notifications from friends because marketers have run amok. And we go back to the cost: it's been so doggone cheap that so many marketers have gotten to where they just don't care about being annoying.

There should be a higher cost to access me when I'm sitting in my barber's chair. Actually, DON'T contact me when I'm in my barber's chair. Go back to tv commercials, billboards, and snail mail. Put in some effort.

What if you've never heard of a quadcopter and neither have your friends, but there's a high likelihood you'd be into it since you like variable x?

Here's a plot that shows marketing channel fit by product type: http://www.kevinlordbarry.com/uploads/3/6/5/4/3654649/edited...

In my opinion, the advertiser should not know that the current visitor is an 80 year old grandmother in the first place.

Just like TV, radio, and magazines before them, advertisers can select which advertisements to put on which sections of websites (or broadly make their decisions on what types of sections they should display on), and individual display requests can and should be de-personalized for privacy measures. Advertisers can still access or determine indicators of demographics for places on the web without individual tracking measures, and measure click-through for various A/B testing for different ads in different contexts.

The contents & general audience of a page should determine the ad, not the individual visitor.

The traditional way to advertise niche products is to advertise in places where the relevant audience is. Maybe put ads on RC-related websites or technology-related TV channels, or buy sponsor spots on technology podcasts or YouTube-channels. You don't _need_ huge amounts of information about every Internet-using individual in order to do targeted advertising.

Podcasts, which (so far) have mostly been free from extreme privacy-violating ad networks, have been doing this for ages; I regularly hear relevant ads for Ting, Linux Academy and Digital Ocean when listening to Linux-podcasts, or for bone conducting headphones, fancy mesh network routers and domain name registrars when listening to general tech podcasts. I also hear ads for PC hardware and VPNs when watching tech YouTube-videos. The ads YouTube itself chooses for me, on the other hand, are generally completely unnecessary and poorly targeted ads for movies I don't want to see or cars or soda.

I am personally happy to see that this happened in Vermont and not on the federal level. We now have the opportunity to see the impact this has on the citizens of Vermont and whether or not the regulations are effective. Nothing beats experimentation and the scientific method.

Data protection laws existed in Europe long before GDPR. Every country had them. And companies would simply disregard them until they became GDPR with the promise of fines and enforcement.

My biggest concern are insurance companies and potential employers.

If insurance companies and employers use that information (as well as creditors) it become subject to the FCRA; as well as subject to state, local, and federal laws about lending, insurance underwriting, and employment. This information merely existing (for advertising purposes) doesn't suddenly make it legal to use it in specifically illegal ways.

For example, it's a standard practice to use a person's credit history and credit score during insurance underwriting - data shows people who are responsible with credit have less claims, so they have lower premiums. However, say you live in Massachusetts. In Massachusetts it's illegal for insurance companies to take your credit history and credit score into account when determining policy premiums. So insurance companies are not allowed to access your credit if you live in Massachusetts even though that information is widely available and used in other states.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com