Hear me out - unpopular opinion. Banning targeted ads wastes everyone’s times.
Ads for things that have zero applicability to me are a waste of my time, the advertisers time, everyone’s time. We’re not going to ever live in a world without ads and I would far rather they be an actual service to me, presenting me things I actually think are cool and might like to buy.
A well targeted ad can be a net positive to my life. An ad for something I would never use, ever, because it doesn’t apply to me is a net negative.
I prefer random ads. If I plan to buy something I will never do it from an ad. At least with random ads there can be something I didn't even think about buying. Now you might try to argue that tracking can predict these awesome things I want but didn't know about, but in my experience it always leads to the most obvious predictable and boring ads.
Anecdote here: Old school targeted ads helped me discover something i didn't know i wanted. I was watching a game of football ( soccer for americans), and during the halftime break there were ads I wasn't really paying attention to, and per tradition, they were oriented towards males. There was an add for a decent looking multi-purpose electric razer that came with all sorts of attachments for different body parts, including head. I bought it and use it frequently, including for cutting my hair ( which has saved me hundreds of euros compared to going to a hairdresser) and beard.
So, sometimes a targeted ad can be useful. A contextually targeted ad can be useful too ( e.g. cooking utensils / supplies on a a recipe site).
A targeted ad is one that knows more about you than your age range, gender and what you are currently looking at (sports event, cooking site etc.).
A targeted ad knows that you usually buy tickets to a certain sports team, or you prefer baking cookies rather than cakes, and that you prefer the "Mestle" brand of flour etc.
And this is a "good" ad. When I'm on a hiking website, I'm interested in ads for tents and hiking utilities. When I'm on a tab website, i might be interested in a guitar selling ad. Those are good ads, I'm never mad when I see those
> If I plan to buy something I will never do it from an ad
How much of your choice in products is based on word of mouth? How do you know those purchases are not as a result of ads. How many purchases are because of "brand familiarity" that is likely influenced by advertising over time (e.g. if you asked me to buy you an energy drink I would likely buy a Red Bull
> in my experience it always leads to the most obvious predictable and boring ads.
Targeted ads are not the same as tracked ads. Shoe HN posts are targeted ads. "You purchased 600 dog poop bags from Amazon, here are 15 other variations of the same product that you might want" in a recipe article is targeted.
> Targeted ads are not the same as tracked ads. Shoe HN posts are targeted ads.
I don't believe that's considered targeted advertising under the DSA. If you're not dynamically selecting an ad to display based on data you have on me, it's not a targeted ad. It's just a contextual ad. A shoe HN post is static, can be read by anyone, there's no targeting logic involved, and you have no personal or behavioral data based on which to target.
"An ad that's meant to be appealing to white male software engineers 25-35 years old" isn't a targeted ad unless there's a system that serves it specifically to the target market.
EDIT: To support my point, the first proposal for Article 2b I found in the DSA documents:
Article 2b
Targeting of digital advertising
1. Providers of information society services shall not collect or
process personal data as defined in Article 4, point (1), of
Regulation (EU) 2016/679 for the purpose of targeting the
recipients to whom advertisements are displayed.
2. By way of derogation from paragraph 1, for the purpose
of targeting the recipients to whom advertisements for commercial
purposes are displayed, providers of information society services
may only collect and use the personal data of recipients who have
given their consent as defined in Article 4, point (11), of
Regulation (EU) 2016/679 explicitly to such collection and use.
[..]
> How much of your choice in products is based on word of mouth? How do you know those purchases are not as a result of ads.
So what if they are? GP's point still stands. When buying products, I often want a first hand experience from someone I trust; or at least a demonstration from an independent party that shows all facets of the product and not just what the advertisers want you to see. I don't care how the conveyor of that experience originally stumbled upon the product (although I would like potential conflict of interest or manipulation to be disclosed, including such things as free review samples). Maybe it fell from the sky, maybe they saw an ad for it and bought it, maybe they won it.. I don't care, it doesn't matter. I'm still not buying things from an ad.
Of course nobody is immune to ads. We were talking about the ad being a net positive to ones life.
Yeah I might also buy a redbull but I don't think they need to or should track me online to increase that likelyhood. And I don't think that would be a netpositive to my life. They can do just fine by traditional advertisements(and they do afaik!).
> How much of your choice in products is based on word of mouth? How do you know those purchases are not as a result of ads.
This is an essentially unsatisfiable burden of proof, isn’t it? In fifteen years on the Web I haven’t once bought or even looked up anything based on an explicit advertisement, even though I find “recommendation engines” occasionally useful. (Then again, I mostly use those as a workaround for crappy catalogues and site search, and the best recommendations I’ve seen were on pirate sites...)
That’s not to say that you’re not bringing up a valid point, it’s just that it’s not a fast dismissal it’s phrased as. I don’t know how one would actually go around proving this kind of hypothesis, or even how it would be phrased: “Ads have had no influence on my life”? Obviously false, given how pervasive they are. Too strong. “Ads have had no influence on which things I’ve used or bought”? Similarly false (I can think of several movies I’ve bought on VHS just to avoid the butchered TV cut). Too strong. “Ads in favour of a certain product line have never made me more favourably disposed towards that line”? Sounds plausible at least, but I’ve no idea how one could even approach proving that, and then there are availability-heuristic issues which are frequently what’s motivating the ads in the first place. Too weak.
Yet the underlying idea doesn’t seem that preposterous in my experience. It might be with more knowledge—economics certainly doesn’t come with a warranty of being unsurprising—but you’re not providing that here.
> Targeted ads are not the same as tracked ads. Sho[w] HN posts are targeted ads.
Then there are two different definitions of “targeted ads” in play: what the EU policy discussion concerned with, and the link’s title calls “targeted ads”, is specifically ads based on user behaviour; ads selected on the base of the page they would be placed on are explicitly OK ...
> "You purchased 600 dog poop bags from Amazon, here are 15 other variations of the same product that you might want" in a recipe article is targeted.
... But these are not (or at least not automatically), and I’d say there’s a distinction between them that is worth maintaining, one that the text under discussion chooses to express with the qualifier “targeted” for the latter but not the former.
There might be an objection that this is not the common meaning of the word “targeted” in the industry, and for all I know it may not be (I’ve certainly seen it used for just about any strategy for ad placement at all), but all in all, when dealing with an industry essentially built around twisting and shifting word meanings in the desired direction, which has already shown a propensity for manipulating the terminology around this particular issue to be as confusing and unappealing as possible (see “legitimate interest” in GDPR popups, which is not “legitimate interest” per the GDPR definition, or it wouldn’t even need an off switch), I’m not inclined to be particularly charitable.
I mean, if reasonable people show up and shout “aargh stupid journos, these are not targeted ads, these are frobnicated ads!”, if in fact every ad person ever mouths “frobnicated” every time the newsman on TV says “targeted”, then sure. We’ve certainly seen enough of that in both IT-related anything and anything-related legislation. But so far I’ve seen nothing that would point in that direction, only attempts (both willing and out of simple lack of attention) to erase, shift, or blur the boundary the EU legislators are trying to draw here. (I’m not idealizing them, and honestly I don’t have high hopes here, but credit where credit is due.)
> A well targeted ad can be a net positive to my life.
Have you ever bought anything based on a targeted ad?
I think targeted ads are a waste of my time, the advertiser's time, everyone's time. Because despite all the effort, they fail to advertise anything I would care for. At worst, they might advertise something that almost seems like something I could want, and then I dive down the rabbit hole and find out it's not what I want. Complete waste of time. Thankfully that's only happened once or twice (usually ads are so far off the mark that I can dismiss them on first sight).
Also, let's not talk about when you buy a product (that you would usually only buy once or once every couple years or so) and then you get bombarded with ads for the same type of product for weeks on end.
Like, I'm not collecting fridges, I just bought one.
An ad is designed to make you buy something. It's irrelevant to them if that makes your life better or worse. We're emotional creatures and I want to minimise companies taking advantage of my emotional state to buy shit I thought I needed. I want to buy less stuff in general. There's more to life than the dopamine you get from spending money.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. "Targeted" ads refer to ads that are contextual on the user (and thereby objectifying the person). There's nothing wrong with contextualizing ads in another way, e.g. on geography or on surrounding site content.
When I walk outside, I don't see ads for the NYC Metro system here. If real-life ads were as random as you suggest, I should have seen a few of those. But I don't, because real-life ads are geographically targeted. That's not the kind of targeting that's being banned here.
That's fine as long as the targeting is solely based on data that I expressly gave to the organisation that produces the product that the ad is for.
If the ad is based on data that was harvested without my permission from a source that wasn't related in any way to the product then I don't want it targeting me.
And every single targeted ad is of the second type. It's nefarious and I have no issue with the current type of targeting being restricted.
You know what makes well targeted ads? Sponsored reviews for products, or inline ads on related sites. Showing me ads for the latest iPhone when I'm reading articles about mobile phones,or tech.
I don't know if I'm an outlier but almost all the ads I see are for products that I will never buy, or that I've already bought. I was looking for a recipe on my partner's phone last night and there was an interstitial ad with Amazon items - all of them were variations on a consumable that we had just bought 6 months worth of, and they were not cooking related.
We can have targeted ads that are appropriate, but we don't need invasive tracking to so so.
Ad companies aren't targeting you to help you find things you want. Ad companies target you because you ended up being one of their most profitable targets, and often those ads extend beyond just profit to highly ethically dubious purposes
There is substantial overlap between “things I want” and “things I’m willing to buy”. The former is my angle on it, while the latter is the advertisers’ angle.
Targeted ads, like all forms of algorithmic personalization, put me in a filter bubble. I don't want to be shown content that's targeted at me—I want to be exposed to the full diversity of the world. If the tech giants are convinced I like technology and computers, that's all I will ever learn about. What if I'd prefer ballet dancing, or basket-weaving, or something else I can't begin to imagine?
I don't want to be trapped in an algorithmic box, which assumes my past will dictate my future. The algorithms think that they know who I am, but I don't know that yet, and I don't think I'll ever know, and I certainly don't want them to decide for me.
It’s about the data collection incentives. If you can’t use the data you collect to advertise, there’s no point in collecting the data in the first place.
Except in this case, where it makes no difference at all, because only certain groups are protected.
And I come back with what is the actual harm in data collection? It’s not like all the governments of the world don’t already have a much more intensive dossier on you.
The governments are the ones out to kill you or otherwise materially destroy your life. Corporations just want you to buy stuff.
All preventing private industry from data collection is prevent useful things like this.
I don't care about "all the governments in the world". I care about my own government most.
And as long as private companies are unable to collect medical data on me and medical confidentiality holds, they won't be able to obtain any such data.
I also certainly don't want some company putting ideas into the heads of my relatives - or my own - about what medicine is appropriate over the advice of medical professionals. The first step would be obtaining data on people's medical condition in the first place, so let's shut it down right there.
They can go directly advertise to doctors who have the required background to actually make an informed decision, but if they trick my gullible grandmother into paying for something that is likely not the optimal treatment, then we have a massive fucking problem.
And that goes for more than just health ads. Most ads are clearly appealing to people emotions instead of rationality: They tell a story of a happy family instead of showing you a fact sheet. They don't exist to "inform" people of their options and help them make a rational decision. If you are going to argue anything else, then I suggest we have a watch party of some randomly selected ads and see whether you can still look me straight in the face, arguing the same, afterwards. Most arguments for the benefits of advertisement are contingent on the idea of the "rational consumer" - as far as I am concerned that ship has sunk and was full of holes to begin with. Even if people were largely qualified to make rational decisions in specialist areas, a sizeable amount likely still wouldn't.
But I don't care as much about people wasting money on some "manscaping" garbage, nose hair trimmer or whatever inferior garbage is currently sold at upmarket prices. So another weasel gets rich? Whatever. It's health where I start to take issue, the weasel grows six legs and becomes something I want to take the boot to.
"IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler's program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success. IBM Germany, using its own staff and equipment, designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable technologic assistance Hitler's Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before-the automation of human destruction."
Good job, amoral corporations just wanting to sell stuff.
> A well targeted ad can be a net positive to my life
I think key word here is `can be`
> We’re not going to ever live in a world without ads and I would far rather they be an actual service to me, presenting me things I actually think are cool and might like to buy.
This is not how ads work. If you have 2 products: one you have 1% chance to buy, another lets say 10%. If 1% one has 20x more profit, thats the ad you will see.
Maybe use ads that are targeted to the context you're currently in, rather than target you as person?
The alternative to ads targeted towards an individual doesn't have to be completely random ads. Google even does this. The ads you see on a Google search is tailored to your search, they aren't ads based on your browsing history (though that might be part of the input).
Google does not show any retargeting ads on SERPs?
Edit to add: I’m into 3D printing and when I search “new printer” from a normal tab, I get a mix of 2D and 3D printer ads on my Google SERP. From the same device and search term 10 seconds later in an incognito tab, I get only ads for 2D printers.
(I’m fine with this state as I’m interested in 3D printers, but it seems like I’m being targeted here rather than just my search terms being targeted.)
The proposal still allows you to consent to targeted advertising. However targeting minors and certain protected groups is not allowed.
So if you think targeted ads can be a net positive to your life, I have good news: you can still consent even if this proposal passes in its current form. Those of us who don't agree with you get to make a choice.
We can talk about opt-in after we first ban general use.
Also, targeted ads introduce too many bad incentives: collecting data about users is profitable, social media pushing toxic content to increase engagement, increasing overconsumption, ... Banning targeted ads (where user tracking is involved) is a good step.
Ads can be applicable to you, but not in your interest. My go-to example is if they target certain political views in order to discourage them from voting.
That said, non-targeted ads doesn't mean irrelevant. They can be contextual, e.g. DuckDuckGo's ads are not targeted, but based on your search terms.
Sure, let's target you with non-working medicine when you are sick and desperate to try everything or, even worse, stop the treating you get that works but takes longer than the one from the ad. Yes, this happens right now.
Sure, let's target you with our extreme Church that thinks being gay is an illness, and you too should help to get rid of them. Yes, this happens too right now.
It's about this kind of ad's not your Raid Legends or I don't know become a rich person with 2 hours of work ad's.
Yes and the ads are carefully crafted to stay within the law. It's not a drug; it's a dietary supplement that may help with your condition, but (small print) it wasn't officially evaluated and it's doesn't replace a treatment. Technically true and legal, but it's not what the customer think it is.
Overall it's a net negative for the individual customer and society at large.
Are they really advocating "taking away human rights"? For comparison, is an activist ad promoting quitting smoking advocating for taking away human rights?
Targeting can still occur by proximity to content, which is how things used to happen. We shouldn’t have random ad performance but neither should we be optimizing for it at the price of privacy.
A lot of people here use the web with barely any targeted ads due to good ad block. I don’t believe they are missing out as opposed to living better.
A well targeted predatory ad can destroy your life. I it looks like an overstatement, read it as «a long stream of well targeted predatory add campaign that span for years can destroy your life, and along the life of many others»
Targeted ads that follow you around on the web need to be banned entirely. My aunt can predict what health issues or products my mom searches for on Google, because Facebook almost immediately serves her ads related to my mom's searches and browsing history.
Targeted ads are turned off in my mom's Google account, and she does not have a Facebook account. The two identities were linked together by the ad industry when in 2014 my aunt logged into Facebook once from my mom's previous tablet, and that's when they gave my aunt a fifth sense.
What's even more frustrating is that the current tablet runs Blokada for host based blocking, and there's uBlock Origin in the browser, but none of that matters, my aunt will call her to point out what shoes my mom was reading about days before.
Google most certainly doesn't share user's search history with Facebook. There may be some tracking on the sites themselves, that allows Facebook to detect user's interests. However I don't think it's supposed to use one persons web history to show ads to another user. What might be happening is that they are using some common accounts or a shared browser that leaks the data between them.
If the industry was that smart, i don't think i'd be getting the truly insane, ridiculous ads.
Garden furniture going on sale in Brno? I've never been to Brno (passed through it 3-4 times by train or bus, never getting off), and i don't own a house anywhere to need garden furniture, for that matter.
Private jet charters? I wish i was that rich.
Senior living homes, hearing aids? My father climbed Elbrus this summer.
The list goes on...
Apart from remarketing ads - like if i visited online store for telescopes, i see astronomy-related ads (plus yes, astrology-related too lol) for a while - almost all other ads i'm seeing online are truly bizarre and have nothing in common with what i want to buy. At the same time, badly needed things that the search engines could provide, are sorely missing - for example, many convenient flight connections are searchable manually online - by combining separate flight legs myself - but missing from online searches on sites like skyscanner...
Facebook's shadow profiles are much more pervarsive and insiduous, it is literally taken from __open__ source data bases and compiled to try to attach existing nodes.
They don't want to ban targeted ads based on political views? Is this because the politicians don't want to ban the techniques that they use to get reelected?
And do they want to ban ads targeted by "customer lists". Both Google Facebook allow advertizers to upload email or FB-ID lists, and will target an ad to show it only to people on the list. This (http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...) feels a lot more spooky to me than advertizing target to wide categories like health - I don't want or need to see products that are are for menopausal women, impotent men, or deaf old people since I'm not in any of these category.
FB & google already voluntarily banned buying politically targeted ads for money. [1]
A politician needs to give big tech something other than money to get their messages to be favourably targeted.
Don't forget that they already have access to virtually infinite money through abuse of market dominance, the only thing that can stand in their way is antitrust and data regulation.
Interesting. That's new (less than three months old). What does microtargeting mean precisely to Facebook? Is it still ok if the customer list is above a certain size?
yes. I think tha change is from now on you can not target your ad for only conservatives/ only socialist leaning people (as determined by their browsing data).
You used to be able to send socialist ads to socialists and conservative ads to conservatives... and be everything at the same time and win. Its like a cheat code of politics.
Now to do this you have to promise Zuck to not support any antitrust and data protection regulation in return Zuck will probably take you to office by microtargeting. You don't need to worry about the media, facebook will "fact check" everything for you.
You can still target nonpolitical ads based on other attributes if it is not specific to very few people.
1. This is unnecessary regulation between private parties
2. This is power balancing between individuals and big corporations
Obviously legislators are aligned with case 2. I think they have realized that the problem is so complex that is better to regulate at the end of the pipeline and let the companies figure out how to achieve it. Otherwise you may forbid gathering data X only to incentivize gathering data Y to circumvent it and make things even worse
How about we ban ALL targeted ads, dear political representatives, thereby removing one of the primary incentives to collect all that information in the first place?
This proposal bans all targeted ads unless you give consent. Targeting minors and certain protected groups is banned even if they consented to targeted advertising.
There's also this gem:
In order to avoid fatiguing recipients who refuse to consent,
terminal equipment settings that signal an objection to processing
of personal data should be respected.
Yes, please, bring us a legally binding No Consent and Do Not Track.
But then, who is paying all that nice money for politicians parties, fun ones and organisational ones?
Like always when it comes to politics, these things boil down to "who gave the tribal chief bigger spoils". We as a civic society should eventually learn that corruption is maybe the only way to get to where we want to be.
Or maybe a politically significant amount of people don't find targeted ads particularly invasive and at least prefer them to being suggested things with no relevance to the individual whatsoever?
> I don't really see the problem with ads that discriminate based on profession or income.
For me it's always been about control.
If the surveillance companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) used opt-in or honoured the Do Not Track header all this could be avoided.
Those that want tracked and targeted ads could request them and those that don't would be left alone.
Instead, by refusing to not honour, Do Not Track or using Dark UX Patterns to make it hard to opt out[1] they're affectively saying, "tough luck, we're going to do whatever we want regardless".
It's a race to the bottom to see which company can get away with being the most obnoxious.
We're left with legal means as the only curbs their behaviour.
.
1. Why do so many web sites get away with an "Allow All" but no reliable[2] "Reject All"?
2. Why is there a second set of things to opt out of as "Legitimate Purpose"? Why doesn't the "Reject All", when present, not cover these too?
> 2. Why is there a second set of things to opt out of as "Legitimate Purpose"? Why doesn't the "Reject All", when present, not cover these too?
Because you need to name stuff like session ID cookies, loadbalancer backend cookies and other stuff that is necessary for operation ("legitimate interest")... but you do not need consent from the user for these.
The whole point of misusing legitimate purpose is they're trying to end-run around consent. It's a bad hack until one of the national data protection agencies decides to say "no, you can't do that" and then it goes away.
> Because you need to name stuff like session ID cookies, loadbalancer backend cookies and other stuff that is necessary for operation
No you don't. You don't need to ask for permission for data you collect/store that is strictly required for your business to operate.
Key word: strictly required.
Meanwhile these leeches have latched on on a more nebulously defined "legitimate interest".
For example, if you need fraud protection for your order-processing business, you have a legitimate interest to process and store more data than is strictly required. Since such legitimate interests are innumerable they are not explicitly defined in the law.
So, the parasites clamp things like "siphon your data and sell it to the highest bidder" under "legitimate interest". Which skirts the law, and will fall apart under scrutiny. See the three-part test by UK's data authority, https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio... (UK is so far still bound by GDPR)
You could still control the audience of your ads by choosing where to publish them. What should be illegal is to target individuals by using their browsing data.
It would help for acceptance that if they ask about building a profile on you. That is especially a problem for said protected classes or anyone that diverges from a corridor of contemporary opinions. This data is sold and you have no control over it.
As it is, no I don't like any form of targeted ads and I have never responded to them. But mostly I don't like their invasive behavior and unregulated business incentives.
If the advertiser can correlate health, religion and sexual orientation with the allowed parameters, then they can still target ads implicitly based on these categories.
Ads are a completely legitimate business practice: I make a product or offer a service, so I want people to know about it.
Bans on targeted ads are not about the advertising, they are about the privacy concerns resulting from the data collection that is the prerequisite for targeted ads.
Although it would be a world very different from ours, I wonder what the consequences of an ad-ban would be? You create a business or service, but the only way an individual could discover it is by intentionally going out and seeking that information (perhaps you've made a new washing machine, and they seek out information for washing machines).
Perhaps specialised 'discovery' services would pop up for people wondering what sorts of new stuff/services was out there?
On the surface of it, I'd assume that if reaching out to customers to 'let them know you exist' via advertisements was prohibited, the amount of innovation and investment into products would decrease. But at the same time, the amount of money allocatable to product development within a given budget would increase, as you wouldn't have to expend so much on marketing (which in some cases, dwarfs the cost of R&D). But maybe the markets would just adapt anyways. Seems a fun thought experiment.
Ads pollute my brain with unnecessary information, which I then have to process.
In theory a perfectly targeted ad might produce some value for me, but in practice people who make shit products have more money to throw at ads, making Sturgeons law even worse.
I don't care about your product and I don't want my view obscured by your ads. The fact you think you should be able to force me to see them is the problem.
This can easily be done with contextual advertising, wich requires no user tracking. I have no problem with a shop showing me eg. an ad-banner for a gym membership if I happen to buy lots of sports wear in that shop.
However, if a website I never visited before shows me the same ads, data collection happened, and that should either be banned, or made into strict opt-on-only.
When you open the YouTube front page, there is no context except for what YouTube already knows about your preferences. If this situation I would prefer to receive video recommendations based on my past preferences, which could be considered targeted ads.
> When you open the YouTube front page, there is no context
Yes there is: My useraccount.
Ideally, if I am logged in, and if I consented that they may show me videos based on my preferences, I would be okay with them may recommending videos to me and refining these recommendations based on my views.
The consent should of course be opt-in only (eg. a simple switch in the account settings).
Using this information for recommending videos within that pages context only != Targeted advertising.
As long as the information never leaves their page, is used in no other page of their ecosystem, and as long as I can tell them to stop collecting it, delete what they already have, and are guaranteed by law that they keep no connection between that data and any identifying information other than my useraccount, I would be okay with that.
And yes, when I visit youtube without being logged in, I would be perfectly okay with having no/default recommendations, or recommendations based on the context of that page visit only.
I agree that there is a difference, but it's pretty hard to define. YouTube videos are a product, the creators are earning money from your views one way or another. If you ban targeted ads while allowing recommendations, Facebook will just claim that it shows you targeted recommendations.
This is a nice proposal overall. I'm not sure I agree with the bans on health, religion and sexual orientation (depending on your point of view such ads can be exploitative or useful) but I agree that targeting minors is not cool, and I like how the proposal makes targeting off-by-default and requires your consent.
It sounds like they're also trying to make things like Do Not Track legally binding:
In order to avoid fatiguing recipients who refuse to consent,
terminal equipment settings that signal an objection to processing
of personal data should be respected.
It does seem like they're trying to outlaw dark patterns that nag and coerce a consent out of you.
This would be a massive win if you ask me. I don't want to be bombarded with consent bullshit all the time, and I also don't want my privacy violated.
The main thing with AI-based services (and in this case, targeted ads) is that after a long while, your preferences are enforced over time in a such way you're deprived from discoverability of new products.
You might like something that is out of your usual searches, then you see other people with it and complain how you didn't know before, because the algorithm made you be within your own bubble. The algorithm is "more of you" than you ever are of yourself.
I think random ads decimates the entire targeted ads industry (at least for ads in EU), and that protects the consumers, and is a big win from discoverability of products, hopefully creating a more fair marketplace. I use the word "hopefully," because one never knows how much ads are gonna cost if the criteria is "sheer force of exposure".
This is a very misleading title and should be changed.
The EU Parliament has NOT banned these ads. Rather they have voted yes to the act. Unless the council votes yes as well, nothing is going to happen.
The politico title is correct, please change the title to that.
I wonder if this includes using inferences to indirectly target these categories, albeit with somewhat less accuracy but certainly more than non-targeted?
I don't care about what ads they are allowed to show me, since I block their ads anyway. What I care about is whether they are allowed to use the information used to compute the ads to track me. It would be a pyrrhic victory if the law simply says that can't use some specific type of data for computing ads, but it still allows them to track and use the same type of data for something else.
> Lawmakers will now have to negotiate with the Council, representing the 27 EU governments, which has shown no interest in tackling online advertising in the DSA.
As I understand it, the vote essentially determines the mandates of the representatives who will negotiate with the Council on behalf of the Parliament. Out of that negotiation will emerge the act that will actually come into effect.
That's right. It's for co-decision, so the Council and Parliament jointly need to agree a final outcome. This vote does not 'ban targeted ads' so much as lay down a marker that the Parliament wants targeted ads banned as part of the package, and instruct their representatives to argue for it.
I get banning the collection of data, but why ban the targeting? Does showing someone products they're more likely to want hurt them in some way? Saying an advertising company is allowed to know everyone's personal details but isn't allowed to, say, only show Islamic prayer mat advertisements to Muslims seems pretty backwards.
You’re looking at positive examples. The negative examples have serious potential to create harm. E.g.;
1) a teenager exploring/researching their own sexuality on the family computer causes ads to be served to very religious mom and dad for queer friendly products or a pride flag
2) ads targeting someone with covid that send them to a scam testing site (that charges both the patient and the government) or pushing ineffective or dangerous treatments like colloidal silver.
It’s not that these are the only categories that can be abused but these are some most rife for abuse
It must be said that the problem with (2) is the site pushing the claims being allowed to advertise/operate at all. Its only marginally less harmful if it can still profit from less directly targeted advertising.
I also think there's an important distinction between data that can be used on a platform's own website and information that follows you around the Internet (which this legislation doesn't appear to draw). In practical terms, this is the distinction between ads for services a gay teenager might actually use on a login-based social profile the teenager has voluntarily publicly displayed their sexual orientation on (and bombarding them with slightly fewer invitations to be heterosexual!) and rainbow ads following their mum round Internet.
But if you limit their targeting the entire method becomes much much less effective and hurts the economic incentive. Right now that seems the best they can do. The policies have to be realistic.
The issue is information following you…but good luck solving that
You can't effectively ban the collection. Bing needs to get your search query to be able to answer it. You can muck around retention and what kind of processing can be done... But this approach seems to be simpler and more robust. Since most of the nefarious tracking is for ads targeting, forbid using sensitive data for ads targeting and you've outlawed most of the worst thing. And adding another layer of processing or even transferring the data between separate entities shouldn't work around such a regulation either.
Now all that's left are the small matters of wording and enforcing the law...
Interesting to see "political orientation" missing here, as historically that is something that many countries have prevented registration of (by police, employers, etc)
Those cookie banners are often times illegal, i.e. consent has to be freely given and it should not be as easy not to give, instead of click and select multiple choices.
The explanations have to be layman ones and what not. It's a very dark pattern, and at some point it should be addressed.
Sorry have to disagree. GDPR, cookie banners and now this new ad-ban are just putting plasters over a problem, rather actually solving the root-cause of the problem.
Now I'm not saying that solving the root causes of these problems is easy, but these solutions are just so lame. Just a couple of concrete examples:
* I see and hear of GDPR violations everywhere (here in the UK, pre and post Brexit). Despite the threat of legal action, companies still ignore (too small to care) or are ignorant of the rules. At the end of the day, Big Tech still owns all the personal data in some way or another getting around EU restrictions.
* The annoying cookie banners where everyone just clicks "accept all" because no one wants to go through a list of checkboxes. This is classic EU strategy to problems: just throw more bureaucracy and administration at a problem.
The solution should be that the EU creates its own Big Tech, under the rules and regulations that it itself creates. Instead all of our politicians are using WhatsApp to perform Official communications (frankly this is horrific to me).
The legal follow-up could be better. The exacted fines should actually follow the law instead of being softened. With at least 4% of gross revenue in every instance, it would have bite and act to curb the excesses, thereby tackling the root problem. After all, it was never meant to outlaw data collection, just excessive surveillance.
> The annoying cookie banners
The GDPR isn't unclear about what companies can collect, what consent should be asked and how. Those banners are malicious compliance or non-compliance. They're purposefully built that way to get you as a potential consumer riled up about the regulation. And it's working: instead of talking about the companies trying to abuse your data and implementing horrible popups that don't do what the law says they should, you're now upset at the regulators. Classic case of "Don't like what they're saying? Change the narrative".
> And it's working: instead of talking about the companies trying to abuse your data and implementing horrible popups that don't do what the law says they should, you're now upset at the regulators.
Actually I'm upset at both the companies using dark patterns and the horribly designed cookie regulations.
> I see and hear of GDPR violations everywhere (here in the UK, pre and post Brexit). Despite the threat of legal action, companies still ignore (too small to care) or are ignorant of the rules.
It was wild west before GDPR, it takes time for companies and attitudes to adjust. And that adjustment is ongoing. Every fine helps; it results in increasing compliance. Give it a few years, wild west won't be so wild anymore. I'm sure you'll still find lots of smaller companies that didn't get the memo but the likelihood that your daily activities involve entities that violate your privacy left and right is getting lower and lower.
> The annoying cookie banners where everyone just clicks "accept all" because no one wants to go through a list of checkboxes. This is classic EU strategy to problems
Annoying banners are not EU strategy, they are strategy by companies who want to violate your rights and annoy you until you consent. The regulators are aware of this problem and I believe it's being worked on.
The DSA proposal discussed in the article includes additional regulation against dark patterns and there's this little bit: > In order to avoid fatiguing recipients who refuse to consent, terminal equipment settings that signal an objection to processing of personal data should be respected.
I have no idea if it's going to work out but this would make something like Do Not Track legally binding. I very much support this bit, because I hate annoying consent nags as much as you do..
> I see and hear of GDPR violations everywhere (here in the UK, pre and post Brexit). Despite the threat of legal action, companies still ignore (too small to care) or are ignorant of the rules. At the end of the day, Big Tech still owns all the personal data in some way or another getting around EU restrictions.
> The annoying cookie banners where everyone just clicks "accept all" because no one wants to go through a list of checkboxes. This is classic EU strategy to problems: just throw more bureaucracy and administration at a problem.
These cookie banners are (slowly) being deemed illegal: "Accept all" and "Reject all" must have the same prominence and accessibility. GDPR is forcing companies to care about security and about how they use information about their users and, probably for the first time, it's forcing companies to be transparent with how they are processing their users' data. And it's not requiring company to do anything you wouldn't expect an honest person to do when you give them some personal information, it's not just throwing bureaucracy at a problem.
GDPR is one of the worst pieces of legislation in the past decade.
It’s deliberately ambiguous, oftentimes nonsensical, was a nightmare to implement, there’s enormous amounts of noncompliance, and now plenty of sites that can’t be accessed from the EU, because the company behind it did the math and it was cheaper and easier to not care about the EU customer base at all.
Not to mention all the potential avenues for abuse. I have a couple of friends who have used GDPR to actively abuse a relatively small company that they didn’t like (because they probably didn’t have the resources to understand all the implications of GDPR), and they spammed them with personal data and removal requests and threatened legal action.
GDPR is bullshit. Your data is a commodity irrespective of GDPR. De-anonymising is trivial.
GDPR also double-victimizes businesses that were a part of a hack, i.e. the British Airways hack. On top of the damage inflicted on them by the hack, they also got hit with an 8 figure fine for a data breach. Which is insane, because everyone can get hacked.
The only thing GDPR has achieved is that you have a legal right to access the data that somebody holds on you, and to request the deletion of it. Everything else should be scrapped.
It's probably the first legislation that deals with user privacy and data transfers. It can be improved and it will most likely be improved. The cookie dialog options should be really a single option placed in the browser's settings, which should be passed to the host through http headers, like DNT.
Companies who 'did the math' and it was easier for them to ignore the EU customer base were addicted to ad placement and tracking anyway, so good riddance.
Companies should be responsible for their data security. If a bank is hacked and they steal my money, the money is insured and the insurance company pays it back. It's the same with personal data, if a data breach occurs, the company should be insured and the insurance company should cover liabilities.
> Companies should be responsible for their data security. If a bank is hacked and they steal my money, the money is insured and the insurance company pays it back. It's the same with personal data, if a data breach occurs, the company should be insured and the insurance company should cover liabilities.
Of course, but they shouldn’t be hit with an arbitrary fine on top of that. The fine goes directly to the government’s coffers, and not to cover any liabilities incurred.
It’s kicking a man who’s already down.
> Companies who 'did the math' and it was easier for them to ignore the EU customer base were addicted to ad placement and tracking anyway, so good riddance.
Not necessarily. In most cases it just didn’t make sense for them to hire a lawyer who specialised in the GDPR (I believe they were hard to come by and expensive in the US and the rest of the world), so they just decided to HTTP 451 instead.
> Almost certainly necessary since if they weren't "addicted to ad placement and tracking" as GP put it they wouldn't have to stop and thing about GDPR.
They weren't fined for having their security breached. They were fined for not having adequate security measures in place. Again, under GDPR you can't get fined for simply having your security breached as you claimed earlier.
What about the fact that models effectively have access to such features without actually having them explicitly apriory. Given all the data fb/google/etc have, they can probably infer these properties in high accuracy anyway. Are we going to exclude all data that correlates with these properties? Probably not, rendering this effort kind of pointless.
The number of financial scam ads I have been targeted with is staggering. Youtube presented me with an ad that was ~24 minutes long with an investment strategy that was supposed to make you a $1000 a day. Facebook is the same thing with crypto scams and binary options were popular back in the day.
This ban would not make dent in my problem with targeted ads. That someone gets scammed out of their money and it had nothing to do with their health, religion or sexual orientation.
Can facebook still target any content based on anything? In other words only outsiders are are restricted from buying some of the manipulation power of facebook but not fb and its strategic partners?
Once in a rare while there's an ad which makes me want to buy something but I don't know if it's worth all the noise.
Something really sad is that sometimes you search for something you actually want to buy like, say, winter tire chains for your car... Then you end up buying them but for two weeks you keep getting ads: because the system has no way of knowing you actually now bought some at the petrol station down the street.
I run pi-hole now: works great and seems to at least take care of the worst offenders.
Bold stance! I think it goes too far - there is definitely value for society in people being able to make services and goods they offer publicly known. No doubt we're currently too far in the "ads everywhere" direction, but within limits I think ads can have net benefit.
If that's the only reason for accepting ads, then they could be consigned to particular websites and stop polluting the world for the rest of us. Then, if you need something, you can go watch all the stupid ads.
For some others I should get money back because I couldn't find what was advertised before (for example recipe sites that contain mostly Blabla with interspersed ads and only a rudimentary recipe that isn't reproducible).
Ads for things that have zero applicability to me are a waste of my time, the advertisers time, everyone’s time. We’re not going to ever live in a world without ads and I would far rather they be an actual service to me, presenting me things I actually think are cool and might like to buy.
A well targeted ad can be a net positive to my life. An ad for something I would never use, ever, because it doesn’t apply to me is a net negative.