EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram | Hacker News Reader

EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

reuters.com

697 pointspbrw735 comments

I might be in the minority here but I personally find personalized ads useful, and am far more annoyed by ads recommending products and services completely irrelevant to my interests and/or needs.

(The latter still account for the ads I see most of the time, unfortunately.)

Advertising does not simply suggest you something that you might need, it often tries to manipulate you into needing something, and with the amounts of personal data being collected and advancements in machine learning this manipulation becomes dangerously effective.

Sure. As long as I don’t have to deliver (all) my private data to get those relevant ads.

ALL your private data sounds rather extreme. That could certainly mean a lot of things!

Some examples of what I'm fine with: if I visit a hardware store's online website and am then retargeted by their ads, or I visit a hardware magazine's website and am then targeted by hardware ads.

Sellers and marketers don't want you opting into their market (eg. by checking a box that says "I want ads for computers"). They want to target their customers with fine-tuned, data-driven assumptions. Age, gender, income, interests, career...

This is the value Facebook delivers (targeting and measuring), and it's about to go up in smoke.

Nobody will pay the same price for a billboard.

That's entirely reasonable. Unfortunately, people don't make distinctions. Some kinds of ad targeting are far more intrusive than others.

Which is fine. The sites can show non-personalized ads, and occasionally replace an ad with an ad for turning on ad personalization. You can then opt in, and get personalized ads. Everyone else can have their privacy respected. That's what GDPR intended.

However, personalized ads are more profitable, and so every single platform subverted the rights of the users. And instead of banning Facebook from continuing to do so until they present a plan that is reviewed and approved, which would be appropriate after years of violations, all the authorities now did is explicitly telling Facebook that they can't continue to break the law.

The headline is incredibly misleading. If you take a closer look at what is actually forbidden, emphasis mine: "On 27 October, the EDPB adopted an urgent binding decision ... to impose a ban on the processing of personal data for behavioural advertising on the legal bases of contract and legitimate interest across the entire European Economic Area"

They can still do behavior ads on the basis of consent. And because some DPAs decided that "pay or consent" is OK and there is no binding Europe-wide decision about it yet, that's what Facebook is trying next. If it gets decided that that wasn't ok, Facebook will be fined a fraction (possibly a significant fraction, but still a fraction) of the additional revenue they made by breaking the law, in a couple of years, and then, over a decade after GDPR went into force, they might actually follow it.

There are types of personalised advertising which aren't deemed harmful, but are still useful. Examples include providing alternatives and suggestions based directly on the user's input/selections, or other non-specific criteria such as the weather, season, holidays etc. This is the equivalent of a shop clerk noticing you're looking at scarves, and showing you alternatives, or bringing more out stock because it's winter. This isn't invasive advertising, and this kind of advertising is not being targeted.

What is being targeted is surveillance-based advertising methods. These involve the collection, brokering and combining of user data. This data is purchasable by anyone - including US government agencies which have been using it as way of obtaining information without oversight(1). There is an expectation that other governments and bad actors are also obtaining this data for advantage.

This type of advertising is also responsible for poorly targeted ads that follow you around the internet. Perhaps you mentioned something in passing on an instagram chat, or you liked a photo from a friend on holiday.

Consumers generally underestimate their digital footprint and the risks associated with having this information available. It's more information than what we'd trust our own governments possessing in a single, or any, database, yet we let others take it without any oversight whatsoever. Additionally the information gathered about them can be wrong or invade their privacy in ways they aren't expecting (E.g. infer their sexuality or private desires) (2). Furthermore individual users can be targeted which beyond being able to prank someone(3), is also ripe for exploitation. (4)

(1) https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23844477-odni-declas... or the easier to read: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-government-buys-dat...

(2) https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/16/facebook-faces-fresh-criti...

(3) https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/roommate-makes-...

(4) https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/15/researchers-show-facebooks...

Yes you are in the minority.. those ads are trash and not worth what you are giving up

I find them useful, as I said. So I'm going to disagree with you on the trash thing.

> Meta has stated that it had already announced plans to provide users in the EU and EEA with an opportunity to provide consent and will introduce a subscription model in November to comply with regulatory requirements

This effectively means then that if you are in the EU and you'd want to use either Facebook or Instagram you'd have to pay for a subscription then because they presumably won't offer the free-service without personalized ads and since the law prohibits them from doing that then the only way to use either service will be to pay for it..?

Exactly, and I personally don't see anything wrong with this approach. You can't offer a free service if you can't make money from it somehow.

They could still show ads without all the invasiveness. For example: advertisers could pay to place ads in specific Facebook groups and they would show to people visiting those pages. Like it has been done for decades in magazines and other physical media. The internet did not invent advertising.

The problem is the network effect dissolves. There's no point being on Facebook if 80% of your friends leave because they don't want to pay for it.

Though it'd be interesting to see what wins out, whether people are really willing to pay Facebook enough to replace the ad funds, or if something else wins out.

To some extent easy ad revenue has given some of these companies a version of Dutch disease, if this revenue falls away for whatever reason they'll need to win out in features or efficiency. Given that I'd be happy if facebook vanished from the face of the earth and that their website is the definition of bloat I'd say they're not doing too well in that regard.

From the Independent (and presumably elsewhere):

> Meta said it has cooperated with regulators and pointed to its announced plans to give Europeans the opportunity to consent to data collection and, later this month, to offer an ad-free subscription service in Europe that will cost 9.99 euros ($10.59) a month for access to all its products

> Tobias Judin, head of the international section at the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, said Meta's proposed steps likely won't meet European legal standards. For instance, he said, consent would have to be freely given, which wouldn't be the case if existing users had to choose between giving up their privacy rights or paying a financial penalty in the form of a subscription.

> For instance, he said, consent would have to be freely given, which wouldn't be the case if existing users had to choose between giving up their privacy rights or paying a financial penalty in the form of a subscription.

This is already present in EU. Spiegel.de and others are like that. Pay or be tracked.

Ad-free does not promise nor even imply tracking-free.

In fact, it would still make sense to track ad-free users, if for no other reason than to better target ads to their family members, coworkers, and friends. They probably like what you like.

And "Bob's birthday is coming up, he would love a Barcelona team t-shirt" would be very convincing.

This is awesome. Yet another great reason to leave the service completely.

I thought it was illegal to only offer the privacy service through paying for it?

Unless I’m completely misunderstanding things, they’ll do what many news sites in Germany already do:

Option A: Continue for free with ads (and tracking and profiling etc.)

Option B: Pay for a subscription without ads or tracking (most seem to use a service called "Pur" (pure))

This does not mesh with some people’s understanding of the GDPR, but at least several German courts said it’s okay.

My recollection is that at least some country's regulators have said that if you offer option A you must also offer option A': continue for free without tracking and profiling.

Their reasoning was that GDPR says that consent must be freely given. If the site provides more service if you consent than the consent is not freely given according to those regulators.

(It seemed kind of goofy to me. In every other context I can think of consenting to something that you do not like in exchange for getting something that you want is usually considered to be freely given consent unless that something you want is something that is necessary).

This is common in Italy as well. Do you have any (English) links to court reports?

As far as I understand the issue, using normal ads (without personalization) would be an option too?

They will give you two choices: pay, or consent. The decision just tells them that now, over 5 years after GDPR went into force, they have to stop breaking the law by not even asking for consent and claiming "legitimate interest" or "we need this to fulfill a contract with the user".

Even if they get fined the 4% of annual revenue, that'll be a tiny bit of the extra money they illegally made over those 5 years. And now they'll do the pay-or-consent (which may or may not be legal), and if it's illegal, they'll happily argue for another 1-2 years then pay the fine...

Hot take, it’s hard to have a free internet without ads. Lots of websites have marginal utility, but can be paid for with ads. And those websites will disappear when CPM rates go down the drain.

Ads are not the discussion. It’s tracking.

Some will say that ads hijack your attention and therefore should be blocked by default. This is a different question. But since ad companies wanted to track ROI it became a problem, because it’s pretty easy for them to do that on the internet. That’s why more people are opposed to ads on the internet but not on a busstop.

If the busstop ads start taking retina scans to show you more personal ads while you travel around town, people will be opposed to that too.

You don’t need to track every user and every click to show ads and make money. But as ad companies like meta can make more money by tracking your every step they will just do that.

There were ads on the internet before tracking became a thing. And people made money off of those ads.

Funny reading that from someone with your nickname :-)

The Deutsche Post, or DHL is sort of tracking too, since a looong time. By having their delivery minions gather information about the circumstances people live in, and selling that information to interested parties.

Ads are significantly more useful with tracking. Non-personalized ads are effectively spam and we would be better off without those entirely. Personalized ads can often be as good as the content you're looking for in the first place, if not even better.

> Hot take, it’s hard to have a free internet without ads.

But that's not the issue here is it? *Personalized* ads is the issue. Can the free internet survive without personalized ads? Of course it can. Will a ton of companies disappear? Yes, and so what? Business fail all the time, and new businesses based on different models will fill the void. We might even see a ton of innovation beyond figuring out how to harvest and profile people's data when our biggest brains are directed towards different problems.

Lots of things like niche review sites might die, but those are impossible to find thanks to SEO spam (which is fueled by ads) anyway. Something like forums? The entire reddit database (excluding media) fits on a $150 SSD, and a used laptop can serve tens of thousands of requests/second for such a simple site. Something like a Ryzen 7950X with a few NVMe drives could probably do more than you could reasonably get a network connection for. Someone with 10 gigabit Internet could serve a forum for 10s of millions of users at least at almost no cost.

The primary issue is liability. Secondary is ISPs not allowing people to use their Internet connections for server hosting (a hobbyist could do colocation, and many do already). Fix the law there and the compute cost is peanuts.

> SEO spam (which is fueled by ads)

Huh? SEO exists because companies don't want to pay for ads. If advertising disappears, SEO will just become more prevalent and we'll have to suffer through more and more garbage.

Product review sites seem like the perfect case for contextual advertising; no user tracking necessary at all.

but yet, when we pay for services (Google Suite) and websites... we still get adverts

we're not incentivised to pay as our data is mined and sold anyway, our attention still fought for

For larger companies I think that’s a fair assessment, but there’s a lot of small websites that I only use one or twice a year which are very useful, like camerasize.com, which otherwise I wouldn’t pay for.

As many many others points out, it's not the ads. It is the massive surveillance and privacy invading machinery that powers it all.

For me personally it's also the constant pushing pushing pushing to buy crap that you don't need or replace things you already own. I already have a washing machine, I got it last month, you don't need to sell me another (It's actually amazing that we haven't gotten to the point there advertisers can stop push products a consumer already bought).

Google is actually really good as a "I need to buy X,Y,Z" in that case the ads are super helpful and often more relevant than the search results. I will absolutely click those ads, but I'm not going to order that new washing machine while I'm reading the news anyway.

The vast majority of data gathered by Facebook isn't gathered on Facebook. The vast majority of that data isn't used by Facebook for delivering ads. The utility of Facebook is long lost. I'd gladly pay a few bucks to keep in touch with friends, maintain niche groups, have a Marketplace etc. But Facebook hasn't been that for over a decade. Its utility is all in tracking us around the internet, and selling our profile to the highest bidder.

Ads are fine, but if the idea is that in order to have a free internet, Facebook needs to monopolize our online presence and shape how we receive information on other sites, then that's hardly a free internet. Facebook ruined the internet.

>those websites will disappear

nothing of value will be lost and all that meme.

On a flip note: that's not reddit to preface comments w/ 'hot take'

>Hot take, it’s hard to have a free internet without ads

pretty easy if you publicly fund it. My vision of Europe is every town, every city putting some money into building out federated and decentralized systems, supported by small and middle-sized business. Effectively the same way radio or public broadcasting is already supported in say Germany or the UK.

We should go all the way and just rid ourselves of Meta, Tencent et al, sadly there's probably not enough vision for something like it.

Anything is easy if you can take people's money and assign it to companies deemed worthy by a bureaucrat. But now you have a much bigger problem.

It's a very nice vision

> And those websites will disappear when CPM rates go down the drain.

Good!

Another hot take, its hard to do a consumer based startup without effective and cheap advertising. Its going to hit their startups like fintech, direct to consumer, etc.

This would open an opportunity for a universal micropayments system.

Another hot take: I honestly can't wait for that to happen.

There's a conspiracy here that people can't see.

Free sites will close without targeted advertisement, obviously; they barely can afford to pay salaries now, so with untargeted ads it will be impossible. And the only media sites that will be able to afford to run are those that are subsidised by the state. This is already happening in Europe, where most of the big media are practically bankrupt and their income comes from the state in the form of subsidies, ad campaigns, internships paid by the state, etc.

You already have a sibling comment in this thread precisely asking for that: the state paying for the media. How do they think this will end?

It all boils down to the same problem : people want to have the cake and eat it.

We all want roads to allow us to roam freely but don't want to pay the government people that manage everything around those roads.

Everyone wants free content but everyone wants to be paid for their work.

I have a pihole and one of the website I frequently visit has been remade and now everything is empty. I'm currently thinking about paying for this content... or just quit and live without this content.

I don't understand. We were able to run with untargeted ads for decades. Why now, suddenly only targeted ads are viable?

Alternatively, when the ad-supported sites crash, the space in the marketplace they were filling will be filled by either pay-to-use commercial sites or by free non-profit sites.

Does anyone have any specific details on the ban, maybe a link to the legal document?

The article seems to use "personalized advertising" and "behavioral advertising" interchangeably, and also mentions that using location for advertising is a breach of privacy - which would prevent any local business from advertising itself to people in the same city, as I see it. Was that the intent here?

geographic location in internet means you are being tracked which is by definition part of what we want to stop. This is nothing like local advertising. Local advertising is contextual advertising not personalised one. The equivalent of that in internet would be for example a Gardening website showing adds for gardening tools or a tech website showin ads for notebooks etc. these are tied to the context and are fine. the distinction is that when i go away from that context i'm not followed by those ads. Location based ads in internet follow you around no matter where you are. Imagine how creepy would be for you if you go to vacation in Hawai for example and see a billboard advertising for something in your home town on the other side of the world.

So there are two different things here: you're talking about building an individual profile for someone and including their home address as part of it, and I meant tailoring the ads to the IP address location, regardless of the user identity.

E.g., if I go to linustechtips and see an ad for cheap notebooks at Best Buy, that's pretty useless if Best Buy doesn't even ship to my country. I was just curious what the new regulation says about this.

Doing a rough geolocation based on ip and using that to decide what to send back to the client can’t be considered “tracking”?

Whenever EU services "ban" facebook, i like to remember that European commission and parliament are among the biggest public spenders of ads on facebook, in most EU countries: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report/

You're misrepresenting things quite drastically by leaving out that it's only "ads about social issues, elections or politics", not all ads.

yes of course, i used 'public' because government did not match either. The point is , EU administration is using those personalization features to target their advertising. I still find it odd that EC & EP outspend local politicians

The big problem a lot of people can't follow is this: they track you even without an account. You don't have a business relation with them. That's not ok. For users of their platform, whatever.

Paper ads in magazines of interests were highly interesting, often useful and in sometimes better than the actual content in the magazine itself.

I remember early, search keywords-based textual Google ads still being somewhat interesting, and if not necessarily useful at least comprehensibly relevant.

Whatever slips past my adblocker these days is absolute junk. Internet doesn't effectively exist without an adblocker.

It seems we reached a high-peak in the 90's on so many things.

Is there a reason as to why this is "on Facebook and Instagram" and not just a general ban on personalised advertising? Is there something specific that Meta does that others don't?

1. Regulators can't do sweeping statements, so it's individual assessments (that can inform "similar" cases).

2. Facebook and Instagram are household names, so the media picks up on that.

3. The DPA/Meta situation is going on for a couple of years by now, with rather interesting statements at times (e.g. Meta thinking aloud about ceasing operation in the EU)

I have mixed feelings about this.

I hate that Europe leads in regulation and lags so much in innovation. At the same time, this is a step in the right direction. True, people don't care about privacy, but it's mostly because they don't understand the extent and implications of letting companies control your data.

If we had been smart, we would have banned Google, Facebook and Amazon on our continent and made our own like the Chinese did. It's telling how ridiculed they still are for this obvious move.

I used to think the Europe was mistaken by demanding that the user's data be processed in Europe and all that, but having read a bit more on history, it's a tactical disadvantage to let someone else have so much control over your society.

Mostly agree but it is not like adtech is a innovation-pushing industry.

I'd disagree on this. Ads are the main income for Meta & Google and they're likely one of the most innovative companies in the last two decades.

I would love to see a regulation put in place requiring companies to notify their users every time they transfer data about their users to another organization. If the data is "anonymized", the company should have to notify all their users.

If the company has contact info for the user, it should send the user a notification via that contact info. Even if that means having to send a physical letter.

The company should also keep a public record of transfers, something like a page on their website listing when they've transferred data, why it was transferred, and what kind of data was transferred. That would cover anonymous users.

There would need to be something in there covering data transfer as part of what the company's business is. Maybe a list of businesses that access your data as part of the provided services and are covered by the company's terms?

Even better would be to force companies that make money selling your data to share the profits with every person they just sold data on.

Why would anyone worry about anonymized data? That bit sounds strange. If it’s truly anonymous then how can there be harm in it? E.g would a site telling its owner they had 400 unique users (an anonymous piece of data since it’s an aggregate) have to notify its 400 users they were counted?

> Why would anyone worry about anonymized data?

I guess company wouldn't care, but I'd like to know if statistics that I'm part of is now also owned by someone else. I don't know why but it'll be nice to know.

GDPR does this. Look at the sections around Subprocessors.

The issues isn't just about the information that is captured and traded about you.

The issue is how is that data put to use - how that affects your life and whether those decisions were made with flawed algorithms or indeed flawed data.

And quite possibly, the whole process being so opaque that nobody understands how it works, or why certain things happened.

And, in my view, a lot of it comes back to a lot of these internet businesses scale only if they leave an element of fairness behind.

For example, if you are randomly banned from youtube by an algorithm, it's not economically worth it for Google to fund a process of proper appeal - because proper appeal process needs people.

You then have a choice - dispense with fairness and justice or dispense with a business model that doesn't scale in a fair and just way.

Disclaimer: Individual EU opinion not reflective of whole continent.

I am very very happy to look at all the ads and even personalised ones, as long as those are not overly obnoxious and mostly (obviously-)scammy.

If I have to scroll through endless ocean of ad with my actual priority(friends and family posting something) drowned out at the very bottom of my feed, I will naturally stop clicking any ads.

All we need is a balance, overwhelming and making my feeds/timeline flooded w/ random ads is not really helpful and as a sane person, I am very happy to text my freinds and family and create whatsapp group to keep in contact.

Perhaps you can install a browser extension that will send all your data to any ad companies that you want to receive personalized ads from? And then login on their website to view said ads?

This sounds like the best solution since it will not bother the rest of us who don't want to be tracked.

non-personalised ads != random ads

It is still perfectly possible to place ads in meaningful contexts.

While possible, fb is in the business of high margin and hyperscale.

I would add that personalised ads != less random ads.

Mapping the context to the ads is likely far superior in convertion.

But once again, fb is in the business of high margin and already figured out personalised ads based on profiling is the most profitable strategy.

Why do people hate personalized ads so much? I understand hating ads in general, but why something personalized is worse than just random spam?

EDIT ---

Ok, I get it now. Personalized ads = surveillance. Fair enough.

Doesn't the whole GDPR already cover it though? You can opt out of the surveillance.

It's not so much the ads for me - though some recent ones that are clearly scams have been making the rounds here that facebook refuses to do anything about.

It's the whole tracking, data-gathering, and trying to optimize for squeezing the last bit of revenue out of people that I dislike.

That and the stupid amount of bandwidth and compute caused by the ad scripts on every other website. ublock makes the web so much faster, it's hard to believe.

EDIT:

I'm actually subscribed to some e-mail newsletters from certain brands/sectors that I care about, and they regularly deliver personalised ads to a subfolder in my e-mail account. I sometimes even buy things as a result. I don't mind this, because it's opt-in and by consent.

I do mind when facebook tries to infer what kinds of things I might like, which it's generally terrible at and the various "ad preferences" I can set don't seem to make any change.

I find it a bit hard to like the idea of letting professional manipulators try to manipulate me to do things that benefit them. Regardless if they are succesful or not.

I don't like being tracked so that I can be offered personalized ads. I don't like _any_ ads, but at least context ads make sense. Show me ads for waterproof shoes if I'm on a website about what to do with a dog on a rainy day, or for computer parts if I'm looking for instructions on building a computer (I'll still block most of them anyway).

The categories are much to broad to be useful. I've been vegan for about 7 years. The internet thinks I like "food" and shows me ads for meat products all the time. Good to know I'm wasting the ad dollars of companies I think are bad, but I think it's gross and I don't want to see it.

And yet, I still think they can be harmful. Think of someone with alcohol use disorder who recently stopped drinking, or someone with BED who's decided not to keep junk food in the house. You don't think constantly seeing ads for alcohol/junk food would make such a person feel bad or even impede their progress? Why would that be the cost of them opening any website at all?

Or mails sent to the entire households with offers for contraceptives products or abortion assistance.

Or infomercials poping about anti depressants.

True anecdotes. Teenage girl tracked by video surveillance and profiled as being likely interested in contraceptives because she stood near the condom shelves for long minutes without purchase. With a good chance of being pregnant.

(Advertisers could mail to the household, yes. because she provided the supermarket with her address to get groceries delivered once)

A certain messaging app offered by a certain social media platform that mine personal conversations to profile users down to their emotional states. Those words you type in and send to your confident are put through real time machine learning.

Don't be too surprised you get an ad about chocolate right after you told your date about your favorite ice cream flavor, that's merely creepy. The obsene mental manipulation usually goes unnoticed.

Because it means that a business (as in, facebook) knows too much about you. It's extremely invasive privacy-wise. Things that could happen:

* Micro-targeting for political advertisements (pretty bad for democracy)

* Dynamic pricing based on demographics (you can afford it, so you pay more)

* Insurance knowing too much about you (rejections based on your health, ensuring parts of the population won't be able to get good insurance)

* And just the fact that too much information being public can be harmful (blackmail, scams, etc)

* etc..

what people object to is the data gathering needed for personalized ads. I don't want all my behaviours and preferences to be collected, inferred and stored. If it can be used for personalized ads, it can be used for other even less desireable purposes.

For me, the answer is tracking. Random ads are annoying, too, but they don't invade my privacy. Personalized ads require the ad network to build a profile of my browsing habits which is something I prefer to have the ability to not grant my consent to.

I don't like companies collecting hundreds or thousands of data points on me.

It's not just advertising, but trashy and addictive suggested content and potential for abuse by actors like Cambridge Analytica.

> I understand hating ads in general

Also this

Because they depend on constant and ever expanding surveillance, and the use of all that data is never limited to just advertising.

Facebook can still show relevant ads without showing personalized ones. For example, if there is a facebook group about car restoration it doesn't take a genius to guess what kinds of ads members might be interested in.

Personalized ads mean they make a ton of assumptions about you using incomplete and inaccurate data. If you actually value advertising as a means of discovery, why would you want your exposure to new things limited to only what marketers think you should be interested in based on stereotypes, or flawed assumptions?

Relevant ads are better because there are fewer assumptions being made. Whatever content you're engaging in dictates what you see, not market research and guesses about who you are.

People often don't like being surveilled relentlessly. Without personalized advertising, the market for all that personal info is significantly reduced, though eg insurers probably still want it.

If you are on your phone showing something to some person, and you get an ad for a new pressure cooking. Well, there it is a nice pressure cooking.

Now if you have been looking for something else that you want to keep private (gay clubs, abortion clinics, or anything embarrassing) then your phone has betrayed you.

There is also a point that if the ad is more useless, the quantity of ads should decrease because advertiser will not find them worth it.

Worse, say a gay club near you was attacked by someone who made an explosive device using a pressure cooker. Your interest in those things (actual or as determined by advertisers) could cause you to be a suspect and/or arrested.

The problem with accepting being under constant surveillance to make advertisers money is that the data is never just used for ads and even if you never show your phone to another living soul that data never goes away and can end up in the hands of just about anybody.

Incognito mode?

Hating ads in general, it's logical to hate them succeed even more. It's the positive feedback loop that leads to force-fed dystopia IMO. It's a temporary remedy, but I do "bad actor" behavior, once I get shown a good and relevant ad, I am banning the source and interact with the irrelevant ones instead.

I think only a vocal minority hate them so much (it is a majority here).

But that's because it is creepy, if the targeting is too accurate, it feels like you are being watched. Which is true, but a little bit ironic on Facebook and Instagram where people have no problem exposing their entire life to everyone.

Too much private information collected for that ads will be catastrophic sooner or later. I don’t think that people got the real wake-up call yet. For example imagine someone getting addresses of all the Jews in town and doing something nasty. Before that you needed a lot of people to gather info for such an operation, now the information part will be trivial, but there is still an IRL part. Or getting the names of all people with severe peanut allergy and adverting them something with undisclosed peanut consents. I think there just have not been a sufficiently motivated actor to cause hard beyond making you buy more, selling scams, paying more through individualized pricing or discriminate based on some parameters.

Because they go with mass corporate surveillance. As soon as a company starts personalizing ads with some data, they’re going to be under financial pressure to personalize ads with all the data they can get.

personalised adverts are more effective at brainwashing you into doing something you don't want to do

I take it that it's the amount of surveillance required to personalize the ads. I certainly don't like the idea of shitloads of data being collected about me.

Now I do like personalized ads and I get insane ones even though I'm anonymizing my tracks more than most.

For example I do get personalized ads trying to sell me... Private jets!

I mean: I'm maybe upper middle class but there's no way I've got the money to buy a x million private jet.

Yet I get the ads for them Falcons and Gulfstreams.

I do, of course, make sure to click these ads.

The default position should be that advertising is bad for you. Therefore more effective advertising is worse for you. Personalized ads are more effective, thus they are worse for you.

Random spam is just random spam. Personalized ads are based on behavioural data that they have harvested from people, it seems that makes people feel iffy about it. Seems some do care about privacy after all.

Because they are collecting a shitload of data about me to make them work.

It's like a little camera accompanying you everywhere and you don't get to say no and it's used for anything they can get away with.

The entire point is that you can't opt out. The sites are legally required to let you, but they don't. For example, by claiming that the tracking is OK under "legitimate interest" and doesn't require your consent, which is what Facebook has done so far.

Or by giving you the "choice" of paying an absurd amount of money or "freely" consenting to them harvesting all your data, which is what Facebook has already announced is the next step they'll take. Whether this is legal or not under GDPR is hotly debated. While that debate is running, Facebook will happily continue (if you pay to "opt out" they'll make even more money off you, so win-win for them). If the debate concludes that it was illegal, they'll either get away with it because "it was unclear so we can't punish them", or they won't, and they'll pay a fine that at that point will represent a small tax on the additional profits they made through this practice.

Either way, they win, consumers lose, because GDPR enforcement takes 5 years per round and multiple rounds...

Personalized advertising should never have been allowed without a specific opt-in.

I know lots of advertisers think they can't live without it --- because promoters have told them so.

> because promoters have told them so.

No, it's because they want to make as much money as possible.

If promoters told them to turn off all ads, they wouldn't. They don't care about promoters. They care about money.

They don't care about promoters. They care about money.

The promoters of personalized advertising care about money too.

The auction systems they promote can be easily manipulated to maximize profits. And since these systems are "black boxes", advertisers themselves really have no way to know if they are being manipulated or not. The only insight they have is what the promoters tell them.

> Personalized advertising should never have been allowed without a specific opt-in.

As a thought experiment, let's go back to the time when the internet existed, adds existed, but targeted adds were in their infancy. Now let's imagine they were launched as some sort of op-in Google BETA this in early 0s fashion.

Assuming, for a moment that the targeting quality was on part — would that have been a success? Ie. would the user adoption have been significantly higher Apple's Tracking Transparancy Policy? (Considering that consent was involved before distrust accumulated in the following decades as result of forcefully surveiling, fingerprinting, third-party cookiea, facebook shenanigans, appstore malware, supercookies, etc.)

Early 0s? Presumably not since at the time, doubleclick (now Google) had the same reputation Google has now. At the time, adware and spyware were malware, and there was an industry around anti-malware tools like adaware and spybot: search and destroy. Among other things, IIRC those tools would delete your doubleclick cookies. The distrust was immediate, and if anything people have given up and grown used to malware being part of the OS now.

I don't think it would have been this "successful," but remember how long ago Facebook came out. In 2004, if someone had said something on the internet could "magically" surface all the stuff you really might be interested in, just by opting in and clicking a button? And it had worked really well? I think tons of people would have opted in.

Back then, before smartphones, before carrying a device in your pocket that can track your every move, it wouldn't have seemed nearly as creepy.

It's actually kind of amusing to me that Apple is the one acting like it's protecting people's data. Without Apple's invention of the iPhone, which doesn't have to be built to collect as much data about its use as it does, there wouldn't be nearly as much data for these apps to collect!

People originally freaked out when the mere idea of targeted ads was floated in the early 2000s, and for a while advertisers listened and backed off.

Observationally, facebook ads are the best I’ve seen by a long shot.

Cambridge Analytica and countless scammers agree with you, but the world was just fine before facebook ads and there are plenty of other mediums through which people could continue to manipulate you if facebook ads went away entirely now. Limiting facebook to just non-personalized ads seems entirely harmless.

Instagram ads is why I started going to live concerts again. Were they not personalised it wouldn't have happened.

Best one I heard was people claiming products will be more expensive if personalized advertising is banned. Because then it’ll cost more to promote them.

Marketing is a major cost factor for many products. You can't sustainably sell anything for less than customer acquisition cost. This is familiar to SaaS people but also high margin products like perfume and professional services.

Interesting line of reasoning. :-)

That would imply, that (globally) we spent significantly [EDIT: remove -less-, insert:] more on advertising before the advent of personalized targeting.

You specifically opt-in when you create your account on IG/FB.

No you don't. They track you even without an account. See the person reconstructing this with his wife a few comments up.

this is not the case in the EU at any rate whatsoever

This is not a ban on personalized/behaviorial advertising. If a user consents, behavior advertising is still allowed.

From the press release (https://edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2023/edpb-urgent-binding-de...):

  "On 27 October, the EDPB adopted an urgent binding decision ... to impose a ban on the processing of personal data for behavioural advertising on the legal bases of contract and legitimate interest ..."

Under GDPR Article 6, all processing of personal data requires one of the following lawful bases: consent, contractual obligation, legal obligation, vital interests of a person, public interest, or legitimate interests of the controller. The ban says that Meta can't use two of these as bases---contract, legitimate interest---for behavior advertising. Behavior advertising that is consented to is a-okay.

Oh, yeah!

Can’t come soon enough. Kneecap the need to datamine users.

I totally want to see this happen even if that means they will have to charge money for their heretofore “free” services.

This would be a big win for society, in my view.

This isn't data mining users. It's just tracking an ID against likely preferences detected automatically.

I think this topic becomes emotive because there are obviously ways to misuse data, but I struggle to see the actual harm in personalised advertising. If there's a data acquisition route that we all agree is bad, then we should ban that.

Eliminate any and all potential avenues of abuse. It’s the only way these gals and guys will stop.

This just furthers unbridled consumerism.

I’m okay when people need something because it’s physically necessary for them. But there is something wrong when people impulse buy online just because they got some targeted ads playing with their psychological profile.

I’m convinced these operators cannot be trusted and kneecapping them is the only way out.

Personalized advertising is based on data, and there shouldn't be hard to see some ways in which misuse it, even with user consent.

And no, saying "Yes, I consent to cookies and terms of use and data collection" doesn't fix this.

Fuck yeah! I have no clue how it came this far, they really banned it. Not just mandated to be default and opt-in? That is crazy, and I honestly fail to understand why they are doing this, I mean do not get me wrong, I like it, I just do not trust the EU AT ALL. They are so in with big business, what do they gain from this? And do not tell me they are doing this "for the people". Probably because it's American companies and they want to push EU companies.

How is personalized advertising defined? Is it just one company singled out? Does this mean Netflix recommending x because I watched y is illegal? What about Spotify suggesting I consume another podcast or song because it of my listening history? Almost every business has some soft of loyalty program where they give you benefits/offers to entice you to transact more with them.

I really hope they make the subscription option available in the US. I'd happily pay $25/mo to opt out of ads on both platforms. I was going to sign up for their "verified" option until I saw that it didn't remove the Ads.

Couldn't they just put in the TOS that if you create an account or use any of their services then they can just collect all the data they want?

This is against the GDPR. Not that it would be a problem for Facebook - they obviously tried this and it was explicitly ruled illegal.

Facebook and all other ad networks using personalized advertising will pull out from the EU, then.

Facebook is the only player that actually has ALL the information it needs (Age, Sex, interests, location, things searched for in marketplace, which friends people have, what they have searched for, etc).

They are more or less the only player that can do pinpoint personalized advertising with the data they already have.

So this can't possibly be about advertising on facebook dot com, to registered facebook users? It has to be about something more nefarious, such as facebook acting like an ad broker themselves and using their vast data to track people and show ads on other non-facebook sites?

Don't threaten me with a good time.

I don't know how much better it would actually be! We'll have ads no matter what. And honestly, I prefer the relevant and targeted ads compared to what we had before.

How will compliance be verified?

The ads tools will change and not allow same target options

The choices will be

(a) consent to personalised ads

(b) subscribe

Will Meta block people from using its websites if they refuse to consent to personalised ads, i.e., option (c). That would seem quite stupid. Meta would lose the traffic.

If millions of people consent, i.e., choose option (a), it defeats the purpose of GDPR. Meta scores a victory against privacy. They may even succeed in complying before the ban comes into effect.

If millions of people choose (c), i.e., to retain their rights under GDPR, then Meta is fscked.

EU is forcing the issue, but Meta will only present this choice of options to people over 18. Quite a large carveout.

Users in the EU should choose (c) and call Meta's bluff. There is no sensible reason that Meta would block users who do not consent to personalised ads.

If a user wants personalised ads, they can opt-in. Users who find personalised ads useful, such as the lone outlier commenter at the top of this thread, can opt-in.

The debt of countries keeps increasing. Wars from greed and for power, derivatives market, and data thieves. They can all burn for all I care. They should have never existed in the first place.

I'm using firefox containers for youtube, so I don't login, don't have cookies etc, and yet youtube still suggests videos that are related to what I watched previously.

So they even build profiles of people who evade tracking techniques. I don't understand how they can think it won't tarnish their image or backfire.

It's funny because on one hand, we don't want government surveillance, but yet people criticize the GDPR or the EU or defend the advertising industry, which is probably a very efficient proxy for government surveillance.

Can they ban Facebook and instagram?

If they have reason to, yes. Same as the USA banning tiktok (if they had gone through with it)

Oooooohhhhh I'm regulaaaaaating

So stupid. Will be regretted.

Good. Now do Google.

It's unclear to me, honestly, why targeting ads is bad. Is random useless ads better. To compensate, they'll need even MORE ads.

You can't fight Gdpr, it's by design built like that. The only realizable outcome is to leave the market. Don't worry, nobody will spring up to replace you , because they'd have to do it for free as well.

2018 — "GDPR doesn't work, says tech bros"

Ok, my contrarian hot take (for HN at least). The real entities we need to be afraid of in regards to privacy are governments & politicians, not companies & entrepreneurs.

The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap. The government on the other hand can literally ruin your life (or even end it in some countries).

The EU is doing a fantastic job of keeping everyone distracted by pointing the finger at the "evil American tech companies" while simultaneously doing the opposite when it comes to privacy from government...which is the real threat.

I could point to many instances of this but the easiest one is the EU commission currently pushing a ban on encryption.

> The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap.

A company can bar the exits, letting you burn to death [0]. A company can send private militias to force you to work [1] (or because you were sent the wrong set of MtG cards [2]). A company can improperly store pesticide, until the resulting explosion kills thousands [3]. A company can own every house and store in a town, managing your expenses to ensure you can't leave [4]. A company can bribe judges to provide them with child labor [5].

Some of these were illegal at the time they were done. Some of these were made illegal as a result of these events. All of them are within the nature of companies, optimizing in pursuit of profit regardless of the human cost. That nature is useful for improving lives, but must be carefully controlled to prevent it from trampling us all.

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)

[2] https://gizmodo.com/magic-the-gathering-leaks-wizards-wotc-p...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

Yep. And when I’m unhappy with my government, I can vote them out or, if I want to, get politically active.

I can’t vote out Google. Their customers are advertisers, not me. And I don’t know which apps on my phone send my information to Facebook or what they do with it.

Try again, but keep things relevant within the past 10 years, and applicable to majority of the population.

I understand that your culture may not be context heavy, but please remember that this is probably related to the context of advertising companies.

I doubt that this relates to the online advertising space.

Disregarding the personal data and other tracking, banning all targeted advertising is... not ideal. I genuinely would prefer to have ads that are relevant, than ads for table casters.

One thing that we should also be aware, is that ads aren't going away. They're going to be more obnoxious as a result of this decision.

Are you sure there is a line between the tech companies and the governments? We’re in the middle of a massive intelligence scandal here in Denmark. Which at its core is about how a couple of high level figures might’ve leaked that our own government is sharing all our internet data with the US “illegally”. I put “illegally” in quotes because it’s not technically illegal for the US to use surveillance on us. Just like it’s not illegal for our secret police to gain access to US surveillance, which means that our secret police can use surveillance against Danish citizens indirectly even though it would be illegal for them to do so directly.

In the post Snowden world it’s hard to imagine that any massive tech service isn’t hooked directly into the NSA or that it’s being used for what isn’t exactly illegal surveillance but sort of is.

Not that you’re wrong of course, but I think we should still work on both issues. Even if you look at the EU the agencies which are working to protect and destroy our privacy aren’t the same. So it’s very possible to support one and not the other. Similarly I think we should absolutely crack down on tech company surveillance. What I don’t personally get is why it stops with Meta. Let’s not pretend TikTok and the others aren’t doing the exact same thing. I also think we should keep in mind that the consumer agencies aren’t only doing it to protect our privacy, they are also doing it to protect our tech industry, so it’s not exactly black and white, but I really don’t think we should stop just because other parts of the EU are also evil.

I’m also not convinced that they are doing a good job distracting anyone. Within the EU NGOs there is far more focus on end-to-end encryption and keeping our privacy safe from governments, especially in countries like Germany.

> they are also doing it to protect our tech industry

With these laws in place, EU companies face worse conditions than US ones. They may be protecting some bigger EU companies, but they definitely aren't protecting our IT industry.

GPDR was an annoyance for Google, and a complete disaster for anyone small(think companies that can't hire a Chief Data Protection Officer to work full time)

There's a good rationale for placing restrictions and rules on data privacy, but there are also some very ignorant and destructive decisions.

> they are also doing it to protect our tech industry

Indeed. And due to the fact that such an industry basically doesn't exist, they are able to introduce such regulation.

> The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap. The government on the other hand can literally ruin your life (or even end it in some countries).

No, the worst thing a company can do is to influence your desires, feelings and behaviours, causing you to spend money irresponsibly, getting your kids addicted to useless games, ... All that is also what this kind of tracking aims at. It is quite incredible how people have gotten used to being manipulated on a daily basis. Advertisement used to be fact based, but it's nowaday all emotional trickery and the more the companies know about you, the better they can modulate it to your wants, needs and worries.

Targeted advertising has already changed governments, caused hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies, family trouble and breakups, and many sucides. You don't notice it anymore because it is so utterly ubiquitous, but it drains you and affects your feelings and thoughts most of the day.

> Advertisement used to be fact based, but it's nowaday all emotional trickery...Targeted advertising has already changed governments, caused hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies, family trouble and breakups, and many sucides.

Wow. I guess if we ban it then, we'll be living in a perfect utopia...like we used to have in the past?

Have you ever considered that "Targeted Advertising" could be, for the most part, a way for customers with wants/needs and businesses with products/solutions to efficiently match up? And that the people who have been "duped" by targeted advertising actually just have different wants/desires/needs than you?

I think its more likely that the root cause of all the things you mention, is just normal human nature stuff.

I think you might be using Targeted advertising as a panacea boogieman instead of confronting the uncomfortable real causes for these things (from election results you don't like to family breakups/suicides)?

> Advertisement used to be fact based

This is demonstrably not true. For over 100 years, advertising has had strong roots in emotional appeal. From wiki:

"In the 1910s and 1920s, many ad men believed that human instincts could be targeted and harnessed – "sublimated" into the desire to purchase commodities"

Just look at smoking ads from this time. Claiming health benefits that didn't exist, covering up health issues they knew existed, and associating smoking with cool people and socially desirable behavior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising#Since_1...

> Advertisement used to be fact based

Instantly invalidates everything you said

Attributing all of these ills to better ads is just comical

No, that's not the worst they can do.

They can sell/give the data they have on you to someone with real intent to harm you.

They can use their money, power and the data they have on you to ruin your life, just like a Government could. A strategic leak of private data about a vocal critic of your company is not uncommon.

They can also use their data to influence Governments in ways that will harm all of us. And they do.

I could go on and on.

>No, the worst thing a company can do is to influence your desires, feelings and behaviours, causing you to spend money irresponsibly, getting your kids addicted to useless games,

I dunno if you realize this but this sentiment is by FAR the most dangerous opinion in regards to advertising one can have. Because you are essentially saying that humans have no personal agency and that every decision we make is influenced by external factors. Which leads to a logical conclusion of a society where eveyone is required by law to take Xanax and is subjected to a carefully planned life down to the minute.

>Targeted advertising has already changed governments, caused hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies, family trouble and breakups, and many sucides.

No it hasn't. Don't make shit up.

When you realize that large enough corporations are a form of government, your way of thinking really starts falling to bits...

But, the government is the solution to when business gets too much power. You can't convince a profit motivated corporation to stop doing something evil as long as it's profitable, so it's the government's job to protect people from corporate governance.

> the government is the solution to when business gets too much power.

I totally agree with this. But are personalized Facebook ads really an example of this?

And what's the solution when the government gets too much power? Especially in a "democracy," when the people have implicitly given approval for this by voting in the people who are attempting to consolidate power?

Google has more money than the government of my country. Someone at google can decide whether to spend like 19B to pay Apple to keep Google the default search engine on iOS. Not a single politician can decide that here. Our government budget is less than 19B. It's scary to think that there are corporations more powerful than governments.

people talk about qanon a governments in the shadows while they are in the open in the form of mega corporations...

This very American point of view, for some reason the Americans believe that politicians are some other kind of breed of people coming from somewhere else and they don't have control over them.

The more European point of view is that companies are run by greedy people on who we have no control and we need the government to keep those in check. We have control over the governments and it's O.K. to take them down by force from time to time.

Mass protests are a thing and we vote quite often on who are those "government people", what control we have over the companies? It's very scary to let some businessmen to run the the stuff that our lives depend on. Why trust Musk, Gates, Tim Cook or any other magnate act in our benefit when they all show monopolistic tendencies, profit over human lives and rent seeking?

I don't know if the Europeans or Americans are right about it but overall it appears that the Europeans are having it better despite the stats about money showing smaller amounts of it.

Americans and Europeans are both right about their own situation, because most European countries have functioning political systems, so there is a good level of popular control over the functioning of the state. The same is absolutely not true in the US due to issues like the senate filibuster, lobbying, campaign financing, gerrymandering, first past the post, and surely others I’m not thinking of.

The US is best understood as a very flawed democracy, somewhere between the extremes of actual authoritarian states on the one hand and modern well-run European states on the other.

You are naive if you think Europeans have any semblance of control. What good did all those French riots do this year? Last I checked, the retirement age change got signed into law anyway. All they did was cause damage to their cities the cost of which is levied back onto them.

As a European, this is so embarrassing to read.

The US is one of the oldest democracies on earth.

"You can give the government infinite power, we will do a revolution, no big deal."

Do you have any idea with how much suffering each revolution has been paid for?

And remind me again how the revolutionaries overthrew Nazi Germany?

The sowjet bloc created decades of suffering and blood but according to you that's fine because we can take them "down by force from time to time"?

> The more European point of view is that companies are run by greedy people on who we have no control and we need the government to keep those in check.

I don’t remember electing you to represent the point of view of “we the European people”.

Gimme a break. For starters the EU is not a "government". Digital state surveillance can only be practiced as a "national competency".

More importantly though, the real underlying enemy here has always been citizen apathy, ignorance and distraction about digital privacy (and more general about individual agency in the digital era).

Unfortunately in modern times active citizenship has degenerated into polarization and false dichotomies. Unless people are hit in the head with clear and present dangers they stand dazed and confused.

This behavior has been actively encouraged by governments worldwide for decades. E.g. they are all still actively promoting citizenry engagement in these platforms.

If a certain coalition of countries (for whatever reason) raises warnings about practices in the private sector this can only result in a more informed debate. A debate that has been largely absent so far.

BTW:

> The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap.

I don't know what companies exist in your world but in the real world a company can deny you entry to public transport, medical care, access to the financial system (banking and insurance) and salaried employment to name but a few "non-soap" issues.

> public transport

Which public transport company has denied entry to someone?

> medical care, financial system (banking and insurance)

You mean the government instituted monopoly?

> salaried employment

This is patently false. No private corporation can deny you employment, outside of their own company.(at the very least, not without government enforcement)

Governments deny you salaried employment on a daily basis.

I just want to note that even if you are only afraid of the government in regards to privacy and not companies guess who those companies sell your data and privacy to. As an example the US government already buys location data from companies [1]. Protecting your privacy from the government (while also important) isn't enough due to companies sharing their data with the government, sometimes even for free and without being forced to do so [2]. Therefore you can't protect your privacy from the government without also protecting it from companies.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/14/tech/amazon-ring-police-f...

> Therefore you can't protect your privacy from the government without also protecting it from companies.

This is reasonable.

Though knowing that the data used to serve ads has very little overlap with the information that governments are interested in, makes this move more pointlessly destructive.

Funny enough, the data that governments are interested in isn't getting restricted. There are laws about how to protect that store that data, but that data is not being restricted.

Let's not pretend that governments are going to tell companies to stop collecting data, that they are inherently interested in procuring.

> The real entities we need to be afraid of in regards to privacy are governments & politicians, not companies & entrepreneurs.

Why not both?

> The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap

No, the worst thing a company can do is to propagate the recorded data, willingly or otherwise (companies get hacked, forced by governments, etc.), to entities that won't be content with just using that data to sell more soap.

Oh, btw. Do you know who's in general VERY interested in all that sweet data such companies collect? That's right: Governments.

And politicians and governments, at least in all countries that I intend to live in, answer to the voter. Who do companies answer to?

Maybe this is why EU has a problem with "Big Tech", while US doesn't?

> The real entities we need to be afraid of in regards to privacy are governments & politicians, not companies & entrepreneurs.

May I introduce you to my good friend "lobbyism" ? He's very good at connecting people with money and people with political power.

*Insert "both" meme*

Both can ruin your life, that's the issue.

> "The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap."

This only works for small companies.

We should also care about government surveillance. But, in this case, we are allies.

Can you elaborate on how a government can 'ruin your life', while a company can't?

This might be hard to grok, but we can actually be aware of both threats without minimizing the seriousness of either.

Governments have a monopoly on violence. And as history has proven (especially in the EU), they tend to use it.

Even in good times, in countries with mostly balanced institutions, the government can lock you up in prison and throw away the key if you piss off the wrong people.

On the other hand, I can assure you the only thing Unilever is aspiring to do is get you to buy more toilet bowl cleaner.

And I know the rebuttal will be..."but stupid people (not me of course) will get duped into buying more toilet bowl cleaner than they actually need!"

While that is indeed a huge burden of responsibility to place upon all the people you think are less intelligent than you, I think they will be okay.

As history has shown, the real risk is the government telling me exactly how much toilet bowl cleaner I get to use.

But the company can sell your data to the government too. Googles location history can tell a lot about where you've been and when. Social networks can tell who you've been communicating with and what about. Sites like facebook can sell your interests, google can sell them your search topics, etc.

Imagine being an evil dictator, who just got to power after years of trying... what's the easiest way to find your strongest opposition? Just buy data from social networks.

I mean... look at some stuck up countries with a lot of religious nuts, and some data, that you either bought a butt plug, googled a butt plug, went to an online buttplug store or worse... and it's just a bit of plastic.

> Googles location history can tell a lot about where you've been and when. Social networks can tell who you've been communicating with and what about.

Notice how those two examples aren't restricted.

> Sites like facebook can sell your interests, google can sell them your search topics, etc.

Governments don't care for that kind of data, that's why they willing to restrict those. Even though the best reason to use Google, is because they know my previous search topics and what I clicked on.

I would not assume that there is no data pipeline connection between big-data collectors and government. Now, and especially not in the future. And that data you create now is forever.

Wow, judging from the replies it seems that most of HN does indeed hate this comment. I agree with you though. Even though it's not apart of the EU, Britain's internet security laws that require browser data collection is particularly disgusting. I am sure that other governments are soon to follow. The EU does appear to be very privacy friendly, and I only hope the governments don't impede corporate privacy regulations when it comes to the public sector (although if they did they would most certainly say it's for national security or child protection).

Corporations can ruin your life just fine.

As long as they manage to somehow manipulate the government to help them do it.

Every time this type of discussion comes up, I'm amazed at the cognitive dissonance of the EU. They restrict data transfer to the US because "The US government might spy on your data" while simultaneously pushing to break encryption for everyone so ... the government can spy on all your data.

Is it the EU that keeps pushing it? Or just some (now non-)member states? I'm personally only familiar with the UK being obsessed about it.

Here is the worst thing you are doing - creating a false dichotomy. We should be weary of both the companies and the governments when it comes to privacy.

yes! the problem is microtargeting for politics, no matter who sponsors it.

I couldn't care less about toothpaste. I care about disinformation and divisiveness campaigns on topics like LGBT+, POC, workplace protection, environment, healthcare, food safety, unionization, gun safety, etc etc etc.

those are not about a little more revenue, those are about how we live, as a society. and _that_ should be a taboo for microtargeting. our ancestors fought long and hard to end feudal aristocracy. and no less is at stake than our freedom.

phew sorry for the rant.

As the old saying goes: don’t lie, don’t steal: the government doesn’t like competition.

Although I do believe that governments should be liable (is this the best word?) to people and in turn make companies liable too.

Accountable? Democratic governments are accountable to people. How well that works in practice varies of course; there's always room to improve democracy, but the basic principle is there.

Companies are, according to some ideologies, only really accountable to their shareholders and to the law. If you want to hold them more accountable, the law is generally the way to do that.

Autocratic governments are of course not accountable to the people, and autocratic parties in democracies go out of their way to undermine their accountability.

This way of thinking is extremely dangerous as it plays in favor of government surveillance.

Without "companies & entrepreneurs", the government would have to build, fund and maintain their own surveillance infrastructure. This might be difficult since nobody would intentionally embed "NSAAnalytics.js" or use "NSABook", so covert methods will be necessary which are costlier and less effective at scale.

On the other hand, "companies & entrepreneurs" already built an industrial-scale, financially sustainable surveillance system that the government doesn't even have to pay for, and since it's not technically operated by the government, a lot of the legal protections against direct government surveillance also go out the window. Even better, while people may not use "NSABook" they happily do use "Facebook".

Reading this, it's like the Snowden leaks never happened. Large companies should basically be regarded as appendages of the government because there's good money in acting as a government contractor and providing data on request. In this respect, privacy from companies ~= privacy from government.

The problem is the data/information is sold to anyone and everyone. Governments, foreign actors, bad actors...

It's the collection and dissemination of the data that is the real problem. Everyone deserves privacy and the right to remain private.

Government routinely abuse their power to coerce companies into behaving as they'd like. So if a company builds a tracking and surveillance network, the government now has that at their disposal.

Hum, if these behavioural profiles and assessments spill over to financial institutions, employment, housing, (private) education, etc., these harmless "companies & entrepreneurs" may have more impact on your personal life and your chances in life than government in a democratic country.

But they don't. These behavioral profiles are literally the core product of Facebook.

If you think that Facebook is willing to part with the sole thing that makes them competitive... is crazy.

Take a look at /r/androiddev and the constant posts from people who've been wrongly banned, for life, from developing android apps. Who don't get any fair trial or hearing, not even a written accusation, it's just over.

And everyone who even ever dares to come near them gets banned too, so employers don't want to risk hiring them either.

When the Nazis did Berufsverbote, that was an unusual and cruel punishment. When Google does it, that's just the free market baby!

Companies can destroy a life just fine.

This is a really limited view on the problem.

For a terrifying counter-example do some research into how easy it is for a stalker to abuse data about their victims.

The free-for-all collection and market of data about all of us is the real problem. Anyone with a few bucks can get around the "safeguards" around accessing it. Governments, your employer, your neighbor, your opponents in an election, criminals.

True, but if data is available commercially, it's available to the government, as we learnt earlier this year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36300410

Even when companies are only selling anonymized data, with enough money and sources, it's possible to cross-reference enough information to de-anonymize it.

The government can also force companies to hand over data. Better that the data is never consolidated in the first place.

At this point dozens of elections across the world have been strongly influenced, perhaps determined, by data collection by social media, and the targeted ads on social media.

Anything that moves democracy away from one-person-one-vote to one-dollar-one-vote (which you need to buy ads), needs to be made illegal.

> Ok, my contrarian hot take (for HN at least). The real entities we need to be afraid of in regards to privacy are governments & politicians, not companies & entrepreneurs.

I don't think this is a contrarian view here, look at the comments a lot of people are very negative about the GDPR and just fine with how Meta collects data. There are quite a lot of libertarians here.

> The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap.

A company could make you dependent on their services, and then shut you out. Or sell your personal info to future employers. Or massively pollute and destroy the environment and climate. Or sell important medicine for crazy margins. There are even mercenary companies waging war and engaging in torture. Selling me more soap isn't the worst I expect from companies, by far.

> The EU is doing a fantastic job of keeping everyone distracted by pointing the finger at the "evil American tech companies" while simultaneously doing the opposite when it comes to privacy from government...which is the real threat.

You are suggesting this has some vague evil hidden agenda, I find that entirely implausible. You don't have any evidence for this. I'm not even sure what you are hinting at, the possible ban on encryption? Do you seriously think this case against Meta is a way to make people somehow not notice that kind of legislation, how?

> The real entities we need to be afraid of in regards to privacy are governments & politicians, not companies & entrepreneurs

Thankfully, governments are incompetent and inefficient enough to prove a real threat on this matter when it comes to tech

I think we don't have to accept one in order to reject the other but yes we should talk more about those countries (mainly France, Spain, Poland) who are pushing to backdoor end to end encryption.

The companies literally sell this data to governments. Stopping companies from having the data is limiting government access to the data.

Why not both? Why can we only pick one? Both things are a problem for a free society

I disagree.

EU data practices differ significantly from tech giants; they're governed by strict GDPR rules, requiring consent for personal data processing.

No EU nation systematically tracks citizens like tech companies do for ads.

It's difficult to compare the data collection practices of EU nations directly with those of large tech companies like Facebook or Google, there are some parallels and distinctions to be made.

The encryption debate is separate, focusing on balancing privacy with security.

My take (being in EU) is that with weaker encryption, the EU tries to balance privacy with law enforcement needs, aiming to curb illicit communications while raising privacy concerns.

There is no such thing as "weaker encryption". Either your data is securely encrypted, or you are being deceived.

> EU data practices differ significantly from tech giants; they're governed by strict GDPR rules, requiring consent for personal data processing.

This is false. May I introduce you to chat control or client side scanning on every device that you own?

That what is the proposal is currently. All the data would be funneled to Europol, which would have access to every text, every image , every thing you do on your messaging apps. Does that sound like consent to you?

> My take (being in EU) is that with weaker encryption, the EU tries to balance privacy with law enforcement needs, aiming to curb illicit communications while raising privacy concerns.

You can have encryption or no encryption. If the EU can read your messages, so can China, Russia, Iran and anybody else who either buys their way into the system or breaks in illegally.

> It's difficult to compare the data collection practices of EU nations directly with those of large tech companies like Facebook or Google, there are some parallels and distinctions to be made.

That's right at least with GDPR, companies have to delete my data after a certain amount of time but some governments of Europe don't have too. There is this thing called data retention:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive

It's been illegal for some time now but some governments in Europe (France for example) have decided that they don't care and keep doing it. Welcome to the land of privacy.

> governments & politicians, not companies & entrepreneurs

In some countries the separation is unclear. Take ai for instance - regulation demands come from corporations to governments rather than the other way around. And thats happening in basically everything we do. Like in communism, the masses are employed in these massive enterprises that benefit from government money and friendly regulation, but regulation flows from corporations to governments while money flow the other way around (see bailouts and friendly policies). Furthermore politicians use corporations to influence our daily lives and to monitor our behaviour such that they know how to exploit our fears in order to gain and maintain power (see Cambridge analytica).

As such corporations are a tool of oppression, anti capitalism and anti freedom. Therefore you have to squeeze them out in order to be able to return to democratic capitalism.

I don't understand why this only applies for Facebook then.

2 1/2 years, ago they opened up a loop hole for newspapers that they are explicitly allowed to do it (Either you pay, or when you use their free version, you must accept to be tracked for behavioural advertising).

Are they any better than facebook?

Some example news sites: www.zeit.de, www.spiegel.de

More information on this:

https://www.heise.de/news/E-Privacy-Verordnung-EU-Rat-fuer-V... (german)

And https://www.consilium.europa.eu/de/press/press-releases/2021...

Look here (referenced pdf in the above url): https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-6087-2021-I...

(21aa) In some cases the use of processing and storage capabilities of terminal equipment and the collection of information from end-users' terminal equipment may also be necessary for providing a service, requested by the enduser, such as services provided in accordance with the freedom of expression and information including for journalistic purposes, e.g. online newspaper or other press publications as defined in Article 2 (4) of Directive (EU) 2019/790, that is wholly or mainly financed by advertising provided that, in addition, the end-user has been provided with clear, precise and user-friendly information about the purposes of cookies or similar techniques and has accepted such use.

> I don't understand why this only applies for Facebook then.

It doesn't.

Can you elaborate? That's not how the article makes it sound.

> The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has instructed the Irish data regulator, where Meta’s European headquarters are located, to impose a permanent ban on Meta’s use of behavioural advertising within two weeks. The EDPB states that its decision is an urgent binding instruction to enforce the ban across the EEA.

Is the same happening at the newspapers?

> I don't understand why this only applies for Facebook then.

It applies to everyone. It's just a consequence of GDPR. The regulator has found, after complaints, that Facebook's handling of personal data was in breach. Anyone who does the same thing as Facebook will be in breach. It's just that so far, either nobody is doing the exact same thing, or nobody has raised a complaint yet, or they're still in the regulator's backlog.

Also, you're hearing about it because it's Facebook. If it were a small unknown company you wouldn't have heard about it.

The GDPR makes it pretty clear that you need a legal basis for processing personal data. And serving personalised ads, with the purpose of increasing revenue, is not a legitimate interest. Moreover, consent is not only required for such use-cases, but rejection should not degrade the service for the user.

The writing has been on the wall since 2018, when the GDPR came into effect. What's new is its enforcement. The DPAs are slow, but the law is clear, and eventually everyone will be forced to comply, if they want to do business within the EU.

newspapers are trying their hand but it is illegal. see for example: https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-tech-news-site-heisede-illega... in germany or https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-beginning-end in Austria.

Unfortunetly because European cases usually do not involve punitive damages, it costs nothing to these actors to try their hand and keep up for as long as thier turn comes becasue there are a lot and they don't risk practically nothing for being found illegal initially. Only after being found illegal they risk fines for repeat violations.

Comments here so far focus on personalised ads as the issue -- but that's a symptom of what's being banned, which is the mass collection of personal data.

Personalised ads are beside the point. The issue is how they are personalised, namely by building a rich profile of user behaviour based on non-consensual tracking.

It isnt even clear that there's a meaningful sense of 'consent' to what modern ad companies (ie., google, facebook, amazon, increasingly microsoft, etc.) do. There is both an individual harm, but a massive collective arm, to the infrastructure of behavioural tracking that has been built by these companies.

This infrastructure should be, largely, illegal. The technology to end any form of privacy is presently deployed only for ads, but should not be deployed anywhere at all.

Upon logging into okcupid today I received a pop up inviting me to join The League (another dating app), with my phone number already pre-propagated. After accepting, they sent me this email.

> We use the combination of your Facebook and LinkedIn data plus your About Me and Photos to ensure we are building a balanced, high-achieving and diverse community. Our screening algorithm looks at indicators like social influence, education, profession, industry, friends in The League, number of referrals you've made to your network, as well as supplemental data like what groups you belong to, events you've attended, interests you list, and preferences.

Absolutely terrifying.

As someone that refuses to use Linked In or Facebook it is wild to me that someone would not only use them, but willingly link a dating app to them.

It makes me wonder how many more things I'll never get to participate in because I've deleted/avoid social media.

Reminds of the days when your name, address, and phone number were automatically listed in the phone book. You had to pay the phone company to not list your information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory

One of those things y'all never upvote is papers about psychodiagnostic software that uses your social media posts, cell phone location data, etc. to diagnose both chronic and acute psychiatric conditions.

I'm fairly certain that if a person is highly active on social media such a system could produce a better diagnosis than most people get when they see a professional, if only because the quality of psychodiagnosis is poor since it is often seen as a scam to satisfy insurance bureaucrats, common conditions are never diagnosed, there are fads for certain rare conditions, etc.

Okcupid and The League are owned by the same company. So that’s a first-party, in platform ad

It sounds like their marketing blurb just copied Tom Scott without understanding the horror it's supposed to represent.

https://youtu.be/WByBm2SwKk8

Like this:

https://nitter.net/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538

I mean who cares? How does this affect your life?

^this.

I don't have anything against personalized ads based on information that I willingly share. If I am following a bunch of groups of kite-surfers, I actually welcome ads for kite-surfing gears and services while browsing those groups.

If I explicitly decide to share my address on my social network profile AND, explicitly authorize the use of this information for targeting, I don't mind, and actually welcome seeing ads for carpet cleaning services from my city, instead of ads from this kind of business located thousands of miles away, WHILE I am using said social network.

But I don't want to browse the local newspaper, and having this targeting information being used outside the explicitly bounded context of that social network.

And above all, I don't want surveillance-style stuff things forced upon me to infer information about me that I never consented to share in the first place.

It is ok to me if I say, I have an interest on X, you (and only you) can show me ads based on that, and I also consent on you (and only you) using my <insert whatever personal info you may think ok> to target ads.

Yeah, it's so much more than most people realize. It's not just visiting websites with tracking pixels either. Like, companies you use will upload your data to facebook. They will take their pool of emails or members of their customer programs and send to facebook to be able to target you. Thus giving facebook more information about you.

When I visit facebooks https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity I see that lots of places have shared my information with facebook..

I am curious what widespread legislation on this front is going to cause. Not meaning to defend surveillance capitalism in the slightest, it belongs in the dustbin of history for reasons too numerous to articulate, but merely from the perspective that personalized ads that creep on you were essentially made a load-bearing column of the Internet before anyone knew how creepy they were going to get with it, and now just, every goddamn website out there with even a modicum of traffic has ads. And like, I'm sure the vast majority of people here block ads and I think blocking ads is getting more or more prevalent year over year, but like, they must be being seen by someone. Sites still use them, largely because there isn't a real replacement for a constant trickle revenue stream like them out there seeing wide adoption.

I guess in my ideal world, I would hope that these businesses could pivot back to a dumber, more privacy-friendly mode of advertising? But I wonder if the corpos are willing to give that up, or if they'll just continue trying to squirrel around this and any other laws to the point of absurdity?

I think in the context of privacy "personalised" always means "personalised by using information the publisher shouldn't have".

Facebook has my age and home town, knows what many of my interests are via groups I'm in. I don't think it's wrong to say I have given them that information voluntarily and so long as they keep it on their servers only, I'm ok with them showing me a mountainbike ad because I'm a 40yo male who is in a mountainbiking facebook group.

I don't consent to them showing me an ad for a specific mountainbike that I placed in the shoppingbasket at cheap-mountanibikes dot com last week, and then abandoned there, and the reason they know is because the store has some kind of arrangement of any kind with facebook. That's the kind of thing I don't think I should even be allowed to consent to.

> increasingly microsoft

Will the EU fix Windows by banning the insane amount of tracking they do? Would be nice. The OS is literally at its peak in terms of being great, but all the telemetry, forced accounts and Microsoft ads keep the meme alive that Windows is awful, when in fact, if you remove those three things I mentioned, you have an insanely reliable and polished OS, all my issues with Windows have always come from customizing the core OS, it just doesn't quite behave the same, I would eventually format due to issues, the moment I stopped tampering and tinkering, I've stopped reformatting Windows.

> Comments here so far focus on personalised ads as the issue -- but that's a symptom of what's being banned, which is the mass collection of personal data.

Exactly. There are places where the data is being collected without direct adverts or other visible signs being present (certain web analytics services for instance). This activity tracking gets married up to the other personal information the various companies hold about you.

> Personalised ads are beside the point.

I think they are an important part of the point, just not the whole point.

Being able to sell adverts for a bit more usually is what makes it worth a company's hassle implementing and maintaining their stalking infrastructure. Without that the online commercial stalkiness would die down an awful lot.

On the face of it some might think that this ruling achieves this, but it would not have that effect unless:

* other significant territories imposed the same sort of restrictions

* those restrictions were routines enforced

* and the enforcement (when transgressions are found) was sufficiently inconvenient to the companies

Why should it be illegal? I don’t understand the moral threat. Personally I feel that privacy gets too much airtime as a value — I see lots of other more direct issues (like political manipulation) that will remain an issue even with “strong privacy.”

Indeed. Targeted ads far predate the internet: someone who advertises in the Podunk Catholic church magazine is targeting a different audience to someone advertising in the same town's Baptist church newsletter. All ads are somewhat personalised to their intended audience.

It's the tracking thing that has to go.

This is why Facebook charging for an "ad free" experience doesn't matter. I care less about whether I get served ads or not and more about if my behavior is being tracked and thrown into some data lake along with personal info just waiting to be mined and combined with who knows what other info, etc., until crackers are withdrawing my social security, defeating the security questions on my banking website, scamming my family, etc.

It's like human organs (like kidney). In my country, I can donate my kidneys under strict conditions but not sell them. For good reasons. Yet, they're mine and mine only.

We should do the same with personal data. You can share it however you want but not sell them.

There are good reason why selling data can be worse socially: your data could also be about me (if it's about relationship), whereas organs cannot.

The ad networks could have self-regulated and perhaps could have received a better treatment that allows some forms of personalized ads.

However, they blew it, and now we have this law that takes away their incentive to infringe our privacy. The needle is now on the other side, but not as far as it was before. I'm happy.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it"

  - Upton Sinclair

> mass collection of personal data

True, but even if EU bans just the personalized ads, chances are that this personal data hoarding bubble is going to finally burst and die, because the belief in "big data = big money" was powered almost solely by the ad industry. I believe ads (and outright abuse, but that's not exactly a business model) were the only use case/reason for why this data is collected and why it's considered valuable.

We'll see attempts to rapidly change the tune (possibly something about "AI", given it's the buzzword of the day) from the companies whose valuation is strongly tied to this myth/meme, as they'll desperately try to keep their $$$-faces. But, I believe, chances are, if using personal data for showing ads will be illegal in a major market like EU, many companies will stop collecting because the data will become worthless, a liability rather than an asset.

And then I have this silly dream that one day a transhuman age will come closer and I will have machinery to aid myself, personally, that would collect and store my interactions with the world, strictly locally, strictly for my own personal use - an extension of my own mental or physical capabilities (I need glasses to see, I suspect I'll need a hearing aid someday, and I have some concerns about my memory and attention spans - so, you know, From the Moment I Understood the Weakness of My Flesh.meme.txt). So every time I hear things like "we're outlawing facial recognition/conversation recording/data collection" without a "(*) for businesses" I'm kind of disappointed. Of course, my hope is that those laws will be reviewed accordingly as we'll get closer.

Thus, I believe, a ban on targeted ads alone could be a possibly better outcome than a blanket ban on data collection. But, uh, whatever works, I guess...

Yes, it is the data collection. But the main incentive is monetizing that data which Instagram makes billions off of via ads. Cutting away this incentive may cut away the incentive to collect such data in the EU market.

Do you have any evidence of an actual harm being inflicted on a meaningful amount of people that would be sufficient to shutdown such a large amount of economic activity?

Governments do exactly the same: they track you in the name of a million things. Now they have in the works even a law for 'free information' (in trh European Union) that can force journalists to disclose sources in the name of national security...

I am not saying this should not be illegal. Probably it should. What I am saying is that noone should be able to track but the state can do it. Noone should be able to.

Don’t forget Apple has a billion dollar ad business!

> end any form of privacy [..] only for ads

It is safe to assume that all intelligence agencies have taps on ad networks allowing to legally (well, not in EU anymore) collect mass of information on the cheap, which they can then de-anonymize at will by cross-referencing with other data sources.

"non-consensual tracking"

Pretty sure it is written in the ToS. Maybe don't agree with that legal agreement and continue to sign up for the service in the first place?

yeah, i really don't get why people are so against personalized ads. As a user of these platforms, I feel the ads are already nowhere near targetted enough and now looks like we'll be getting ads that are even more irrelevant. at this point, I think they're just trying to find more way of fining fangs as a means of selective taxation and punishment.

It is not deployed just for ads, but also for various world governments, police and military that buy and violate your data and privacy.

> It isnt even clear that there's a meaningful sense of 'consent' to what modern ad companies (ie., google, facebook, amazon, increasingly microsoft, etc.) do. There is both an individual harm, but a massive collective arm, to the infrastructure of behavioural tracking that has been built by these companies.

What is the individual and/or collective harm done here?

Data privacy is one of the least important issues of our day. People (especially on HN) get very passionate about it but are unable to produce specific harms Google and Meta ad tracking creates.

Could there be an issue in the future? Possibly. Are privacy laws like GDPR worth the economic and other harms? Probably not. The amount of wasted programmer hours alone has far overcome the negative impacts of big tech ad tracking.

Neither real life or the internet are anonymous. We live with other people. But Google and Meta in particular have an amazing 15 year track record of basically never leaking user data. Various national governments have been much worse in this regard.

Government risk from Meta and Google is meaningless in any case. The ISPs have all the same data and regularly share it with the government in response to warrants.

Also all the data is out there on me and you in a million databases. Just like in the 80s with the yellow books. Did you know you can buy a list of most Americans with an estimated credit score and income and other details? This is 50 year old tech.

On the other side, digital ads have a huge impact on the economy (Google and FB being some of the biggest companies in the world) because they provide a service of matching businesses with consumers interested in products. Targeted ads means they are much more enjoyable and effective at matching consumers to products they like. I've worked with dozens of small businesses that used targeted ads to survive and thrive.

It's not a good trade-off for the EU to ban targeted ads, in short.

How would you stop it?

If I wanted to, right now, I could build a deep profile for every single user of HN, simply by downloading the public pages, and cross-referencing comments, upvoted/favorited stories, etc with usernames. I could then create a weighted index that tells me how likely a user is to be a libertarian, gay, wealthy, etc. Then I could e-mail those users and offer to sell them privacy-focused freedom-loving lgbtq+ products.

I can pretty much do whatever I want with this database, partly because you don't even know I have it, but also because it's all public information you've posted to the web voluntarily. Maybe the ToS will say I can't, but they have to catch me/stop me. I could just hire some Russians to do it for me and collect the data later.

I'm not saying this should be allowed, but it's probably going to be impossible to stop, and the implications (esp. for political concerns) are enough of a motivator that just making it illegal probably won't end the practice. We have to consider alternatives so that we aren't stuck in some information arms race that makes the problem worse.

For example, we could say that private data should remain private, and public should remain public. Data which everyone has a reasonable expectation to be private - like the private photos you upload to Google Drive - should never become public, and thus should never be aggregated into some product (trained for an AI, etc), used to sell you something, etc. But data which does have a reasonable expectation to become public - like comments on a public forum, likes on public posts on Facebook - should remain public, and thus be used the way any other public thing can be. We already have legal limitations on uses of some public things, but we can expand that if need be.

Then we can legally define what constitutes private and public, and construct tech so that it's very clear to people what's public and what's private, and then they can decide what they will post where, or what sites they will/won't use in what ways, etc. It's already clear what's private and public out in the real world. We just need to make that same distinction clearer for other cases, like when and how companies collect data and what they can use it for. It's going to require case-by-case analysis, but we can totally get there without having to ban everything or allow everything.

At the same time EU wants to break SSL and facilitate man of the middle attacks.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/fr/policies/discover-e... https://nce.mpi-sp.org/index.php/s/cG88cptFdaDNyRr

I think that's the work of a campaign within the EU (and from lobbyists). I don't think it represents a majority opinion neither by elected people or bureaucrats. If a proposal like this ever passes it will be because them and us didn't care enough to stop it.

What does this have to do with GDPR?

That both relate to privacy and the EU and one regulation is for more privacy, the other for less privacy. If you were new to the EU you might find that surprising.

I know in HN there is a big "personalized advertising" is bad sentiment, but I don't get what the problem is.

I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet.

It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here.

Can someone explain to me what the problem is? Honest question. Thanks.

A scenario from today, context: I don't have Meta/Facebook/Instagram account, my spouse has.

We were discussing haircuts in the morning and I showed her some photos online. 15 minutes later she opened Facebook and saw hairdresser commercial with THOSE EXACT haircuts we were discussing.

I was using iOS with no-track and adblocker on top of that. My guess is that link was made using IP address. Meta/Facebook was processing MY data to which I didn't agreed at any point. Most likely some website (which didn't ask for my permission, as I'm very anal about making sure I disagree to everything) shared this data with Facebook, Facebook linked the dots and voila.

That's my problem.

P.S. We did similar experiment 2 times, once with jewellery and once with specific types of shoes. One using Firefox Focus using home WiFi, second using 5G network. I disagreed to all cookie processing at any point.

WiFi connection was linked, 5G wasn't.

> I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet.

That's all fine and dandy, I think. The problem starts to become a bit bigger when suddenly everyone in your household starts to see "chlamydia medication" ads everywhere they go online based on some message you sent a month ago to a friend.

> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here.

I'm not sure that's so obvious as you make it seem. There are lots of long running websites that don't survive on personalized ads created based on behavioural profiles created by data harvesters.

There are parts of my life that are fine for ad companies to know. What clothes I like, what music I like, what sports I like etc. These are all benign, and even useful to me if ad companies know about them. The sentiment of your comment makes sense when applied to these topics.

But then there are things that I don't want ad companies to know about. My medical history, my likely voting patterns, my political affiliations, my sexual orientation, the nature of my relationships with other people, etc. These are private, and I don't want ad companies (or anyone) to know these. Depending on the topic and where I live, it may even be dangerous to me for others to know these things.

One thing that has been made apparent by the advancements of ad-tech's excellent ability to find unintuitive patterns in consumer behaviour, is that the benign data can be used to predict the non-benign. So even if data collection is regulated to only collect benign data, or I am extra careful with where my sensitive data goes, I still have a problem.

That's why tracking on this scale is bad. That's why I hope we can build a society where we stop these practices.

I would rather have <best case of personalized ads> rather than <worst case of random ads>. That's not an equal comparison, neither does it represent a common scenario.

> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here.

People do want ads to subsidize free internet usage, as it has been since the Internet's inception. People accept random ads or even contextual ads, but people flat out refuse targeted ads. This refusal comes out of many reasons, many of which you'll find in other comments around here.

Mine are self-determinism and privacy. I don't want someone, regardless of how well intentioned or competent they believe they are, to collect sensitive data on my habits, preferences and choices to then attempt to influence me. I like to make my own mistakes and own up to them.

Ads are almost universally trying to convince you to do something you shouldn't do. At best, they will convince you to but a subpar product, at worst they'll convince you to buy a product you don't need at all.

Personalized ads are better at convincing you personally, so they are worse for you than random ads, or even than content-based ads. Additionally, they depend on building a detailed profile of you, which most people are fundamentally uncomfortable with when they are aware of.

Try https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica

Personal data used to create highly personalised and targeted political ads.

It's not just about whether you get a nice notebook.

you are confusing contextual advertising with behavioral, profile based advertising

contextual advertising is placing ads in locations, pages, screens etc where people are likely already in a certain mindset (and potentially more likely to be influenced and buy) but the advertiser has no further information about them.

behavioral, profile based advertising is, in contrast, using (in principle) any and all information about you that they can grab and get legally away with using:

Citizen X2235X, device ID asx233e, geolocation X,Y, with $$ in the bank account, an estimated IQ of 98, with the following list of prior purchases, the following list of "likes" on social, has just searched for "weekend trip". Let the bidding begin.

Creating profiles of people has always been a very regulated affair (e.g. your credit score, insurance segments, medical categories etc). In the context of state surveillance profiling people has been the primary tool for oppression.

In the last decade somehow in the name of "innovation" all caution has been thrown out the window.

Its really not about ads at all.

Advertising is manipulative. More personalized advertising is more effectively manipulative. Manipulative = bad.

For example, the personalized advertising algorithm could deduce that someone is insecure about being fat and ugly and having no friends. Then, they get ads with the message (a bit veiled of course) "you have no friends because you're fat and ugly", and some product they can buy to ostensibly solve that. Seeing that message is not good for someone's wellbeing.

If I go to a BMX page then show me an advert for a new helmet or whatever

That's not how adverts work. Instead I get an advert for a new TV because I bought a new TV last week.

> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads.

Adverts aren't free. The service still costs the same to provide, but on top of that you have to pay for the advert infrastructure too

Companies paying for the adverts fund the, but they only do that because they will get more money from you than the money they spend to acquire you as a customer (if they don't they go bust)

Therefore you looking at www.bmxsite.com are paying more than you would in a world without adverts

Here[1] are my "personalized" Twitter ads. The ones that at least match the language of the content I want to see, not the geo I'm in. I use the PWA on mobile. No ad blocker, no pihole, full consent to collect what data they can.

I exclusively follow technical people. Devs of the software and tools I work with, PG, indie hackers, that sort of thing.

Personalized ads are a scam. They are not personalized to you. They are personalized to the imaginary profile advertisers want to see their ads. You're just the sorry victim that nobody cares about. Some of them are outright dangerous (see the first one in the album), and your interests always come last.

That doesn't even include the primary concern: The rampant abuse of privacy and collected data.

[1] - https://imgur.com/a/NGBsEaM (one or two are mildly NSFW)

Before Facebook, if you wanted to find information about a notebook, you would go to an independent forum dedicated to notebooks. These forums would typically have adverts from notebook manufacturers or computer stores - and so the ads would be relevant to what you are looking for.

Now, you wanted to learn about new notebook friends talked to you about, you opened a link and from there everywhere you go you see notebook ads. It's madness and unhelpful.

Problem is not the "personalized advertising" alone, it is more dangerous when also combined with "bidding". When those two combined, you are most likely to see ads with bigger profit margins than small profit margins.

Let's say you are looking for a notebook, you are assigned to "notebook seeking" cohort. You will see "notebook ads". But the ads you will see will be the ones most profitable for your cohort.

For simplicity, let's say cohort is 100 people; if there is a one person in this cohort that is the target of an overpriced, low quality, drop shipped product, with huge margin, rest of the 99 people will be bombarded with that ad.

>Also, it is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads

Good. A well-functioning market might emerge instead.

To be a bit nitpicky, Internet is not free. The content may or may not be free/ad funded. And there are many problems. One of the major ones being that ad funded content is overwhelmingly often utter crap that I could live without. As a general rule, if I need to look for actually useful information, I need to look for content generated for free (wikipedia, HN, reddit etc) or paid content. There are exceptions but they are rare.

> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here.

Ads are bringing so little revenue per user that I can't see how that can possibly be true. And even then people are paying the ads on the product they end up buying after.

Ads function at a macro economic level like a very inefficient tax scheme.

> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads

I'd argue that it's impossible to have a free internet with ads. I'm old enough to have seen the internet before it was ad infested and it wasn't lacking for great content. Humans seem to have a need to share (or at least show off).

Who is paying you to post comments here on HN? I'm guessing nobody, but here you are, contributing to the internet for free.

Without ads we'd lose some things certainly, but the greater the focus there is on making money the worst everything seems to get. The best things are usually the free things, at least until greed causes enshittification to set in.

Cambridge Analytica scandal showed that social media data can be collected and abused by governments.

Edward Snowden showed that global surveillance can lead to abusive system, in which there is no privacy, and everything is accessible by governments.

It is not about your personal advertising. It is not about your grocery lists. It is about creation of abusive system.

If social media have special portals for governments (at least I know about Facebook had one for New Zealand), then it opens a gateway for abuse.

- How do you know you were not abused?

- How do you know your data was not used by China to overthrow western civilization?

- How do you know that your data was not sold to Putin?

- How do you know that your data was not used by Left, or Right political party to change election results, like in Cambridge Analytica?

Companies do not have morality. They care about money, and laws (through fines). If a service does not require capture of data, then that data should not be captured.

Jews in 1920s didn't have much issue with the German government knowing about their faith, fast forward 1933...

God knows what they'll use it for in the future, they'll know everything about you, who you voted for 15 years ago, what joke you make 20 years ago against the now-in-charge cast, do you sympathise with communist ideas ? Did you like or hate Musk before he becomes a dictator of the now independent Republic of Texas ? Did you use grinder ? Well too bad, homosexuality is now punishable by death retroactively. Looks like you illegally contacted a doctor for an abortion in 2027, that'll be 6 months of jail and a 30k fine ;)

You don't see the problem because you live in an abnormally quiet and abnormally peaceful (for you) time. The thing is your data is forever, the state of peace not so much

Problem is that they show you the notebook after you have purchased one. The car after you bought one. Medical services after you get back from the hospital.

Your ability to discover relevant products from targeted advertisement is flawed to begin with.

I don't want ads. If I'm looking for buying something, I'll go to an online store, and find the relevant stuff myself.

I don't like the idea of companies using biases and tricks from our human brain to sell their stuff. Ads are profitable because they use our anchoring bias, amongst others. This is disgusting and inhumane to accept to exploit our vulnerabilities for capitalist reasons. We, as a society, should seek for better solutions.

Nice to read this. Its not the medium, nor the media, its the business model that is the problem.

The incentives are perverted and the outcome imbalanced. The entire ad tech universe is built on false metrics, lies and fraud. Burn it all down.

Url changed from https://dig.watch/updates/eu-data-regulator-decided-to-ban-p..., which points to this.

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I am so glad someone finally called their "we gonna leave" bluff.

so far everyone's comments here are awesome

private data should be illegal, public behavioral data should be public, censorship is pretty much always wrong

I am an european and I am pretty sure that some day in the EU they will regulate even the position to go to po...

Also, we are pretty broke now so get ready for looking for gold even underground...

In the meantime... these people do not do more important homework...

Personally I find this quite an important issue. Whether you don't care is your own choice, but not all us are happy to live in a panopticon.

And the EU is in fact mainly a trade body, setting standards and categorisations, so there are likely some rules on toilets already in EU acquis on health and safety at the workplace, etc. I doubt they oblige a specific position though, you can rest in peace on the piece

I care, but they spend a lifetime fining citizens and companies and later at the same time they tell you that with digital euro, anonimity... no. Want to make physical money disappear over time, restrict to 1000 euros cash transactions... (Spain case) They are so special. I thought common human beings work for public institutions also so they should be audited by the same rules.

Or for example they prepare a law to be able to get journalist sources (which is even illegal in my constitution!).

I do not think it is a fair position. They are increasingly telling us: you do all this and we... we have superpowers we do not need to do it.

I do not agree with that vision.

While I could care less about Meta and Alphabet, I find it difficult not to basically see this as a form of economic warfare between the United States and the EU. The latter simply being jealous of the former's technological superiority, both economically and technically.

How is it warfare? I just see it as a rule to follow....hardly international "shots fired", like US/ China trade bollocks [etc].

I'd ask that you remember: the rest of the world isn't quite on the side of the advertiser, and nor should the relationship be abusive and one-sided.

What technical superiority? And, for what it is, i bet it's for sale.

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