i don't understand this. why would anyone prefer generic ads over targeted?
It was low enough that it wasn't really a factor when determining what to price your ad-free pages at (most people went with 1-2 cents per load) -- most people just priced at whatever average your ads were pulling in currently without worrying about the cut, since it was a fraction of a cent.
Generic ads, on the other hand, can be about topics/products I usually would never consider or have a strong opinion about, when I realise it might be helpful to a problem I've been neglecting or something like that.
Put another way: Targeted ads are never useful to me, generic ads are sometimes useful to me.
It’s not the least of my problems. A to me unknown but large number of companies try to track as much as possible of what I do online, and buy and sell this intensely personal data, causing a very concrete risk that private information about me becomes public. I’m not consulted about this, and I get nothing of value out of it, only risk of disaster.
Yes, there are other big privacy problems. They are all, to varying degrees, the focus of my discontent, and they have barely anything to do with this discussion.
Targeted ads simply show me what I bought or was interested in recently(there's always a delay).
Ads work.
I think these terms are misleading though. Traditional advertising is targeted: at the audience of some particular media which takes advertising. And that kind of advertising is actually very effective, and still is. What do viewers of a technology YouTube channel perhaps have an interest in? Technology! What might readers of a gardening magazine want to buy? Gardening tools!
And traditional advertising also advertises to people things at the time they are most receptive to it: when am I thinking most about buying video games? Perhaps when I'm watching others playing them.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-14.4
Accept-Language: da, en-gb;q=0.8, en;q=0.7
would mean: "I prefer Danish, but will accept
British English and other types of English."But it is strange to imagine I would get ads in a different language to the website I'm reading.
The billboards on highway 80/101 in SF are usually rented by big brands with large corporate backing, but their products are usually solid, whereas AdSense ads usually show me what I assume must be dropshipped goods with little quality control (but usually have some sort of novelty value).
The thing is: ad tech doesn't want your personal data. Ad tech doesn't even want 'individually-targeted' ads. Advertising is applied sociology and works with statistics and its laws of large numbers.
What ad tech really wants is to assign you to broad classes of sociological groups. ('Gamer', 'parent', 'hobbyist', 'instagram user', etc.)
The insane spree of personal data collection by Google and Facebook isn't driven by advertising needs. It's a deeper and more insidious strategy for things in the future that aren't advertising-related. (I think the strategy bosses in these FAANG companies imagine a future with something like China's social credit system, except on steroids. But this is just my hunch.)
I see this as an indirect way to solve the problem of tax havens, because little known fact: the money that goes to pay the fines effectively reduces the pool of EU member contributions, because it's distributed using the same method.
For the EU, making a decision frequently means getting the consensus of 28 governments with sometimes very different ideologies. I don't think it's capable of plotting.
At the same time, they have serious problems agreeing on tax reform. Because somehow, their interests are only aligned when it comes to secretly taxing Google.
Please take off your tinfoil hat. When the EU properly taxes Google, it will do so openly.
That's not what I said. What I said was that each government individually decided that it was in their interest to fine Google.
No EU-level plotting - just incentives.
Secretly taxing Google by making a privacy law, giving businesses years to prepare for it and hoping Google violates it anyway doesn't even make sense. Taxing them using, well, taxes is easier, quicker and more likely to work.
Is it really? To date Google et consortes managed to dogdge just about any tax law thrown at them. Meanwhile the fines are incurred and paid.
(The people who decided to expand the EU to 28 members without overhauling its decision-making processes, which were designed for a community of 5 members with a much more limited scope, must have been on drugs.)
You wrote that all countries are interested in money. To an extent that is of course true, and it also applies to Ireland.
The EU is not short on money, and its existence and effectiveness do not hinge on how much money it "makes".
Google is pretty big, but not that big if compared to 27 sovereign countries and their combined GDPs.
The biggest problem the EU has is credibility with its populations. Taking on online privacy for their citizens was a huge win. It made a lot of people aware that the EU can be more than boring fish-quota and agricultural subsidies.
The chance of Google getting away with paying a fine every now and then is pretty much non-existent.
If the EU fined Google for the maximum amount (which is rare) every year, it would raise 8 Euros per citizen.
Our politicians have better things to do.
> The probe was triggered by a formal complaint from Dr Johnny Ryan, Chief Policy Officer at Brave, the private web browser.
Which seems fair to me. And another where he's mentioned amongst others who've put in complaints.
> Duplicate complaints were also submitted to the UK Information Commissioner by Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group and Dr Michael Veale of University College London. Dr Ryan, Dr Veale and Mr Kilock are represented by Mr Ravi Naik of ITN Solicitors in London.
And at one point, he even quotes himself:
> “Surveillance capitalism is about to become obsolete,” said Dr Ryan of Brave.