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It seems obvious to me that there is genuine benefit: otherwise it is a giant scam against the advertisers as well as an invasion of individual privacy, and there would be lobbing from larger commercial entities affected to make the scam illegal if it were one.

Though that there is a benefit to businesses, however small, does not make me inclined to be happy that I am stalked throughout my personal life online by a great many advertising firms, and information about me gleaned from that stalking bought and sold between them, in order for those businesses to experience said benefit.

If it were banned globally, the “but how do I run my business otherwise?” question is a problem for the businesses, not me.

The “most people don't mind, you are just being contrary” argument that I've seen once or twice is bunkum. If that were the case it would not be so often be made such a faf to opt-opt.

One thing where I feel current privacy laws are a little off, is disallowing blocking for people who don't opt in. I've quite happy to be given a choice of “let this list of hundreds of third parties track you, or go away” (in case you haven't guessed, I'll go away) as long as no tracking is initiated between my arrival and going away without opting-in.

I don't particularly care if advertisers build a profile of me for the purpose of advertising. I use ad blockers and I rarely if ever see ads when doing anything online.

My concern is that all this profile data is being slurped up by people who can really do harm: governments and their TLAs. People don't get sent to re-education camps (or worse) by companies trying to sell dog treats.

Like you, my problem isn't advertising, but the tracking. Though unlike your position this isn't because I block the adverts regardless. I wouldn't block the advertising if it were not for it being intimately linked with the tracking & recording. Apart from simply avoiding sites that carry rudely irritating adverts (huge pop-overs, auto-playing audio & video, …) that is.

> People don't get sent to re-education camps (or worse) by companies trying to sell dog treats.

No, but they might by state agencies that gain access to the data (by fair means, at least as defined by their laws, or foul) to use as part of a larger profile.

My personal concern isn't state entities. Maybe this is some of my old-fashioned-ness speaking out but the idea of being followed around is just icky much like being followed home from the pub of an evening, or otherwise tracked in the real world, would be.

Of course, there are people for whom state agencies are a concern, and not just state agencies but various negative activist groups and other undesirables: I know a few people who don't want parts of their personal lives (gender status, abortion, the fact they consider themselves atheist, etc.) tracked because in the wrong hands it could, even in 2023, lead them and/or their loved ones to come to harm. They don't want an advertising company holding information about them because this is just one hack away from a lot of other groups having the information, and while it is highly unlikely that they are tracking such information they likely have something that could help derive it (location data being the most obvious factor there, and advertiser love to track that).

I agree, there's a creepiness to it, but demographic-based target marketing isn't exactly new. Remember when products used to come with a "warranty registration card" that not only asked for your name and address and phone number but your income, SSN, other products you owned, hobbies, age, marital status, etc? Or you'd enter a contest to win something, and the entry form asked for similar information?

All of that went into databases that were bought and sold, matched and merged with each other, for purposes of lead generation and target marketing.

What Meta and Google are doing is nothing new, they just have much better collection and segmentation than was ever possible, and it's much more covert than what was ever possible.

> What Meta and Google are doing is nothing new

The new part is making it nonoptional.

You never had to enter a contest or send in a warranty card, after all.

All those were up-front and optional (though maybe the wording made the details seem less optional). The surveillance done by the advertising industry these days is definitely not up-front nor optional where they can possibly make it automatic/required/both.

> What Meta and Google are doing

It isn't just Meta and Google. It is a great many companies large and small.

> is nothing new

Even if I accepted the equivalence, the industry having done a smaller version of this surveillance in the past doesn't make it right. My friend traded a bit of weed in the 90s, that would be no reason for us to take an “it is what it is” attitude if he traded a ton of crack today!

So you DO care. A lot. Enough to install tools to frustrate the process.

To me it reads like

> I don't particularly care if advertisers build a profile of me for the purpose of advertising. [But I do care about not seeing ads in the first place, so] I use ad blockers and I rarely if ever see ads when doing anything online.

I block the ads because they are annoying, not out of concern that the advertiser per se has a profile about me.

I am the reverse. I don't block ads per se, but I absolutely block scripts (which has the effect of blocking ads) because I find the spying completely unacceptable.

Yep, I agree with what you're saying here. My personal preference is to allow greater advertising, even putting my own use for it aside, because I both generally believe it's better to let markets do what they will and also because I have a significantly above-average understanding of what's being tracked and how it's being used. My preference is for transparency, education and possibly regulation around how data that is collected can be sold to/shared with others.

Still, I definitely the side of wanting to restrict it more in order to protect folks, and I think it's very much a worthy debate to have.

If it weren't banned globally, the “but how do I protect my privacy?” question is a problem for the consumers, not me.

“I don’t consume stuff”, says paragon of austerity.

What you are describing is targeted advertising, not behavioral advertising. The article discusses a ban on behavioral advertising. Behavioral is targeting advertising based on how a user interacts with content on the internet, instead of basing it on their personally stated interests, which they have control over.

In your case, instead of targeting advertising at users that scroll past cat videos and choose to watch dog videos, you could target advertising to users in a dog owners FB group.

> because a much higher percent of people who click on it convert.

And even better (for the consumer), a higher percentage of people who _see_ the ad are likely to actually be interested in the topic.

This compared to the annoying ShaneCo ads that have been plauging radio stations for years.

Totally - the most positive ad experience I've ever had was when I was looking for a gift for my then-girlfriend and was served an ad for a company that offered private tours of the SF Zoo where you got to meet the red pandas. I got a great experience that I otherwise would never have known about, and the company + zoo both made money. This is good!

> And even better (for the consumer), a higher percentage of people who _see_ the ad are likely to actually be interested in the topic.

Which inadvertently means the consumer is forced to see less ads, since each ad is capable of generating more revenue and therefore there doesn't need to be as many of them.

So, you've sacrificed some privacy, and in exchange you get less ads and better targeted ads. Was this a good trade-off for the consumer? I don't know. It probably doesn't make a big difference to our lives one way or the other.

> the annoying ShaneCo ads

On the corner of State St and 7200 South. Open Monday through Fridays til 8, Saturdays til 5. Closed Sundays.

How was anyone able to sell dog treats before pervasive digital surveillance? Must not have been possible.

You probably had to be a major national brand.

That's not true. I am old enough to remember that we had boutique dog treats in the 90s, too. The vet my parents used sold some, and I recall several nearby bakeries (not chains) selling house-made dog biscuits.

Yes but the barrier to start a internet-only small business with advertising is the lowest it's ever been. Before you were either only local (bad luck if there's already a pet store in your town), or you had to be huge. Online advertising is a great equalizer that has allowed many regular people to run successful businesses without much starting capital.

> Online advertising is a great equalizer that has allowed many regular people to run successful businesses without much starting capital.

Maybe so, but I personally don't think that's worth abusing the public with tracking.

Yeah that’s the current situation is better for small businesses is a bit of a weird take, considering how consolidated the world has gotten in the last 20 years.

While there might be anecdotes to support such a claim, the numbers tell a different story. Any reduction in friction is bound to benefit the businesses with the largest footprint, as they can leverage economies of scale and recursive synergies.

> Yeah that’s the current situation is better for small businesses is a bit of a weird take, considering how consolidated the world has gotten in the last 20 years.

I think it's more nuanced than that - it's not that the current situation overall is better, it's that the state of advertising is better. On the other side of things, the ability of large corporations to achieve greater economies of scale is decidedly worse for small businesses, to your point. The fact that targeted advertising is there helps to offset that a bit.

Local stores have always existed.

because The Old Way is universally better.

in this case it clearly is? i don't care about capitalism's ability to unethically try to manipulate me into giving it money. if it sucks for business owners then that's too bad - maybe they should do something different with their time.

Yeah, well, that's where we differ. I think giving small business owners access to tools to show up in front of an audience that is interested in them is worthwhile while you believe almost all consumer products should be sold only by megaconglomerates who can afford large blocks of advertising.

That's a pretty big difference in our viewpoints and while HN currently tends towards yours, I have no doubt that my objectives lead to a better world for consumers (and actually, non-consumers as well) than yours.

Considering you make a very bold claim would you mind expanding on how you think your viewpoint is actually better?

How about the option in which there's still at most limited ads and we also break up all those big corporations into lots of little ones?

I don't think active management of company size works successfully. The enforcement division of any nation would be a significant portion of GDP. And what happens to products like the iPhone? After the ten thousandth iPhone, you're a $10 mm revenue company and someone else sells the next iPhone? I'm not convinced that's better for consumers and non-consumers.

> That's a pretty big difference in our viewpoints and while HN currently tends towards yours

This is an interesting phenomenon no matter what the topic is - I experience it too. It's human nature to feel counter culture. I believe HN is pretty strongly pro-capitalism for reasons that are obvious due to the nature of the site.

I don't think small business owners are innately more deserving of money. They still make money off the backs of others, just at smaller scales. Competition is important to make capitalism less sociopathic but small business owners aren't meaningfully competing with Amazon.

Also to be clear, I think all advertising is unethical. It's a spectrum for sure though.

By being a monopoly in your region of course.

This is a perspective that’s not usually talked.

Small, incredibly niche businesses come up often when we talk about ads. Probably because they are one of the few sympathetic business models that benefit from hyper-targeted ads.

It is nice that people can start these incredibly niche businesses, but we have to weigh that against the fact they we’ve built a massive surveillance apparatus and also the misinformation ecosystem that grew out of Facebook is screwing up politics around the world.

But ya know, dog treats, I guess it is a hard choice.

> we’ve built a massive surveillance apparatus and also the misinformation ecosystem that grew out of Facebook is screwing up politics around the world.

I'm also concerned about the misinformation ecosystem, but why is the surveillance apparatus a primary cause? I'd say the primary causes are a lack of content moderation and the incentives that the platform creates by putting likes as the main way that ideas spread.

What digital advertising platform do you use? I am looking for methods to promote my small business and have an idea of my audience but want to understand the most efficient way to reach them.

You’re conflating several different things here. Facebook et al could easily change the targeting criteria to match the content your ads are being displayed next to, rather than the audience that is looking at it. Especially with AI content description and summarization tools. The fast feedback and targeting you can get from digital advertising could still be available without mass surveillance.

No, what you're suggesting misunderstands why these ads work well.

I don't care what content you're looking at. I care who are you. Specifically, I care whether you're a person who owns a dog and spends money on high-quality/luxury dog goods. Whether you're looking at something related to dogs or a post by someone in your family about a wedding last weekend doesn't matter.

Displaying my ad next to dog-related content would be much, much worse from a targeting perspective. Instead of targeting the people who are likely to buy my product, it'd end up targeting people watching dog videos. The set of people who watch dog videos is much broader than my target audience - my mom watches dog videos sometimes, and she's a cat person!

> Specifically, I care whether you're a person who owns a dog and spends money on high-quality/luxury dog goods.

Thing is, that is non of your god damned business.

You can show your ads next to dog videos or whatever other content you like. You don't get to spy on me just because you think you'll learn better ways to try to manipulate me.

If targeted advertising were really about helping get the information to interested people who want that information, then content based advertising would accomplish that.

>I don't care what content you're looking at. I care who are you. Specifically, I care whether you're a person who owns a dog and spends money on high-quality/luxury dog goods. Whether you're looking at something related to dogs or a post by someone in your family about a wedding last weekend doesn't matter.

I think you have it backwards. You don't care who someone is. Rather, you care about "people most likely to buy my product," and much, much more about people who actually buy your product. Their name, family history, life story and other information is irrelevant.

Having the money to pay and the will to buy are the only important things.

As such, which was alluded to by others, instead of spying on/tracking people to hazard a guess (perhaps even a good guess, but not necessarily) what they're likely to purchase, let's just ask them up front to list the things they are interested in, with the ability to modify such a list whenever they like.

And make that list opt-in, of course.

Then use the database of those lists to target ads. People see ads for stuff they're interested in, those who aren't interested don't see them. Which is a win-win for consumers and advertisers. Consumers only see relevant ads and advertisers know their ad impressions are among folks who are actually interested.

Sure, there are lots of reasons to argue against a voluntary database like that, not least of which ad-supported sites would suffer.

But if you (like me) don't earn a living via ad-tech, even such a flawed idea seems like paradise compared to the current levels of spying/tracking which would make a Stasi[0] wet dream look decidedly soft-core.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi

People are terrible at judging their own thoughts.

Pound for pound, people prefer ads that are relevant to ads that are irrelevant.

What they are annoyed by is the volume (in multiple senses) of the ads. That's it.

They just take it out on other things.

So you're asserting that marketing companies know people better than they know themselves? If that's true, that's incredibly damning of marketing companies and is a great argument for why they should have access to less individualized data about people.

> marketing companies know people better than they know themselves

Yes. I'm saying it's a low bar because people don't know themselves.