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I know everone hates ads, but isn’t targeted ads better than wholesale bombardment? Did Apple’s blocking of facebook’s targeted ads improve the consumer experie

I know everone hates ads, but isn’t targeted ads better than wholesale bombardment? Did Apple’s blocking of facebook’s targeted ads improve the consumer experience? Or did that just make advertising more inefficient which then led to just more irrelevant ads. A good example would be American tv. Everyone has to suffer to through those stupid viagra and antidepressants ads because there is no targeting.

tomp 4y ago
The more targeted an ad, the more it manipulates your mind.
buzzy_hacker 4y ago
No. Because targeting means you’ve built a profile on me by collecting data about my habits and interests without permission and will sell/leak that to god knows who. Websites can tailor their ads to the audience likely to visit them.
- makestuff 4y ago
  I would be fine with paying for youtube premium, etc. if they did not track and build profiles on paying customers. I get mining my data in exchange for using it for free, but I do not think it is fair to mine data on paying customers without giving them some discount/opt out.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  You can turn off personalized ads on iOS https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/control-how-apple-delivers-advertising-to-you-iphf60a6a256/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/control-how-apple-del... Turn personalized ads on or off Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising, then turn Personalized Ads on or off. Note: Turning off personalized ads limits Apple’s ability to deliver relevant ads to you. It may not reduce the number of ads you receive.
- hurril 4y ago
  Plus: they're often even worse than the wholesale because what they think they know about me is basically always pure nonsense. (Other than offering me an ad to buy the book I just fckn bought.)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
malfist 4y ago
I would argue no, but that is my opinion. The reason for my no is that if there are ad agencies committed to building a profile of you, that's far to easy for that profile to get sold/stolen by bad actors. For example, if I was a trans man, and I was buying feminine hygiene products, I could be targeted for harassment by a leaked advertising profile. If there's no money in building profiles it makes it less likely that one will be built, not that it can't. But that's a reasonable tradeoff to me.
vehemenz 4y ago
Sure, but it's not as if the data used to create the targeted ad disappears after the ad is served, or that the data in a single, secure location. It's shared with 100 other analytics companies and could end up in the hands of your health insurer, or God knows who else.
rebeccaskinner 4y ago
I'm against all ads, but I'm particularly against targeted ads because building and tuning systems that are designed to track people and personalize messages to influence behavior have far too many uses that are far worse that convincing someone to buy some pants or whatever. It's highly tuned and personalized psychological warfare at scale, that can be deployed for any number of reasons.
okamiueru 4y ago
If you want a contrary opinion, I disagree. On the face of it, I agree with your premise. However, targeted ads unfortunately also means creating profiles which are sold to data brokers. Targeted ads are I suppose ok. However, collecting data, profiling and selling to whomever is paying has very significant ramifications. If advertisers figure out a way to target ads without profiling, I'm all for it. In fact, it's not that uncommon for me to watch "sponsors" on YouTube. It's targeted because people who are watching a video on mechanical principles, might be interested in.. Say "brilliant". That said. VPN services and ear pods can gf themselves.
dbtc 4y ago
Maybe not so much for the individual user's experience, but society as a whole. We're seeing that targeted (political) ads are a powerful way to hack a democracy. If everyone is seeing the same shitty advertisement, at least they have something to complain about together - even that much common ground is better in my opinion than everyone with their own version of reality.
stormbrew 4y ago
> Or did that just make advertising more inefficient which then led to just more irrelevant ads. Why should I care about the "efficiency" of the ads I'm being served? It's not my job to help them exploit me.
rixthefox 4y ago
I think that's the model everyone (eg: your average consumer) likes and is most familiar with. Advertisements on TV are tolerated because it's not targeted and just a random broadcast to everyone who might be interested. Anxiety that certain things may be used against you in the form of advertising is a very real problem people face. A teenager who is researching transgender topics would be potentially frightened if the TV station the family usually watches that never shows any ads about transgender health suddenly started pushing those kinds of ads and the parents disapproved. The problem lies in the tracking technology. In order to make informed decisions about what people might potentially be looking to buy includes learning that individual's preferences and the rather unfortunate part of everything being online is that includes everything you could possibly imagine. Everything from the type of job you have right down to your porn preferences and other proclivities are potentially up for grabs and I'm sure the vast majority of people would feel greatly unnerved if Google, Facebook or whoever showed them just what kind of person the algorithms have determined them to be just by the data they've already collected.
tomComb 4y ago
Also, targeted ads can be very useful for small businesses trying to reach their target market. Untargetted ads tend to be big companies promoting their brand.
magic_hamster 4y ago
First of all, yes I rather get irrelevant ads than being targeted. If you worked in certain industries you know that some advertisers are extremely cynical, and I simply don't want to be in a constant state of mental warfare against these people. This has a real effect on stress and in my opinion is worse than seeing an irrelevant ad. At least I know this ad isn't tracking and profiling me. There is also the concept of identity, and specifically, who owns your identity. If you are the owner of your own identity, including interests, wants and needs, then no company should be allowed to create a profile of your identity ("shadow profile") without your permission. However, the big ad corporations like Google and Facebook (and recently TikTok) all create shadow profiles for you, like it or not, with or without your consent. Why are they allowed to do this? Should I not be paid if my unique identity is being used and monetized?
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  This "ownership of identity" complaint makes no sense to me. You are the owner of your identity, but I would still be free to think you are an asshole if I so wanted (I don't, to be clear, just an example :) ) Making inferences about you doesn't mean you "own" your identity less.
  - magic_hamster 4y ago
    Of course you can think what you like of me, but how did you obtain this opinion? In all likelihood, from a personal interaction - perhaps you met me or replied to my misguided comments. Now imagine a person constantly badgering you for personal information that you don't want to share, and then using whatever info they found to manipulate you. There's a law against that, it's harassment, nobody wants this. But when a machine does it, it's supposedly okay. I would consider consenting to being tracked and offered personalized ads if I got paid to see these ads. If I am the owner of my identity, I should be the one monetizing it. Why would I agree some corporation should make money off of my very being? I resent that. Either don't profile me (especially against my will) or compensate me. Getting paid for your thoughts is not something new. People are constantly being paid to take part in focus groups, AB testing, polls and surveys. So why not pay you for the right to use this information in advertising?
addicted 4y ago
I strongly disagree. Targeted ads are significantly worse than generic ads. The entire point of advertising is manipulating human beings. Targeted advertising means you have even more data specific to an individual making it easier to manipulate the individual. More generic advertising (for example, TV ads) means all you have is the general area they live in, or the general interest of the individual (magazine ads). You cannot manipulate people based on their personal traits anymore. The focus of the advertising shifts immediately from the consumer of the ad to the product and/or message of the ad, because you simply do not have enough information about the consumer.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  > The entire point of advertising is manipulating human beings The entire point of your comment is manipulating human beings. Advertising often just seeks to make a consumer aware of a certain product. If that is manipulation, so is pretty much any content that seeks to change what people know.
  - airstrike 4y ago
    > The entire point of your comment is manipulating human beings. The difference is in the intention for said manipulation. His comment isn’t trying to get us to part with our hard-earned income for ultimately frivolous goods.
    - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
      "frivolous goods" Sure, if the good or service is actually frivolous, but what about the case where the human is actively searching for some good or service that offer some actual value?
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      Is there no such thing as a win-win? If the business makes money off of a sale and the consumer gets a product they actually wanted? Or is the default mode of operation always the consumer losing and the business winning?
AlexandrB 4y ago
> Everyone has to suffer to through those stupid viagra and antidepressants ads because there is no targeting. This is no worse than suffering through "Raid Shadow Legends" ads because I have a "gamer" bit flipped somewhere in Google's profile of me. 99% (or even 100%) of stuff advertised to me is hot garbage, even if I'm in the right demographic for the product. The problem is that targeting is only part of the equation of what you see. The other part is the advertiser's budget. And companies that spend big on marketing are often either selling digital crack (e.g. gacha games, scams, gambling) or simply have the most capital investment (startup of the week, manscaped, Nord VPN, etc.). Neither scenario is a good signal of quality. As a result, the safest approach as a consumer is to ignore all ads.
enkrs 4y ago
I live multiple lives. I'm a father, a businessman, have multiple hobbies, do sports. Targeted ads mean this info can be combined. I can be profiled and abused. Algorithm has calculated what I might impulsively buy and shows me that personalized ad everywhere. Non-targeted ads do not mean viagra ads. Non-targeted ads still have the context of the website/app I'm using. Non-targeted ads mean that I can get ads about specific hardware when I browse my hobby forums; I can get ads about some interesting SaaS when I browse my work related news sites. I don't get anything that's targeting some calculated personality quirks of mine to the highest ad bidder.
wbsss4412 4y ago
I don’t see how targeted ads are any less insufferable than a viagra ad. I don’t watch ads for fun. No matter how “relevant” an ad may be, you’re still breaking context to insert yourself, and distract me from, the thing I’m actually interested in.
MobiusHorizons 4y ago
If they were any good I might agree. But in my experience ad targeting just fixates on things you recently looked up, or actually already purchased. I don't recall ever finding a product through a targeted ad that I didn't already know about.
spaetzleesser 4y ago
when I am on a kiteboarding forum I prefer to see ads that are relevant to kiteboarding and not ads for hand mixers just because I looked at or bought one last week. I also think targeted ads are really bad for society in general. They have incentivized the building of companies that have created massive surveillance and manipulation systems on a scale nobody would have dreamt of some decades ago. Think about Stalin or Hitler having the datasets Google or Facebook have built up and how they could have used them. I can't see anything good about targeted advertising unless you buy into the vision that people's only purpose in life is to buy things.
bee_rider 4y ago
I will add yet another voice to the heap saying "nope, targeted is worse." The point of ads is to trick me into buying something I don't need, I'd rather they were less efficient. Further, lots of smart people are working on the project of ads. Talented programmers and data scientists. Hopefully less efficient ads will result in a less lucrative ad sector, and more of these folks can be convinced to do something productive with their talents.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Doesn’t it say more about you than the advertiser that you are allowing yourself to be tricked?
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Sure -- ads are a billion dollar industry so apparently they are getting some people to spend money they wouldn't have otherwise, what is says about me is that I don't think I'm somehow uniquely immune to them. Naturally, like most technically inclined people, I've adjusted to this vulnerability by using an ad blocker.
crazygringo 4y ago
Seriously. I literally have gone to the page for my Google advertising profile and updated my interests to be more accurate. Targeted ads usually aren't trying to trick me, they're telling me about products and services I genuinely don't know about. Maybe this will shock people, but I have actually bought things linked straight from ads a handful of times. (Only a handful, but that's more than zero.) I infinitely prefer targeted advertising rather than the horrible lowest-common-denominator generic non-targeted "grow your dick" and "one weird trick" and "millionth website visitor" garbage. (I just wish there were a button for "don't show me ads for humidifiers anymore because I already bought one after researching, I'm not gonna buy another". So that the targeting worked even better.)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
cush 4y ago
> but isn’t targeted ads better than wholesale bombardment? Better by what measure? Not at the expense of privacy. Where is the data going? Who is it being sold to? Sure, American TV ads are annoying, but they're predictable and sometimes entertaining. American TV ads are so inefficient that they need to work for your attention. One issue with targeting is receiving antidepressant ads, knowing the algorithm knows that you're depressed. Or receiving baby ads when the algorithm knows you were expecting, but doesn't know you had a miscarriage. There are countless examples of targeting being a danger to the public as well, being used for very effective misinformation campaigns.
avianlyric 4y ago
Apple blocked targeted ads based on track individuals, and collecting personal data. There are plenty of ways of serving targeted ads without the tracking. The most obvious approach is content based targeting. If someone is reading an article about baby names, put ads for baby clothes next to it. If there’re reading an article about cloud infrastructure, put an AWS ad next to it. People managed to make and sell perfectly good adverts long before Facebook and Google came along. Have you never noticed that every advert in a trade magazine targets people in that trade?
- ec109685 4y ago
  They didn't block targeted ads based on collecting data. Facebook can collect all the personal data they want and use it for advertising. What they can't do w/o consent is collect data from third party apps and use that to target users in other apps.
- robbyking 4y ago
  I understand your point, but there's a difference between ads targeting specific audiences and ads targeting specific individuals.
unionpivo 4y ago
No targeted ads are worse in several ways. 1.) It's one of the main reason why surveillance capitalism is so widespread. Some of the worst things that came out of tech in past 20 years are directly or indirectly connected to "targeting ads". 2. ) Better name for targeted adds would be Machine driven adds. And with it comes the counter part of machine driven re-posters re-blogers, ai generated spam content etc. If you didn't have all those "targeted" machine driven networks there would be a lot less reason to build such sites. Since most advertisers would not want to advertise on such sites if they had a choice in it. 3.) With all the crap they bring, they still suck at targeting. They either focus on one search you did a while ago to the exclusion of everything else, they to sell you same expensive stuff for months after you already bought it, or completely irrelevant most of the time. 4.) They make pages load slower, sometimes a lot slower.
JimDabell 4y ago
> I know everone hates ads, but isn’t targeted ads better than wholesale bombardment? There’s a lot of people disagreeing with you, but it’s missing the point, I think. Everybody can get the experience they want; both you and they can. You can get targeted ads by accepting when an advertiser asks to track you. They can get non-targeted ads by rejecting when an advertiser asks to track them. The key thing here is that everybody is given the choice. And that’s Apple’s only requirement – they haven’t banned tracking, they have banned tracking without asking the user for their consent first.
chillfox 4y ago
You are forgetting the alternative that is no ads.

tomp 4y ago

The more targeted an ad, the more it manipulates your mind.

buzzy_hacker 4y ago

No. Because targeting means you’ve built a profile on me by collecting data about my habits and interests without permission and will sell/leak that to god knows who. Websites can tailor their ads to the audience likely to visit them.

makestuff 4y ago
I would be fine with paying for youtube premium, etc. if they did not track and build profiles on paying customers. I get mining my data in exchange for using it for free, but I do not think it is fair to mine data on paying customers without giving them some discount/opt out.
andsoitis 4y ago
You can turn off personalized ads on iOS https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/control-how-apple-delivers-advertising-to-you-iphf60a6a256/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/control-how-apple-del... Turn personalized ads on or off Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising, then turn Personalized Ads on or off. Note: Turning off personalized ads limits Apple’s ability to deliver relevant ads to you. It may not reduce the number of ads you receive.
hurril 4y ago
Plus: they're often even worse than the wholesale because what they think they know about me is basically always pure nonsense. (Other than offering me an ad to buy the book I just fckn bought.)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

malfist 4y ago

I would argue no, but that is my opinion. The reason for my no is that if there are ad agencies committed to building a profile of you, that's far to easy for that profile to get sold/stolen by bad actors. For example, if I was a trans man, and I was buying feminine hygiene products, I could be targeted for harassment by a leaked advertising profile. If there's no money in building profiles it makes it less likely that one will be built, not that it can't. But that's a reasonable tradeoff to me.

vehemenz 4y ago

Sure, but it's not as if the data used to create the targeted ad disappears after the ad is served, or that the data in a single, secure location. It's shared with 100 other analytics companies and could end up in the hands of your health insurer, or God knows who else.

rebeccaskinner 4y ago

I'm against all ads, but I'm particularly against targeted ads because building and tuning systems that are designed to track people and personalize messages to influence behavior have far too many uses that are far worse that convincing someone to buy some pants or whatever. It's highly tuned and personalized psychological warfare at scale, that can be deployed for any number of reasons.

okamiueru 4y ago

If you want a contrary opinion, I disagree. On the face of it, I agree with your premise. However, targeted ads unfortunately also means creating profiles which are sold to data brokers. Targeted ads are I suppose ok. However, collecting data, profiling and selling to whomever is paying has very significant ramifications. If advertisers figure out a way to target ads without profiling, I'm all for it. In fact, it's not that uncommon for me to watch "sponsors" on YouTube. It's targeted because people who are watching a video on mechanical principles, might be interested in.. Say "brilliant". That said. VPN services and ear pods can gf themselves.

dbtc 4y ago

Maybe not so much for the individual user's experience, but society as a whole. We're seeing that targeted (political) ads are a powerful way to hack a democracy. If everyone is seeing the same shitty advertisement, at least they have something to complain about together - even that much common ground is better in my opinion than everyone with their own version of reality.

stormbrew 4y ago

> Or did that just make advertising more inefficient which then led to just more irrelevant ads. Why should I care about the "efficiency" of the ads I'm being served? It's not my job to help them exploit me.

rixthefox 4y ago

I think that's the model everyone (eg: your average consumer) likes and is most familiar with. Advertisements on TV are tolerated because it's not targeted and just a random broadcast to everyone who might be interested. Anxiety that certain things may be used against you in the form of advertising is a very real problem people face. A teenager who is researching transgender topics would be potentially frightened if the TV station the family usually watches that never shows any ads about transgender health suddenly started pushing those kinds of ads and the parents disapproved. The problem lies in the tracking technology. In order to make informed decisions about what people might potentially be looking to buy includes learning that individual's preferences and the rather unfortunate part of everything being online is that includes everything you could possibly imagine. Everything from the type of job you have right down to your porn preferences and other proclivities are potentially up for grabs and I'm sure the vast majority of people would feel greatly unnerved if Google, Facebook or whoever showed them just what kind of person the algorithms have determined them to be just by the data they've already collected.

tomComb 4y ago

Also, targeted ads can be very useful for small businesses trying to reach their target market. Untargetted ads tend to be big companies promoting their brand.

magic_hamster 4y ago

First of all, yes I rather get irrelevant ads than being targeted. If you worked in certain industries you know that some advertisers are extremely cynical, and I simply don't want to be in a constant state of mental warfare against these people. This has a real effect on stress and in my opinion is worse than seeing an irrelevant ad. At least I know this ad isn't tracking and profiling me. There is also the concept of identity, and specifically, who owns your identity. If you are the owner of your own identity, including interests, wants and needs, then no company should be allowed to create a profile of your identity ("shadow profile") without your permission. However, the big ad corporations like Google and Facebook (and recently TikTok) all create shadow profiles for you, like it or not, with or without your consent. Why are they allowed to do this? Should I not be paid if my unique identity is being used and monetized?

whimsicalism 4y ago
This "ownership of identity" complaint makes no sense to me. You are the owner of your identity, but I would still be free to think you are an asshole if I so wanted (I don't, to be clear, just an example :) ) Making inferences about you doesn't mean you "own" your identity less.
- magic_hamster 4y ago
  Of course you can think what you like of me, but how did you obtain this opinion? In all likelihood, from a personal interaction - perhaps you met me or replied to my misguided comments. Now imagine a person constantly badgering you for personal information that you don't want to share, and then using whatever info they found to manipulate you. There's a law against that, it's harassment, nobody wants this. But when a machine does it, it's supposedly okay. I would consider consenting to being tracked and offered personalized ads if I got paid to see these ads. If I am the owner of my identity, I should be the one monetizing it. Why would I agree some corporation should make money off of my very being? I resent that. Either don't profile me (especially against my will) or compensate me. Getting paid for your thoughts is not something new. People are constantly being paid to take part in focus groups, AB testing, polls and surveys. So why not pay you for the right to use this information in advertising?

addicted 4y ago

I strongly disagree. Targeted ads are significantly worse than generic ads. The entire point of advertising is manipulating human beings. Targeted advertising means you have even more data specific to an individual making it easier to manipulate the individual. More generic advertising (for example, TV ads) means all you have is the general area they live in, or the general interest of the individual (magazine ads). You cannot manipulate people based on their personal traits anymore. The focus of the advertising shifts immediately from the consumer of the ad to the product and/or message of the ad, because you simply do not have enough information about the consumer.

whimsicalism 4y ago
> The entire point of advertising is manipulating human beings The entire point of your comment is manipulating human beings. Advertising often just seeks to make a consumer aware of a certain product. If that is manipulation, so is pretty much any content that seeks to change what people know.
- airstrike 4y ago
  > The entire point of your comment is manipulating human beings. The difference is in the intention for said manipulation. His comment isn’t trying to get us to part with our hard-earned income for ultimately frivolous goods.
  - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
    "frivolous goods" Sure, if the good or service is actually frivolous, but what about the case where the human is actively searching for some good or service that offer some actual value?
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Is there no such thing as a win-win? If the business makes money off of a sale and the consumer gets a product they actually wanted? Or is the default mode of operation always the consumer losing and the business winning?

AlexandrB 4y ago

> Everyone has to suffer to through those stupid viagra and antidepressants ads because there is no targeting. This is no worse than suffering through "Raid Shadow Legends" ads because I have a "gamer" bit flipped somewhere in Google's profile of me. 99% (or even 100%) of stuff advertised to me is hot garbage, even if I'm in the right demographic for the product. The problem is that targeting is only part of the equation of what you see. The other part is the advertiser's budget. And companies that spend big on marketing are often either selling digital crack (e.g. gacha games, scams, gambling) or simply have the most capital investment (startup of the week, manscaped, Nord VPN, etc.). Neither scenario is a good signal of quality. As a result, the safest approach as a consumer is to ignore all ads.

enkrs 4y ago

I live multiple lives. I'm a father, a businessman, have multiple hobbies, do sports. Targeted ads mean this info can be combined. I can be profiled and abused. Algorithm has calculated what I might impulsively buy and shows me that personalized ad everywhere. Non-targeted ads do not mean viagra ads. Non-targeted ads still have the context of the website/app I'm using. Non-targeted ads mean that I can get ads about specific hardware when I browse my hobby forums; I can get ads about some interesting SaaS when I browse my work related news sites. I don't get anything that's targeting some calculated personality quirks of mine to the highest ad bidder.

wbsss4412 4y ago

I don’t see how targeted ads are any less insufferable than a viagra ad. I don’t watch ads for fun. No matter how “relevant” an ad may be, you’re still breaking context to insert yourself, and distract me from, the thing I’m actually interested in.

MobiusHorizons 4y ago

If they were any good I might agree. But in my experience ad targeting just fixates on things you recently looked up, or actually already purchased. I don't recall ever finding a product through a targeted ad that I didn't already know about.

spaetzleesser 4y ago

when I am on a kiteboarding forum I prefer to see ads that are relevant to kiteboarding and not ads for hand mixers just because I looked at or bought one last week. I also think targeted ads are really bad for society in general. They have incentivized the building of companies that have created massive surveillance and manipulation systems on a scale nobody would have dreamt of some decades ago. Think about Stalin or Hitler having the datasets Google or Facebook have built up and how they could have used them. I can't see anything good about targeted advertising unless you buy into the vision that people's only purpose in life is to buy things.

bee_rider 4y ago

I will add yet another voice to the heap saying "nope, targeted is worse." The point of ads is to trick me into buying something I don't need, I'd rather they were less efficient. Further, lots of smart people are working on the project of ads. Talented programmers and data scientists. Hopefully less efficient ads will result in a less lucrative ad sector, and more of these folks can be convinced to do something productive with their talents.

scarface74 4y ago
Doesn’t it say more about you than the advertiser that you are allowing yourself to be tricked?
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Sure -- ads are a billion dollar industry so apparently they are getting some people to spend money they wouldn't have otherwise, what is says about me is that I don't think I'm somehow uniquely immune to them. Naturally, like most technically inclined people, I've adjusted to this vulnerability by using an ad blocker.

crazygringo 4y ago

Seriously. I literally have gone to the page for my Google advertising profile and updated my interests to be more accurate. Targeted ads usually aren't trying to trick me, they're telling me about products and services I genuinely don't know about. Maybe this will shock people, but I have actually bought things linked straight from ads a handful of times. (Only a handful, but that's more than zero.) I infinitely prefer targeted advertising rather than the horrible lowest-common-denominator generic non-targeted "grow your dick" and "one weird trick" and "millionth website visitor" garbage. (I just wish there were a button for "don't show me ads for humidifiers anymore because I already bought one after researching, I'm not gonna buy another". So that the targeting worked even better.)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

cush 4y ago

> but isn’t targeted ads better than wholesale bombardment? Better by what measure? Not at the expense of privacy. Where is the data going? Who is it being sold to? Sure, American TV ads are annoying, but they're predictable and sometimes entertaining. American TV ads are so inefficient that they need to work for your attention. One issue with targeting is receiving antidepressant ads, knowing the algorithm knows that you're depressed. Or receiving baby ads when the algorithm knows you were expecting, but doesn't know you had a miscarriage. There are countless examples of targeting being a danger to the public as well, being used for very effective misinformation campaigns.

avianlyric 4y ago

Apple blocked targeted ads based on track individuals, and collecting personal data. There are plenty of ways of serving targeted ads without the tracking. The most obvious approach is content based targeting. If someone is reading an article about baby names, put ads for baby clothes next to it. If there’re reading an article about cloud infrastructure, put an AWS ad next to it. People managed to make and sell perfectly good adverts long before Facebook and Google came along. Have you never noticed that every advert in a trade magazine targets people in that trade?

ec109685 4y ago
They didn't block targeted ads based on collecting data. Facebook can collect all the personal data they want and use it for advertising. What they can't do w/o consent is collect data from third party apps and use that to target users in other apps.
robbyking 4y ago
I understand your point, but there's a difference between ads targeting specific audiences and ads targeting specific individuals.

unionpivo 4y ago

No targeted ads are worse in several ways. 1.) It's one of the main reason why surveillance capitalism is so widespread. Some of the worst things that came out of tech in past 20 years are directly or indirectly connected to "targeting ads". 2. ) Better name for targeted adds would be Machine driven adds. And with it comes the counter part of machine driven re-posters re-blogers, ai generated spam content etc. If you didn't have all those "targeted" machine driven networks there would be a lot less reason to build such sites. Since most advertisers would not want to advertise on such sites if they had a choice in it. 3.) With all the crap they bring, they still suck at targeting. They either focus on one search you did a while ago to the exclusion of everything else, they to sell you same expensive stuff for months after you already bought it, or completely irrelevant most of the time. 4.) They make pages load slower, sometimes a lot slower.

JimDabell 4y ago

> I know everone hates ads, but isn’t targeted ads better than wholesale bombardment? There’s a lot of people disagreeing with you, but it’s missing the point, I think. Everybody can get the experience they want; both you and they can. You can get targeted ads by accepting when an advertiser asks to track you. They can get non-targeted ads by rejecting when an advertiser asks to track them. The key thing here is that everybody is given the choice. And that’s Apple’s only requirement – they haven’t banned tracking, they have banned tracking without asking the user for their consent first.

chillfox 4y ago

You are forgetting the alternative that is no ads.