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Comment by LMYahooTFY | Hacker News Reader

The degree of grand standing over this issue leads me to wonder who among the donor base is pushing for such action. Obviously many would welcome something similar to "GDPR", and the question is always how such regulation can be levied in favor of incumbents.

Our new digital footprints are much more detailed, but I've yet to understand how they're fundamentally different from what media companies have been selling for most of the last century.

I don't preclude the possibility that they might be, I've just not understood it yet.

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> Our new digital footprints are much more detailed, but I've yet to understand how they're fundamentally different from what media companies have been selling for most of the last century.

Thirty years ago a media company could say you subscribe to these two magazines, this newspaper, and you're a 35 year old male. That means you probably watch these five TV shows and you're likely to be interested in X, Y, and Z. They could also say to advertisers, if you're looking for a 35 year old male who's interested in X, Y, and Z the most effective way to market to them is probably advertising on this radio station or during this T.V. show. They tranched and profiled viewers as groups and sub-groups. Today, they don't have to profile or make generalizations about trends among groups of people. They have all of the information, for each and every one of us as individuals, at their fingertips.

Thirty years ago they sold access to "35 year old males who like football." Today they sell access to you.

If you ever used Facebook or Google Ads system you would know that this is factually incorrect!

Neither platform sales access to a specific person! Instead what they sell is access to “35 year old males who like football”!

Except that you could upload a list of e-mail addresses or phone numbers, or even an e-mail address or phone number list of one, and target that one person.

This was a bug though and fixed a while ago. It wasn't by design or anything

Facebook, and almost all the other platforms which allow this type of targeting, make it impossible to do this now by setting a minimum matched audience size. This means that even if you upload a list of 9,999 fake email addresses and 1 real email address it will not allow you to run ads against that audience explicitly in order to make it impossible to do this.

Is it not quite easy to use 9999 real email addresses you dont care about or control?

E.g. targetted ad in english sent to 10k thai people and one english speaker? Maybe even reduce costs depending on how the system works.

You certainly were able to at one point. http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-... I feel like I read about FB making some symbolic gesture to close this particular method (it seemed easily worked around) but my searching is coming up blank.

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