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>I don't understand why people hate on it so much. Because they fundamentally misunderstand how advertising works. Read the comments on any article that discus

by neotek 10y ago

>I don't understand why people hate on it so much. Because they fundamentally misunderstand how advertising works. Read the comments on any article that discusses advertising and you'll see endless pages of people furious that Facebook or Google or Microsoft are "selling my data", as though an advertiser can click a few buttons and download a list of people's names and addresses and preferences. It's the same confusion that exists about cookies, which people seem to think are super secretive bits of code that can somehow infiltrate your browser and watch everything you do. The average person is completely misinformed about how advertising works, and the media breathlessly hypes up that misinformation despite the fact that they know very well exactly how advertising actually works and that nobody (well, nobody like Facebook or Google) is selling your personal information to anyone.

fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
So you would claim that these companies do not hold these lists? Or do you understand that they currently don't sell them (because it is currently more profitable to sell services based on them)? Do you remember what happened when Radioshack went under recently?
- neotek 10y ago
  >So you would claim that these companies do not hold these lists? Why put words in my mouth, particularly when those words have nothing to do with what I actually wrote? To address the meat of your conspiracy theory, Facebook and Google and indeed the vast majority of companies in similar positions with similar data collection activities all have very specific, highly defined privacy statements which explicitly rule out selling direct access to personally identifiable information, and all of them promise to give you notice ahead of time should anything change that would materially affect those agreements. I absolutely trust Google and Facebook never to sell my personal information to an advertiser and I am extremely confident that if they ever decided to do such a thing I'd have ample time to opt out. None of which, by the way, has anything to do with the manner in which the general public misunderstands advertising. The general consensus is that their personal information is currently being sold to the highest bidder, and that's simply factually inaccurate.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
    You position is very naive. The general public is less trusting because they have a collective memory of how the world works. People object to the collection and storage of the data in-and-of-itself. Most people understand that these companies will not sell their competitive edge under current market conditions - but market conditions change and companies change. The privacy policies are subject to change. Radioshack will give you a clue as to what might happen if one of these companies goes bust. Another point to consider is that so called anonymized datasets have been de-anonymized repeatedly.

by neotek 10y ago

fdgdasfadsf 10y ago

So you would claim that these companies do not hold these lists? Or do you understand that they currently don't sell them (because it is currently more profitable to sell services based on them)? Do you remember what happened when Radioshack went under recently?

neotek 10y ago
>So you would claim that these companies do not hold these lists? Why put words in my mouth, particularly when those words have nothing to do with what I actually wrote? To address the meat of your conspiracy theory, Facebook and Google and indeed the vast majority of companies in similar positions with similar data collection activities all have very specific, highly defined privacy statements which explicitly rule out selling direct access to personally identifiable information, and all of them promise to give you notice ahead of time should anything change that would materially affect those agreements. I absolutely trust Google and Facebook never to sell my personal information to an advertiser and I am extremely confident that if they ever decided to do such a thing I'd have ample time to opt out. None of which, by the way, has anything to do with the manner in which the general public misunderstands advertising. The general consensus is that their personal information is currently being sold to the highest bidder, and that's simply factually inaccurate.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
  You position is very naive. The general public is less trusting because they have a collective memory of how the world works. People object to the collection and storage of the data in-and-of-itself. Most people understand that these companies will not sell their competitive edge under current market conditions - but market conditions change and companies change. The privacy policies are subject to change. Radioshack will give you a clue as to what might happen if one of these companies goes bust. Another point to consider is that so called anonymized datasets have been de-anonymized repeatedly.