It's confusing as a war is because the regulators decided not to make the law say, 'behavioral advertising is illegal,' and instead have spent years slowly awakening to that conclusion, at the cost of zillions of dollars in legal fees.
It's true the EU does not recognize it's in a war yet but they are at least trying to slow them down. The US is further behind.
Most people seem to happily approve all the GDPR dialogs too. While doomscrolling TikTok/Instagram/FB.
This should make it a lot easier :) It auto-handles most gdpr permission walls, and yes, you can set it to reject all - that's what I do!
(I'm sure this exists for Chrome, too, but if you care about this sort of thing you really should be using Firefox!)
People care about this, so no wonders the industry as a whole is up in arms about it.
What's a "GDPR dialog"? Do you mean a cookie banner? Nothing in GDPR requires a cookie banner.
Companies aren't being punished for it often enough (yet), that is true, but it's absolutely illegal.
Amazon was also fined for not properly asking consent. If I remember correctly, one of the company making those annoying cookies banners where you have a list of trackers to uncheck was also fined for this behavior.
It is illegal to not offer a clear and unambiguous opt out.
Facebook is doing exactly the same and wish to emulate TikTok as much as possible, sharing all data with US 3-letter agencies as required (most probably meaning everything all the time). They are just behind and lost the social momentum. Haven't heard anything about Meta products ban in US, probably because it will never ever happen.
Those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.
If they were to “ban behavioural advertising”, then advertisers would simply rebrand it: “oh no it’s not behavioural advertising, it’s ’interest-centric’ advertising, completely different”.
The point is to ban it in “spirit” not in “letter”, because a ban in the lette would simply get lawyered around and end up not being worth the paper it’s written on.
The advertisers know that these regulations ban behavioural advertising effectively, which is why their immediate tactic is to decry the wording as “too hard” and “too confusing”. This is an obfuscation tactic. Like with GDPR, it’s actually shockingly easy to comply with:
Just don’t track users and sell their data.
It’s the fact that our browsers don’t solve this issue in a standardized way.
Everyone who serves HTTP in the Eu and includes third party tracking, shows you an idiosyncratic consent banner. Often these things download a large amount of JS as well.
That’s completely and utterly idiotic.
- It’s confusing for users.
- It interrupts the user’s flow everytime they visit a site.
- It’s bad for overall performance.
- It’s bad for people who publish content.
- Developers have to defer to legal experts for trivial stuff out of FUD.
- It doesn’t work correctly on the technical side.
- It doesn’t work from a user’s perspective, because they just get annoyed or uncertain and falsely consent!
Nobody wins.
It should just be a standard, global feature in browsers. A site should only ask you _once_, if at all from a user’s perspective.
The browser should send a “profiling and tracking” whitelist, or simply make it available via a JS API.
Why is this not the case?
This should give you the answer to "why this isn't sufficient". The ads industry does not respect anything until it's driven out of existence by fines.
and top is complaining that his industry was instead given unholy ammounts of money to agrue that it isn't.
> That’s completely and utterly idiotic.
Yes. And that's not the fault of the law, but the fault of the companies.
1. The law doesn't talk about browsers, or cookies, or banners. It's a General Data Protection Regulation. It applies in equal measure to browsers, apps, VR, AR, offline interactions, and whatever you can think of
2. The law is ridicuously simple for 99% of use cases, and is extremely cheap to implement. It says, "Only use data you need for the operation of your business. If you collect any other data, you have to ask users for consent. Consent has to be informed, and it must be as easy to say no as it is to say yes"
> Why is this not the case?
Because the companies think that tracking you and selling your data on theopen market is their god-given right.
And the standard is literally already there: it's called GDPR.
"I can make money by collecting this data" is not a legitimate interest.
"Legitimate interest" is there to cover areas that are too numerous to cover in a law. E.g. combating fraud is a legitimate activity, and it requires more data than you strictly need to operate your business.
However, as with all things, companies will try and exploit any and all loopholes possible.
So why would companies who don't give two shits about user privacy bother with any implementation or standards? The law already tells them to provide a yes/no option, and yet here we are.
It's an EU law what did you expect?
You just described regulations.
Yes they could, so the question is why didn't they?
I suspect the answer is that there are lots of factions within the EU, some want to ban it and some don't and what they've done is a compromise.
No, and no, and no.
Most privcy-adjacent laws that EU has released in recent years are neither complex, nor do they cost too much money.
Well, they cost some money because businesses have this entrenched idea that they have an inalienable right to your data, so they don't even know which data they collect, sell, exchange, let leak, or use throughout their systems. Well, boo-hoo. Spend some time and money to get rid of this idea.
And the laws are "indirect" in the sense that all laws are indirect. They have to be general enough to be applicable not just in the year they were released to the technology of the time.
Please visit https://gdpr-info.eu/ and read the text of the 99 articles that make up the GDPR. You don't think 99 separate statements of the law are too many? Not complex? Add in reading all of the CJEU opinions and the original directive behind GDPR (which remains in force). Also add the e-privacy directive, a 15 year old law that is also still in force. How can you say that isn't complex?
> Well, they cost some money
My argument is that it costs more money than it's worth. Hard to find good statistics, but we can leave it at that.
Or they weren’t paid enough in legal and illegal bribes before, if you prefer the cynical take.
We know how well the industry "tries to follow" from how industry follows GDPR and how Facebook keeps pretending that it's their god-given right to use tracking data in advertisment.
> It's confusing as a war is because the regulators decided not to make the law say, 'behavioral advertising is illegal,' and instead have spent years slowly awakening to that conclusion, at the cost of zillions of dollars in legal fees.
It's not confusing. Regulators do what they always do: they let companies do whatever companies do. And when the companies keep doing shitty things, regulators regulate.
What that means for the clerks trying to regulate the ad business... Well...
Data aggregators and advertisers don't have agency?
OK, I’ll bite, then what is it?
These externalities include death of traditional media, extreme levels of political polarization, and climbing suicide rate of teenagers, girls in particular. These things are caused in very large part by the big tech companies maximizing consumption of ads, and efficiency of ads targeting.
Well if adverting is so bad, and old media relied on advertising, Tech was doing the world a favor by starving them out.
We should be thanking Google for exposing the corruption that was the old media advertising empire
Google didn't expose the corruption of old media, rather it supplanted it with even deeper and more insidious corruption.
The problem isn’t the ads. The problem is the ad targeting.
But they (and the rest of the industry) have replaced it with an even more egregious and abusive advertising system.
Google gets no thanks from me.
Every single other type of advertising requires your explicit consent. YouTube? Google? Newspapers? All have your consent.
I can’t avoid billboards. But I can trivially avoid FB/Google/YT etc.
I can also use things like uBlock.
The internet is open and inherently client focused. That’s a huge feature. We’re ultimately in control.
News reports, announcements, updates, etc are often announced and hosted on social media and YouTube. The main news outlets hardly host their own video, and half the useful announcements got made on Twitter first (before Musk torched it lol), so unless “remain deliberately ignorant” is the alternative - which I don’t think it is, then the reality is that you end up on one of these tech giants real quick.
How exactly do they have that "consent"?
There is advertising in public washrooms, there is advertising on people's clothing, there is advertising playing on PA systems, there is advertising embedded in movies, there is advertising presented as news. There is nonconsenting advertising everywhere. In my experience, more of it is nonconsenting than consenting -- probably because very few people would actually consent to it.
Advertising is itself always balancing on the tradeoff between disgruntling the consumer and the benefit the consumer gets from the media/tool they're actually trying to engage with. It's an implicit bargain for most people, not an explicit one.
For me, advertising crossed that line a long time ago. If I had to watch the amount of ads YouTube actually puts in front of you, I wouldn't use it. Thank goodness for ad blockers.
By all attributes, it is a product.