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speaking only for myself, two reasons:
1. they don't show me relevant ads. I would honestly fill out surveys for them to show me relevant ads, but they still won't, just like Netflix and Amazon won't restrain themselves from showing me the same screens full of movies and TV that I will never watch. If they find out that I don't want to drink sugarwater, I swear they will only show me ads for Pepsi, Sprite, etc.
2. They're addicted to hot javascript and flashing lights. If they'd just give me a short text blurb that says "this podcast that you love is brought to you by X ice cream brand", I'd buy that ice cream as thanks. But when they take over my screen and kill my right click menu, no.
In a related way, some vlogger/podcasters that I listen to who touch on controversial subjects have this elaborate "we only advertise products that we ourselves use" speech they give, and I'm thinking, hey, what about an advertiser that would say, "we support free speech on both sides of this issue". I'd buy their product in a second.
I really don't think we're using the same Facebook. Facebook's ads are tiles in the feeds, they're very occasional ads that play after a video when you're in their video section, they're an occasional sponsored Reel that you can just swipe past, and they're a 0.75cm tall strip of products (I get Nordstrom) across the bottom of a playing Reel. Of all the advertising platforms, this seems one of the most respectful of me. Compare this to YouTube's unskippable preroll and mid-roll ads (though the cheap availability of Premium means you're choosing to pay with your time instead of money so :shrug: whatever). And compare with any local or national TV news website and most blog-style sites, laden with fake malware ads, "one weird trick for fat loss" with disgusting body horror pictures. I really genuinely do not find Meta that bothersome compared to almost anyone else.
Try drinking Coke for a year to see if the advertisers flip :)
it's the means by which they make them relevant.
No one would be cool if Facebook sent agents to your home each night to rifle through your drawers to learn about you and "tailor ads to you and make them more relevant".
That's the problem, the data-collecting and spying.
It is not too surprising that companies who can profit from it push the data collection as far as they can. It is more surprising/troubling how the people in general seem to either have completely capitulated due to the generalization of the data collection... or fail to understand the implications it can have.
Thankfully some people in EU courts still think that privacy is a right.
I suppose twitter knows nothing about me and shows me stupid gaming ads all the time. I click on them exactly 0 times. Show me something relevant to what I see on HN and probably will even find it useful.
If I can’t block all ads, at least show me something useful.
Not sure why we need a bizarre analogy here? The actual premise is straightforward and doesn't need abstraction.
every share button on the internet is basically a tracking pixel. who asked for that? nevermind network effects. nevermind intrusive, subversive attempts at tracking like the SDK shenangians. nevermind contact book uploads.
no, they're not invading your home. Gathering information about you from friends who DID let them in? Rifling through your garbage? A chase car to surveil your movements? Perhaps those are more apt comparisons.
Facebook is combining the information they have with information from data collection companies like Datalogix, Acxiom, Epsilon, and BlueKai
...
way more than you'd think, including race, gender, economic status, buying habits, and more
https://lifehacker.com/how-facebook-uses-your-data-to-target... (2013)
They're not selling personally identifiable information. They're selling generalized group info on categories people fall into for targeted ads.
I don't understand how this is a privacy violation or unethical. Especially given Facebook isn't hiding what it's doing, they're open about what they're doing. I assume the customers are informed and are consenting to this in exchange for free use of Facebook's services.
I think it was wrong for Ubuntu to sell user data to Amazon because their users weren't informed. Some people choose Linux for privacy reasons and that trust was violated.
No one who values privacy would willingly use Facebook. Facebook doesn't hide what it does, it's a consensual sharing of information. They even have a big button on their site inviting their users to try targeted ads. Everything they do is in the open.
When they start correlating with external payments sources they are
In any case even if they are I still don't care because they're not tracking me. Know why - it's easy, I just don't use Facebook. People who complain about Facebook collecting their information all the while continuing to use Facebook are not victims - they're just complainers.
If stopping it is as simple as logging off forever and people can't even do that, I can only assume that they consent.
People who want the government to step in to prevent something they could prevent by hitting a log off button...I don't even know what to say about that.
Besides even the criticisms don't make sense - eg complaining that they won't say what info they have while at the same time complaining about video tracking. How do you know they have that if you don't know what they have?
A step further- associating this entity with your identity is trivial with access to additional information. For example, a tagged photo or contact info uploaded by the friend or family member who uses the same networks or devices you do.
Maybe you have yourself sufficiently shielded and have excellent OPSEC. Can you reasonably expect the same from everyone else? Does not having the expertise to be as savvy as you justify being exploited?
Second more importantly privacy seems to be a watchword for tech people. Maybe people claim to care about the sort of privacy you are talking about when asked but their actions speak different. People use Facebook, google maps, leave location data on on their phones. Obviously people don't value privacy as much as they do having access to certain tech. Sad but that's the world, privacy seems to be a thing of the past.
We can all opt out by not using these services. To the extent that we don't there must be some extent to which we accept and consent to this tracking.
I care because I'm afraid of my government and want to keep myself secure from them. I also realize that's not the average person. My preference for privacy means not using Facebook it doesn't mean I get to control how Facebook does business or how people choose to use it.
My view is that ultimately people have to be responsible for the tech that they use and how they use it. We can't just pass along that responsibility to government or business.
But through democracy, they can elect politicians that can create laws to give authorities tools to assert leverage. This is what we see in action here.
Talk to people who have downloaded Facebook or Instagram to their phones? They're tracking you.
Have someone take a picture of you, even incidentally in the background in public, and post it to Facebook? They're tracking you.
They're literally shameless stalkers who suck up as much data as possible through every possible avenue to do entity resolution to track individuals to the degree they possibly can.
This is mass, corporatized surveillance, and we shouldn't suffer it.
I would agree this is a big deal if it's true but I haven't seen evidence of it being true.
The rest of your arguments ignore the human choice aspect. Facebook didn't come pre-installed on my phone, I don't think it came pre-installed on anyone's.
At the end of the day using Facebook is a choice. Nobody has to have Facebook. I get by fine without it, without instagram, WhatsApp any of it. These are things people willigly choose to use and give their info to.
I think your arguments have weight only if their users are unaware of Facebook selling data to advertisers. You'd have to be living under a rock not to know that in 2023. I mean it's not just a choice it's an informed choice.
The modern personally targeted ads are fucking terrible, excuse my language. They have a relevancy rate of <1% and usually just suggest things that I've searched google for and already bought. The amount of fucking data collection that goes into something that boils down to "advertise me things I've already bought or did a google search for in the past 2 weeks" is insane. You could get rid of 99.9% of the data collection and still serve the exact same ads based only on my Google searches.
Ads, like noise, impose a mental cost on every person who watches them. Besides the benefits to the business, a very small percentage of those people get the benefit because they want to buy the product. We generally tolerate ads in society, despite the blanket costs because some amount of ads are necessary for businesses (and ergo society) to flourish.
The problem with targeted-ads is that they are custom designed to mind fuck me. The concept, every letter, every color, every image chosen by a cadre of professionals, who spend their entire life doing this, and highly sophisticated algorithms, designed fully to get me to want to buy something I don't need. Human brains, evolved on the African savanna are simply not designed to withstand this sort of assault.
I don't want to be exposed to such ads, and society doesn't need them to flourish. Do as much as you can with non-targeted ads, and go home.
Because they should show fewer ads that don't fuck with our heads and make less money in the process, and regulation hasn't caught up yet, and in the meantime they have an approximate monopoly so we have to deal with it.
Because they stay in power not by doing the best job or providing the best service, not even a good one really, but by manipulating markets, governments, and people in their favor, and by destroying competition, which means they've earned no respect and deserve nothing.
> they should show fewer ads that don't fuck with our heads
If I'm shown an ad that caters to my taste in software and horror movies, I don't consider that to be fucking with my head.
I made screenshots just to be able to show them to people like you.
For context:
Image 1 and 2 are successful and popular persons in Germany.
"He didn't know his mic was on. Is his career over now?"
"The scandal which is shocking the entire world, Stefan Raab didn't know that the camera was filming"
Image 3: Attractive women with 6 fingers because they were made with Stable Diffusion
https://imgur.com/a/tm3wQs2 (excludes 3rd image)
https://imgur.com/a/9Q9YI4b (requires accepting 18+, but it is sfw)
"Why people are so vehemently against leaving their door open for the amazon delivery guy to put the package they ordered indoor instead of outside in the rain, they pay for a safe delivery ?"
Because things that can be abused are abused
The obvious counter-argument is that, somewhere in the 100(+?)-page ToS, User Agreement, EULA, Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy documentation, you did.
We really need to make new laws to force companies to explain, in plain (terse) English, what they're doing with our data -- everyone knows nobody reads those documents.
(EU privacy/data protection regulations already have some of these, and they were violated by Facebook, which is what the article is about).
Facebook's EULA is over four thousand pages long [1]. Burying info in a bunch of legal text does not constitute informed consent in the EU.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/terms-of-service-visualizin...
https://design.cnil.fr/en/concepts/information/
1. it's not necessary for the service provided (a social network) so it should be explicit opt-in
2. it should be written in an explicit and understandable way 3. the user should be able to opt-out at any moment
none of that are true with an EULA of 1000+ page long written in legalese that you can only accept in a block by checking a little checkbox
Without targeted advertising this cottage industry and the associated data on people would not have as much of a reason (or any) to exist, improving privacy for the average person.
From what I have heard, Google instead sells ad space in real-time with information about the viewer attached to the ad space - but not the identity of the viewer; real life, online alias, or otherwise. Advertisers then in real time bid for that ad space depending on whether they are interested in the viewer characteristics attached to it - it’s all automated / done by preprogrammed bots.
I'd like to see an example of an ad platform that actually does this.
One concept I've seen floated is separating the advertising markets from the user-facing services. As in DOJ/antitrust legal seperation of Google, Facebook, etc into smaller entities.
In that world Facebook-the-social-network-I-use company would need to send data Facebook-the-advertising-market company for each page load to request some ads to display. What data would be in that request? My reading of EU law is that such data couldn't be personally identifying or of a private nature (so, like, 99.9% of what I do on facebook...). Features like time of day and language of user would be fine and appropriate - the sort of data used by TV networks to choose which ad to display on their broadcast.
It doesn't matter if you seperate the Facebook company this way, my understanding of EU privacy law is that they still can't use your private data to augment the advertising part of the business when you were there to use the social network part of the business. (Note: the social network still provides user aggregation and has value to FB without any ad personalization).
It is more Facebooks inaction despite being aware of this rather than their actions.
The latter gives them constant unchecked access. It’s like handing someone a blank check instead of a check for a fixed amount.
This is a particularly poor one.
Someone mentioned "poisoning the well" earlier. I sense a lot of that and like you I am struck by the prevalence of whataboutism and bad faith questions in this thread, particularly low quality leading questions relentlessly sealioning in the credulous tone of a five year old child ;
"But mummy, why is it bad to stab someone in the face with a garden fork?"
i get the dream and i buy things all the time but for me ads don't make that buying experience easier because i dont trust any of the content in them so it doesn't save me any time on researching what i want to buy. i'd rather have irrelevant ads because maybe they are easier to ignore and they won't serve as a constant reminder of how much data companies have on me. seeing an ad for something i recently searched on a different company's site generally makes me unhappy.
"actually" stands as a weasel word here. Trying to use the internet w/o an adblock is a daunting experience. When I have tried: I am, yet, to see a single relevant ad shown to me, it's especially funny if you live in a country where you don't speak the local language - the browser preferences/headers(accept-language) are ignored altogether, so pretty much everything "targeted" is entirely useless.
However, receiving an online invitations to learn that programming language is still funny enough. Car ads are funny too, especially if you don't drive at all. Local pizza deliveries, when the same chain won't deliver to the place you live (the IP location is pretty spot on). That kind of stuff: "actually" irrelevant.
The grocery store doesn't like this and want to start making it illegal to enter the store with any notes.
Their argument is that they have laid out the store in such a way that it expects people to get distracted and buy things they don't need, so planning your trip to the grocery store harms their current way of doing things.
To me at least, this sounds insane and extremely arbitrary. Arbitrary because it __feels like__ I can just keep the list of notes in my head instead. It also __feels like__ I'm being denied behaving in a certain way.
Perhaps it's a personality trait, but when something is this contrived it's easy to feel vehemently opposed to this.
do they? isn't this the secret sauce?
But ads can get ultra intrusive if you carry around tracking thingies like cookies and people have varying thresholds for what they consider "personal" information.
just as an example, two random subjects i recently browsed online are taylor swift and over vs under breast implants
i can't stand taylor swift, i just wanted to see what the fuss about her concert movie was about, kinda hoping it was panned (it's not being panned)
the over vs under breast implants was to settle a bet i had with my gf - she said her friend has under muscle breast implants, i didn't believe her when she said that was a thing so googled and was proven wrong
now i'm being presented news articles and ads about both those topics, despite me having zero interest in either of them (and no, i'm not going to engage in some semantics about akshully i'm implicitly interested in them, otherwise i wouldn't have googled them - i'm not, periodt)
Ads are surveillance of you to find out your age, income, sex, address, phone, behavioral characteristics, etc.
Those characteristics are then sold to advertisers who bid to present ads to you.
In other words, if you like lego, you will not see lego ads.
Instead you will see water filter ads because they won the bid to serve someone with your characteristics, income, etc the advertisement.
Positional Advertising in magazines worked perfectly well for decades, as an example.
The canonical example being that if you buy a Car magazine, as an Advertiser I can assume you are a potential car buyer and therefore warmed up to see Ads about cars.
The Digital Ad market is nonsense for many businesses: At one point Facebook Ads for Australia promoted a potential audience reach than was greater than the population of Australia.
In smaller markets, Ad Targeting is often useless :-/
in the past, we could tune out that channel with the remote.Tune another channel. Catch another show. And the original show would continue when you came back, even if you missed a few secs
The current setup does not allow this. We are losing ownership of our devices.
I guess an ad is just a particular type of content with a particular type of agenda.
ads are a subset of content that is typically fed to you against your will, is that better?
First, some people just don't want to see ads at all. I'm sympathetic to this. I use ad blockers. I don't feel bad about that. But it's not really a reason to oppose contextual advertising.
Second, a lot of people don't really understand what targeted advertising is. I think some people think Meta or Google are selling a zip file saying "Bob Smith of 1234 Main Street like Lego, trains and polyamory" when an advertiser doesn't actually care about you, personally. They care about an audience. This is a group of people with some defined set of characteristics like "Men aged 18-35 that live in the Pacific Northwest and like fishing and hiking". And they're not selling that data. They're selling access to people who match a profile.
It's a little trickier with third-party data services and cookie matching but all that really comes down to is the platform creates an ID for you and passes that to the advertiser so when they see you, they can build their own contextual data. That may sound nefarious but the ID is just a random string. It's different for every advertiser so you can't match across advertisers. Users can pretty much reset that ID at any time and all that matching data is effectively orphaned and lost.
Now we can, should and have had conversations about what targeting is allowed. Generally, location can't be too specific (eg typically only down to a city or town). There have been issues too with illegal discrimination (eg [1][2]).
I also think we should generally ban all advertising to anyone under 18, targeted or not.
So personally I see advertiser targeting capabilities not behavioural contextualization of preferences to be the issue to tackel.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/21/faceboo...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/24/google-se...