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Why not both? Any time somebody suggests a legislative solution, people come out of the woodwork to say that bad actors will continue being bad actors despite

Why not both? Any time somebody suggests a legislative solution, people come out of the woodwork to say that bad actors will continue being bad actors despite legislation. Privacy should be enshrined both in legislation and in practice.

jefftk 7y ago
My parent comment wasn't arguing for privacy, they were arguing against personalization. Specifically, I referenced two proposals for privacy-preserving ad personalization, FLoC (https://github.com/jkarlin/floc https://github.com/jkarlin/floc) and TURTLE-DOV (https://github.com/michaelkleber/turtledove https://github.com/michaelkleber/turtledove), and their response was that privacy wasn't the issue, the effects of personalization are harmful in themselves. For privacy I do agree that you can't just do it with legislation and you also need technology. But if you think the issue is personalization itself, regardless of how privately it is implemented, then legislation is the critical playing field. Blocking personalization on the open web through technical means while allowing it in walled gardens means you (a) still have most of the claimed harms of personalization but also (b) massively disadvantage the open web.
- MereInterest 7y ago
  Ah, I see. For me, the privacy-breaking aspects that are required to personalize ads are the primary negative aspect, and are what I focused on. While the parent comment only explicitly mentioned personalization of ads, tracking by ad companies for the sake of ad personalization is so ubiquitous that unless one explicitly makes a distinction, it is reasonable to take a reference to one as a reference to the other. Reading through those links on FLoC and TURTLE-DOV, those are interesting concepts. My worry is that even though the ad selection is done in the browser, it will still leak significant information. For image/video ads, it would require bloating the amount of bandwidth used to serve the ads, or would leak information about which ad was selected by the client.
  - ogre_codes 7y ago
    > For me, the privacy-breaking aspects that are required to personalize ads are the primary negative aspect, and are what I focused on. The two are more or less intertwined. "Personalization" leaks information about people. It has also allowed advertisers to promote material targeting (or eliminating) otherwise protected groups. People have been outed for being pregnant and for being gay, by outside observers noticing what promotions they were getting.

jefftk 7y ago

My parent comment wasn't arguing for privacy, they were arguing against personalization. Specifically, I referenced two proposals for privacy-preserving ad personalization, FLoC (https://github.com/jkarlin/floc https://github.com/jkarlin/floc) and TURTLE-DOV (https://github.com/michaelkleber/turtledove https://github.com/michaelkleber/turtledove), and their response was that privacy wasn't the issue, the effects of personalization are harmful in themselves. For privacy I do agree that you can't just do it with legislation and you also need technology. But if you think the issue is personalization itself, regardless of how privately it is implemented, then legislation is the critical playing field. Blocking personalization on the open web through technical means while allowing it in walled gardens means you (a) still have most of the claimed harms of personalization but also (b) massively disadvantage the open web.

MereInterest 7y ago
Ah, I see. For me, the privacy-breaking aspects that are required to personalize ads are the primary negative aspect, and are what I focused on. While the parent comment only explicitly mentioned personalization of ads, tracking by ad companies for the sake of ad personalization is so ubiquitous that unless one explicitly makes a distinction, it is reasonable to take a reference to one as a reference to the other. Reading through those links on FLoC and TURTLE-DOV, those are interesting concepts. My worry is that even though the ad selection is done in the browser, it will still leak significant information. For image/video ads, it would require bloating the amount of bandwidth used to serve the ads, or would leak information about which ad was selected by the client.
- ogre_codes 7y ago
  > For me, the privacy-breaking aspects that are required to personalize ads are the primary negative aspect, and are what I focused on. The two are more or less intertwined. "Personalization" leaks information about people. It has also allowed advertisers to promote material targeting (or eliminating) otherwise protected groups. People have been outed for being pregnant and for being gay, by outside observers noticing what promotions they were getting.