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I think all this talk about Facebook and paid political ads missing the key problem I have with ads-based businesses and that is there are certain things you ju
by undefined3840 7y ago
I think all this talk about Facebook and paid political ads missing the key problem I have with ads-based businesses and that is there are certain things you just shouldn’t be able to target ads to people with, including health information.
If congress wanted to regulate big tech they should enforce certain basic standards around 1) what information can be used to target consumers with 2) the granularity of the data.
For political ads, for example, I think the right decision for Twitter and Facebook would be to allow them but limit targeting e.g. you can specify the district they would appear in (low granularity) but be shown to a completely random sample of users who live there.
- briffle 7y agoThere have been quite a few lawsuits around related subjects. Facebook got sued because their targeting of ads allowed people to do things like target jobs to only men [0], or only to certain ethnicities [1], etc. Certainly, in some cases, targeting gender makes sense, but allowing it across the board gets a little scary. 0: https://www.vox.com/2019/3/21/18275746/facebook-settles-ad-discrimination-lawsuits https://www.vox.com/2019/3/21/18275746/facebook-settles-ad-d... 1: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-advertising-discrimination-settlement/ https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-advertising-discriminat...
- undefined3840 7y agoYeah but Facebook got sued for that because those violated existing laws. There’s no regulation around using any data for targeting purposes for most regular or political online ads, and I’m saying that should be the focus when it comes to regulation but have not heard anything other than “Facebook is destroying democracy!”