EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram (opens in new tab)

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.

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...

> 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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

nothing of value will be lost and all that meme.

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

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.

Good!

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?

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)

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

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

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.

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?

* 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..

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.)

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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".

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

It doesn't.

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 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It's the tracking thing that has to go.

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.

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.

  - Upton Sinclair

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...

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Good. A well-functioning market might emerge instead.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.