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Comment by zerostar07 | Hacker News Reader

I 'm not sure how well it will reflect in the court of public opinion if the EU's first ruling is that basically every website is not allowed to use ads to pay itself. There seem to be certain groups here in Europe who relish on this kind of "activism" . I m not sure how representative they are of public opinion, they are certainly very vocal.

Do we know how strict the Austrian DPA is ?

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Advertising does not need to be targeted to a specific person to exist. Advertising has existed since the dawn of time without that ability, and frankly, marketing budgets are not going to wind up decreasing because companies can’t target individual people.

> to a specific person to exist

Advertising was always trying to find the right target. Technology allowed this to become a lot more efficient. As long as targeting is anonymous and certain limitations are set, i m fine with it, we don't need to kill the patient here.

Targeting is not anonymous because the amount of data that is used for targeting almost always amounts to personally identifiable information. Even just “company this person works at” + “job title” can be PII, and Facebook processes both of those things in targeting, along with many many others.

i dont believe facebook allows targetting by company and in general this shouldnt be allowed to targeted advertising.

The definition of anonymity you are using here is completely unhelpful. When someone knows how to recognize you as the person to apply certain stimuli to in order achieve a certain result based on previous observation of your behaviour (with increased probability), you are not in any meaningful way anonymous to them. At best, you could say that you are pseudonymous.

You don't need to know someone's legal name in order to abuse information about them to exercise power over them, and that is was data protection is about.

> their [EU] first ruling is that basically every website is not > allowed to use ads to pay itself.

Of course they won’t. This is absurd.

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