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Comment by avarun | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I value privacy above the marginal usefulness of targeted ads. You should be free to opt-in to tracking and personalization if that's what you want. But we shouldn't all be caught in a surveillance dragnet by default.

> You should be free to opt-in to tracking and personalization if that's what you want.

Agreed. So why is the EU making that illegal? I want to be able to use products for free by opting in to personalized ads so that businesses can make enough revenue to justify having an ad-supported free version of their product.

The incompetent bureaucrats at the EU won't allow Meta to offer that.

Because Meta has proven year after year that they can't be trusted with our data. It's a sanction on their gross negligence and complete lack of morals

Let's clarify - 3rd party tracking is the issue. Tracking me on your site is fine... it's expected. Spotify should build a profile of my musical tastes. But my profile on your site should be relegated to your site. Facebook not only tracks you off their site, they sell your information to literally anyone willing to pay. It's ludicrous that we've allowed this, and the EU is finally stepping in.

> Facebook not only tracks you off their site, they sell your information to literally anyone willing to pay.

This is just blatantly incorrect. Please inform yourself about topics before choosing to comment on them. https://www.facebook.com/help/152637448140583

Sure. Facebook is still the data custodian, but it's been proven that the granularity of their targeting is so small that it's possible to target individuals - a la Cambridge Analytica and a few other studies. They're selling the use of your profile, not the profile itself. It's gross.

Even without pervasive tracking, ads can still be targeted based on the content you are looking at. That's probably still quite useful in most cases.

And if you want more, you can opt in to one of the many schemes that would have popped up if the entire ad industry didn't just decide to ignore GDPR and the DPAs didn't decide to ignore those violations.

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