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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

In the case of the letter author, I suspect the problem isn't just that stillbirths are rare, but that you can't really monetize a stillbirth. Better to assume the baby was born successfully than miss out on the opportunity to advertise to a new mom.

I'm sure no one in the room of marketing execs has considered personal consequences like this one.

This type of thing is why I do my best to enable privacy settings and disable personalized ads. I don't actually care whether Google knows what I ate for dinner last night, but I don't want constantly see Google's fuzzy judgements of my humanity as I browse the web.

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Given the amount of ads for fertility doctors I saw after we lost our son, and the ridiculous claims they were making, I think its safe to say that stillbirths are both lucrative and certainly advertised towards.

Honestly, I'm not sure theres anything to do about it. As awful as losing our son was, I'm not sure taking away others rights is really an appropriate response. While Facebook would be wise to take these things into account to build social trust, advertisers themselves are always going to want to advertise their products.

Sorry to hear of your loss, it is a horrible thing to contemplate. Hope you (will) recover(ed) in time; all the best.

>>> I'm sure no one in the room of marketing execs has considered personal consequences like this one.

Your first sentence was more correct (I suspect) : they thought about it and purposely forgot about it 'cos there was no money to be made there.

Are people that callous?

I work for a large corporate, and I can honestly say that I think no-one would make such a decision. Perhaps I am naive.

They'd just think, "all measuring has false positives", and wouldn't think about it beyond checking if there isn't too much of them.

I doubt people hear this story and say 'Meh, fuck em'.

However, what about (in thought not out loud) 'False positives are hard to prevent, special cases like these are very rare. Instrumenting our platform with exceptions like these is a massive undertaking for which I don't have the political capital. Lets not take action now.'

From outside the company, those are nearly the same reaction. From inside the head of the thinker, they are very different.

This is suspiciously reminiscent of the adage, "All it takes for evil to triumph, is that good people do nothing."

I can definitely imagine certain execs being single-minded enough to think "Well if a parent has suffered some tragedy, they're not going to click our ad anyway, so it's costing us nothing to advertise to them"

The execs in question are most probably all male and have never thought about stillbirths.

Men lose babies too.

> but that you can't really monetize a stillbirth

Serving up ads that are guaranteed to not apply are a negative because it means you're giving up the opportunity to serve up ads that might actually make money.

Are advertisers going to notice that 1% of people in the 'Just had a baby' group actually had stillbirths? I'd guess not, especially because advertisers don't get to know who they advertised to.

Is FB or Google going to change this to improve their conversion rate by ~1%? Probably not, 1% is not a lot. In the end, as long as the advertising platform gets a decent conversion rate on 'Just had a baby' for the advertisers, everyone is happy.

Heck, advertisers might prefer 10% accuracy and 90% recall over 50% accuracy and 80% recall. If pushing that recall up a bit yields a few more customers, the extra cost of showing that to a lot more non-viable people might just work out.

Serving up ads that are known to be offensive to the user isn't just a lost opportunity to make money, it's also going to encourage that user to start blocking ads, which the advertisers and Google/Facebook don't want.

Still births aren't rare. That makes this all that much worse.

> Stillbirth effects about 1% of all pregnancies, and each year about 24,000 babies are stillborn in the United States. That is about the same number of babies that die during the first year of life and it is more than 10 times as many deaths as the number that occur from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/stillbirth/facts.html

1% is in the same ballpark as the percentage of transgender people in the US (~0.6%). So if we're saying one is rare, so is the other.

I consider 1% to be a pretty low percentage, myself.

1% is no where near "rare". It's a low percentage, but still a frequent enough occurrence.

>I suspect the problem isn't just that stillbirths are rare, but that you can't really monetize a stillbirth.

And you can monetize transgenderism, so unless the cost of this letter starts to get very expensive, OP's advertising will get better well before mothers of stillborn children.

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