Euro privacy watchdog calls for end of targeted advertising
theregister.com
theregister.com
Well I can see how personalized ads benefit advertisers. But users? I mean at first, it seems like it make sense because personalized ads are based on what I'm interested in. But more I think about it, I'm not really sure if it is actually beneficial to me.
For example, if I want to buy a hard drive, the ads don't tell me what kinds of hard drives there are and what the pros and cons of each of them are. The ads are just what an arbitrary company X wants me to think of their product in order to change my behavior. They are rarely actually informative. Can someone give me an example why personalized ads are beneficial to users compared to non-personalized ads or no ads at all?
Edit: I'm afraid I haven't elaborated enough. I'm not saying that non-personalized ads are better than personalized ads. I just think they don't add much informational value. If I want to buy something, information access is so trivial these days that I can easily look for products myself, and the information I find will likely be a lot more helpful than ads. So what I'm trying to say is that personalized and non-personalized ads don't look a lot different in terms of benefits they bring to the viewer.
Edit: my milk shaker example is not even that great. If targeting was killed, you'd most likely see ads from massive corporations only - those who have a lot of cash to spend on ads. Little players (small business owners, startup owners) would have zero chance to compete against those corporations. They'd lose every single ad auction.
Because it doesn’t require invasive surveillance.
Why? If I run a niche site with ads I'd want to pick ads that fit my site and audience, similar to picking affiliate programs. Picking relevant ads should be my job a as a site owner.
This is not entirely correct. It comes back to CTR (click thru ratio) and with the loss of 'targeting' then the CTR will plummet unless the platform reverts back to 'market targeting'. That is, websites will need to choose the class of ads on their websites, and the more irrelevant they choose, the less they'll get paid (because CTR will drop). So, from a small advertiser's perspective, they'll need to make sure their ads only appear on relevant websites (eg. tech on tech sites, milk shakes on food sites).
A one-man-show (eg a plumber's business) already knows that social ads work better for them anyhow. Maybe billboards and local classified ads will make a resurgence as a result.
Edit: I should add that Goog is already ahead of the targeting ads for the small local business, with their "my business" product, which allows you to search locally for businesses.
But what about an ad? By definition it's something someone pays to be shown. When Google shows you targeted ads, they aren't showing you the best ads for you, they are showing you the best ads of those companies who paid for it (and probably the price influences its ranking). The user is not the first objective.
In an ideal world, personalized ads wouldn't be called ads, and would be like having an assistant. You want a hard drive? Here is the best hard drive for you, or a list if you prefer, and then you buy it and the company earns your money.
In the current world, that's far from the reality.
I mean, that is an assumption, unless you work at Google and is currently sharing the algorithm with us. Most likely, they show you the best ad they can based on targeting criterias and the information they know about you. It could very well be possible that Google not always picks the highest bidder. The winning score is most likely calculated based on a combination of signals, eg bidding price, user's preferences, user's buying history, etc.
Right, I'm truly stretched to the limit to think of any ad that I've seen on the web that's actually been truly informative to me. For that I have to go back to ads in specialized technical magazines that used to list detailed specifications for the products they were selling, today web advertisers simply don't do that - all we get is hyped-up uninformative and often misleading crap that interferes with our access to the site's web pages.
Similarly, many, many websites that are selling stuff are cluttered, disorganized and otherwise hard to navigate (as well as being very, very slow). Of course, this is a deliberate marketing ploy but the effect on me is that I'm straight out of there as fast as possible.
Internet advertising has always been an unmitigated mess and unlike those old magazine ads, almost without exception, it's gotten in the way of the main presentation to the utter annoyance of website visitors. It's little wonder so many use ad blockers.
For years, my solution has been to block ads as well as all the accompanying JavaScript of which much is devoted to spying on the user.
Eliminating both ads and JS not only speeds up websites enormously but also it eliminates all those hesitant pauses and other jerky/delay-like responses that make browsing such a damn pain.
I'm now so used to 'clean' browsing that I cannot ever imagine myself returning to the standard defaults - ads and JS. For those who ask 'how do you do this or that without JS?' I'd just say this, there are millions of sites on the web, if one blocks me then I instantly move on (one good point about the web is that most of the information on it is paralleled across multiple sites and there are many sites that are more user friendly than others). That said, there are rare situations where I still have to use JS. When necessary I just toggle it on and off, the default being off.
As far as I'm concerned the web has been ruined by invasive advertising and we need a new paradigm to fix it. There are many options for that but it's too big a subject to discuss here.
It starts with a seller, who wants to sell this hard drive, no matter what, and then pays to find a buyer. Targeted advertising is a false promise that if the date of birth, sexual orientation, political preference, and the favourite color of everyone are known, the advertiser can somehow find buyers for a smaller fee. Indeed, most of the hard drive buyers are older than 20 and like women. There's a correlation to exploit.
This business model is completely backwards in the digital age. What is possible now, instead of profiling people, Google/Facebook/Amazon could have been profiling products, sellers, their supply chains, organize information, build knowledge graph, and rather than profit from a seller pushing their message, they could have took a commission for finding just the right hard drive for everyone, no matter what color they like.
The point is profiling sellers and their products is a harder problem than scamming and nudging unsuspecting users. We all know how great Amazon search is. Targeted advertising on the other hand is just the same as print era advertising but cheaper.
Isn't it simpler, cheaper and more respectful of people's own decision-making faculties to provide them with a way to retrieve a list of hard drives that match their requirements, and make their own choice?
My guess is that in 80%+ of situations, simple measurements and properties of products (with price, reliability, and perhaps other ranking factors to tie-break) are all that consumers want.
Even if ads did this, would anyone believe it? The obvious conflict of interest removes all legitimacy from any claim in any advertisement.
Now people just search for reddit posts instead. We want to see what real people think about the product, not some paid-for opinion. We want to see the products compared with their competitors. Advertisers figured this out and have started astroturfing on reddit as well...
You're dead right, there is no other way to get real/accurate facts about products other than to check the experience of others.
One gets good at it too, one quickly learns how to distinguish those who've vested interests and hype up their products over those of rivals, similarly one learns to ignore the clueless who down rate a good product simply because they're incapable of reading the manual.
I've found that doing such research across multiple sites to be absolutely invaluable.
I was looking to buy an item but the store had so many options that I got completely overwhelmed with choice paralysis. Afterwards I started getting ads from said store in chunks of three items. It made it possible to evaluate things in peace over time since I was only exposed with a few options at a time in my regular feeds. I finally ended up buying one of those options.
Maybe it's more of a problem of choice paralysis but the fact that the options naturally and slowly showed up when I wasn't actively looking made it much easier.
To the contrary I got an add for the local bus service, which I checked out and found to be targeted to everybody living in Denmark and being 18+. It was extremely not relevant to me because I am a happy driver (happy in particular that I don't have to use the bus service).
The less that advertisers have the ability to manipulate me, the better.
To not have this privacy invasion, I would have gladly paid a few 100 more though.
And a confusing thing (to me); why did that ad only show up in another site (some news site with an unrelated article) instead of in Google when I searched for those specs? It did not have to be personalized at all: it just could have shown when I literally was searching for it with the search results adwords?
there is literally no evidence for this
Pushing ad dollars into prohibition will make the problem much worse than it already is.
Maybe I am out of touch with reality but it seems to me that there is mostly a demand, or maybe better a desire, to advertise something while I do not think that there is the same demand or desire to consume those advertisements. But all kind of media will happily take some of those advertising dollars and force the ads onto us, whether online, on paper, on TV, or billboards. And people don't complain because they get stuff cheaper or even for free, or so they think.
If by that you mean that we should incarcerate influencers like we do drug traffickers, I'm all for it!
Period.
Double gain if it would eliminate tracked advertising on the rest of the internet.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https:/...
which is great, but I think DE and FR are way ahead compared to other countries in that area.
Edit: also in UK there's "Which?":
It was only ever able to cover a tiny part of the market for a few selected things, though. (And of course only a small minority of people would ever see it.)
I'm not sure how well that would scale.
This is different than surveilling people's private and intimate communications, building a profile from those, then targeting against those built profiles.
I can always not use the loyalty card if I really want a purchase to be private, but that would only be really true if:
- I approached the store not using any type of vehicle with a government identifier that could be potientially observed or tracked,
- I paid cash,
- I wore a disguise to not show up on the store's security cameras or be recognizable to others,
- and I didn't bring a cell phone and/or any other device broadcasting a MAC address to a potential sniffer.
I half-wonder whether there's a more pernicious plan which actively wants customers to know they're being tracked, on the assumption that if they see their purchases as contributing to a persistent profile with unknown distribution, they'll try to curate that profile to make themselves "look good" the same way they do on Facebook etc. Don't want everyone to think I'm a cheapskate, better buy that more expensive brand even though I can't taste the difference...
2. Grocery stores are retail. They spend money on bulk product, mark it up, then sell it. Why would a grocery store simply not stock things it doesn't want people to buy?
3. If there is some master plan behind the scenes, who's paying the grocery store to keep product it's trying to shame people into not buying with loyalty cards?
To your 1, I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised. "Value" own-brand ranges are typically packaged to look cheaper and cruder than fancier lines. The cardboard costs the same either way.
To your 2 and 3, it's about capturing consumer surplus, not stopping value sales altogether. The customer who can only afford the cheapest lines will still buy the cheapest lines. The one who could afford something a bit more upscale, but wouldn't normally care enough, might be nudged.
And looking further into the dystopian future: what if it becomes more than just status anxiety? What if buying the "wrong" things affects your (social?) credit score, or your health insurance premiums?
In the case of internet and Google, we are being stripped of that basic choice. Google's browser, browser extensions, cdn, site analytics, dns, their prepackaged apps that are hard to uninstall on Android, all these are making it virtually impossible to walk away from that "loyalty program".
There may be people who like personalised advertising and I think they should have the choice to let Google and other internet companies scrape all the personal data they can from them in exchange for targeted ads. I'm not one of them. I want to surf the internet on my terms. I want to pay for the services I like to use like I do now for those that are available and uninstall apps from my devices without breaking warranty from my mobile manufacturer. I want that choice. After all, that's what life is about. If anyone says that we can't find that middle ground where people like me can browse the internet without personalised ads, then fuck personalised ads.
When you're a tiny operation, you can't spend millions on a broad fishing net and hope somebody will match your ideal customer. Having the ability to precisely target who sees your ads is a great way to get some initial momentum and traction, without going under.
It sounds like targeted advertising based on a user's behavior on a specific site would still be allowed? i.e. I watch a lot of backpacking videos on Youtube, show me backpacking gear advertisements on youtube.
How would you feel as a user? Are you always interested in being a "consumer" and willing to have your habits sold so you are the target of ads?
How does your target audience feel?
I would like to have total transparency about which personal information was used to target me so that I can opt-out of sharing a certain piece of information if I'm so inclined.
I would like to have the ability to revoke access to my personal information from companies that I don't personally like.
------
I understand the anti-ad/privacy fanatics and share most of the values but the extreme end sins in too much short-sightedness and hypocrisy. Understand that if your will becomes reality day 1 will be a very different day from what you had in mind. In the meantime put your money where your mouth is and stop using any services that uses users' private data for improving the product: search, maps, youtube, twitter... you're pretty much left with Wikipedia. Oh, and thank you for the cookie bars, great addition.
Privacy is a human right, and you seem to be putting the burden on the user to protect it, rather than on the companies to stop abusing it.
We live in "1st world countries" - I assume you do too - and we have the luxury of having regulations that allow us to opt out of some things, but others might not be so fortunate; I believe we should lead the way in preventing people from being products. It might be a pipe dream, but things are obviously not working at the moment
I think that's exactly it - advertisement are unsolicited communication - aka spam.
Outlawing spam does not mean that you cannot communicate with people that choose to listen.
They are not free, you pay for them with everything you buy, with the ad budget share of the price. And you are not only paying for the service you want, you are also paying for the entire ad industry on top of that.
Free services have no reason to exist without advertising.
This is at the very least not obvious. Advertising does, again at least not obviously, increase the amount of money consumers [can] spend. If they shift money to one product, another one will see reduced consumption and get more expensive to manufacture.
Also what prevents one or a few companies from being very successful with their advertisement, becoming a oligopoly or even a monopoly and then inflating the price for more profit and to the disadvantage of the consumers?
I think this is just as muddy as the bits you pointed out. Incumbents don't need to advertise but new players do and they have a better chance to gain market share with targeted advertising due to more effective use of their often limited budgets.
You are of course right, I only wanted to given some scenario with opposite outcome for customers. My point was more that one will have to provide much better arguments or evidence than some random macroeconomic interaction to convince me that advertising has any net positive effect.
It's always useful to go back to basics: Let's say I'm a teenager and I want to make some money to buy a new bike by mowing lawns. Will I just sit on my front porch and hope that my neighbours will read my mind? Of course not, I'll advertise by knocking on doors or distributing flyers.
Then, targeted advertising is putting flyers only in the mailboxes of houses that have a lawn instead of distributing at random.
Banning advertising altogether is at best an ill-thought-out position, at worst a call to enforce a planned soviet-style economy. Banning targeted advertising does not seem much better (of course the article qualifies this proposed ban as only being "on the basis of pervasive tracking", not general).
And I say this as someone with an instinctual dislike for advertising and practically any sort of opportunistic promotion/marketing.
I'd argue that advertising should not be a tax-deductible business expense. That would discourage overdoing it.
Are you ready to pay 5$/month to have access to google search, then 2$/month for hackernews, another 5$ for youtube, and then 3$ for your mail address... ? The web runs on ads
This is still a nascent idea; I don’t know how this would be enforced, and there are a lot of blurry boundaries. I think this would be an interesting thing to explore.
And apparently it wasn't enough, since the EU was lobbied to update the law with "special interests" that allow companies to track and monetize you without opt-in anyway. So, the worst of both worlds.
Yes, it's likely that those opt-out checks, hidden under a folded option and requiring literally hundreds of clicks to remove all third-party ad providers, are illegal. [1] That doesn't seem to deter popup developers from designing them that way.
[1] https://dma.org.uk/uploads/misc/5b0523a0d1a2b-5ae1fbf5c60fd-...
The law itself is surprisingly reasonable and shouldn't be faulted. The "loopholes" are breaking the law, plain and simple.
Targeted advertising (especially on social media) really levels the playing-field, as smaller businesses can target niche audiences. It's sad that Big Tech have ended up the de-facto middleman between all advertisers and all communities, but that's a separate question. If you want to make it easier for competing advertising agencies to carve out parts of the market the worst thing you can do is add onerous complex regulation.
The problem is when you walk into an auto parts store, have to wait in line, so you play whatever the newest game is on your phone. The game figures out where you are via gps, reports that to facebook, and suddenly you're getting car part ads on facebook. This is not clear to most people. And I'd even say this behavior is just fine if you opt-in to it.
And it gets worse. You have a friend in your contacts list (which you shared with Facebook for some reason). Facebook thinks that they probably share the same interests as you, so now THEY are getting auto parts ads.
At least for me, as long as this is all clear and accepted, I'm fine with it. As of now, consumers either don't have a choice, or the choice they do have is so hidden that they don't know they have it.
It's become more of an extortion scheme. Ask a small business about Yelp.
well, it is liked by the perpetrators, not the victims.
If individual users could pay a few cents to access content across thousands of websites, with the total spend level aggregated, this could replace the need for advertising.
Some turn to ads because they can't afford to host/build the content otherwise, even though they don't like having ads.
I think we do desperately need viable widespread micropayments system(s). We need an alternative funding mechanism. Plastering everything with ads is no good solution, whether they invade privacy or not.
I wonder if online shops would start offering a discount if the user says yes to targetted advertising.
I’m IN a store, show me ads with spec sheets for items IN your store only. I save time. You sell more, more easily.
Let's clean that up first before creating a new set of rules.
At that point I wouldn't care about "intentions" behind such regulation.
https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-cut...
Perhaps it’s not much of a loss.
That being said, it is possible to get around this. The trade-off is: the privacy cost versus efficiency of advertising. I don't think there are any easy solutions short of coming down definitively on privacy. All the pop-ups are very annoying, and introduce friction to just using the website (I go onto Google, I search, I click result, stuff starts leaping on my screen...Agree to this...ad blocker on? Do this please...what a mess).
I agree