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Comments here so far focus on personalised ads as the issue -- but that's a symptom of what's being banned, which is the mass collection of personal data. Pers

Comments here so far focus on personalised ads as the issue -- but that's a symptom of what's being banned, which is the mass collection of personal data. Personalised ads are beside the point. The issue is how they are personalised, namely by building a rich profile of user behaviour based on non-consensual tracking. It isnt even clear that there's a meaningful sense of 'consent' to what modern ad companies (ie., google, facebook, amazon, increasingly microsoft, etc.) do. There is both an individual harm, but a massive collective arm, to the infrastructure of behavioural tracking that has been built by these companies. This infrastructure should be, largely, illegal. The technology to end any form of privacy is presently deployed only for ads, but should not be deployed anywhere at all.

mliker 3y ago
Don’t forget Apple has a billion dollar ad business!
- kibwen 3y ago
  Perhaps this is being downvoted because Apple's ad business is far larger than a measly billion. One can already detect the hint of fecal matter on the wind.
- cm2012 3y ago
  They has grown enormously as Apple used its monopoly power to make every other advertiser less effective. Apple still uses the same user targeting they banned for every other advertiser, of course.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Do they track your activity in non-Apple apps in order to feed their ad selection algos? I really don't know, but I would guess not, and that's the thing they banned for others. (FWIW I find their move into ads alarming because it threatens to ruin everything I like about them)
    - cm2012 3y ago
      Yes. They have conversion optimization which means non apple tracking.
dr_dshiv 3y ago
Why should it be illegal? I don’t understand the moral threat. Personally I feel that privacy gets too much airtime as a value — I see lots of other more direct issues (like political manipulation) that will remain an issue even with “strong privacy.”
- mcv 3y ago
  Political manipulation is a lot easier if the manipulator knows everything about you.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    And doesn't even have to build & fund the infrastructure themselves. Same for government surveillance - adtech/marketing is a boon to it because they don't even have to build/maintain their own surveillance infrastructure anymore.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      Not only that, but they can now just buy information that they wouldn't legally be able to collect themselves.
- hedora 3y ago
  Modern political manipulation techniques rely on the same data as ad targeting. Ad targeting infrastructure is expensive and hard to hide, so banning it would defeat many political manipulation attacks.
- lewhoo 3y ago
  Maybe not illegal but optional (opt in not opt out). More issues are of course at hand but strong privacy should be a step in the right direction regardless. Let's not forsake traffic violations just because there are killers on the loose.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 3y ago
lapphi 3y ago
Upon logging into okcupid today I received a pop up inviting me to join The League (another dating app), with my phone number already pre-propagated. After accepting, they sent me this email. > We use the combination of your Facebook and LinkedIn data plus your About Me and Photos to ensure we are building a balanced, high-achieving and diverse community. Our screening algorithm looks at indicators like social influence, education, profession, industry, friends in The League, number of referrals you've made to your network, as well as supplemental data like what groups you belong to, events you've attended, interests you list, and preferences. Absolutely terrifying.
- devoutsalsa 3y ago
  Reminds of the days when your name, address, and phone number were automatically listed in the phone book. You had to pay the phone company to not list your information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory
  - firecall 3y ago
    Being ex-directory was a status symbol in the UK!
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    Sidebar: it used to be completely normal to publish your phone number and address publicly yet far less people had the information. The people who had it were basically a subset of people in your local community. Looking back at this point in time, the world felt so huge because it wasn't so connected and centralized.
  - cobbaut 3y ago
    Phone books were local, as in the neighbouring couple hundred thousand people max, so about one in ten thousand less than current social media. And, at least here, they contained last name and one letter of the first name. No information on gender/interests/articles read/ads clicked/locations visited/family/friends/devices used/apps installed/items bought/...
  - 3y ago
alkonaut 3y ago
I think in the context of privacy "personalised" always means "personalised by using information the publisher shouldn't have". Facebook has my age and home town, knows what many of my interests are via groups I'm in. I don't think it's wrong to say I have given them that information voluntarily and so long as they keep it on their servers only, I'm ok with them showing me a mountainbike ad because I'm a 40yo male who is in a mountainbiking facebook group. I don't consent to them showing me an ad for a specific mountainbike that I placed in the shoppingbasket at cheap-mountanibikes dot com last week, and then abandoned there, and the reason they know is because the store has some kind of arrangement of any kind with facebook. That's the kind of thing I don't think I should even be allowed to consent to.
- s3p 3y ago
  I totally get where you're coming from. Isn't that the approach Apple took with their (small) business running app store and news ads? they only allow generalized location and user info, and in app store context its almost entirely query based. but there's no identifying info. FWIW I absolutely hate the ads I see in apple news and they seem to be AI generated images with shitty headlines such as "New government program can wipe out debt. see how much you could save". Instagram in comparison sends me a ton of personalized ads and I actually really like them. I have a modified .ipa of instagram (Rocket for iOS) and while it turns ads off I actually have that setting changed so I still see ads. Sometimes I find things I really like.
- l33t7332273 3y ago
  >That's the kind of thing I don't think I should even be allowed to consent to Why not?
  - alkonaut 3y ago
    Because I think it's a net negative for society.
    - l33t7332273 3y ago
      It is clear that you think that. Almost never do people say that they think something should be illegal while simultaneously believing that thing is a net good. I’m asking why you think that it’s a net negative that you’re able to consent to that.
red_admiral 3y ago
Indeed. Targeted ads far predate the internet: someone who advertises in the Podunk Catholic church magazine is targeting a different audience to someone advertising in the same town's Baptist church newsletter. All ads are somewhat personalised to their intended audience. It's the tracking thing that has to go.
Eridrus 3y ago
Do you have any evidence of an actual harm being inflicted on a meaningful amount of people that would be sufficient to shutdown such a large amount of economic activity?
- gpvos 3y ago
  Cambridge Analytica.
  - cm2012 3y ago
    FYI - referring to Cambridge Analytica like it has any meaningful relationship to privacy, ad tech or election results is the silliest thing you can say to someone who has any understanding of the subject. Cambridge Analytica is a like a canary in a coal mine that says, "this person has no actual understanding of the issues".
    - itishappy 3y ago
      Why? They harvested personal info from 87 million users under false pretenses. They're also an explicitly political company. We can debate their effectiveness, but their stated intent was to influence elections. These seem like meaningful and relevant additions to a conversation about data collection and privacy. Your comment is rather light on information that might support your points.
      - Eridrus 3y ago
        I have two thoughts on Cambridge Analytica: a) Influencing elections is not a harm, even if you disagree with the political ends. b) They were notoriously ineffective, which further solidifies this into the non-story bucket
        itishappy 3y ago
        > Influencing elections is not a harm, even if you disagree with the political ends. It feels icky, but still I mostly agree. I do think there's a limit as I would consider directly influencing elections (via force or deceit) to be harmful, but I'm largely ok with trying to sway public opinion. > They were notoriously ineffective, which further solidifies this into the non-story bucket. Unfortunately, they were surprisingly effective at the thing I care about which is collecting millions of people's personal information without their knowledge or consent. The fact they turned out to be incompetent does not inspire confidence.
cm2012 3y ago
Data privacy is one of the least important issues of our day. People (especially on HN) get very passionate about it but are unable to produce specific harms Google and Meta ad tracking creates. Could there be an issue in the future? Possibly. Are privacy laws like GDPR worth the economic and other harms? Probably not. The amount of wasted programmer hours alone has far overcome the negative impacts of big tech ad tracking. Neither real life or the internet are anonymous. We live with other people. But Google and Meta in particular have an amazing 15 year track record of basically never leaking user data. Various national governments have been much worse in this regard. Government risk from Meta and Google is meaningless in any case. The ISPs have all the same data and regularly share it with the government in response to warrants. Also all the data is out there on me and you in a million databases. Just like in the 80s with the yellow books. Did you know you can buy a list of most Americans with an estimated credit score and income and other details? This is 50 year old tech. On the other side, digital ads have a huge impact on the economy (Google and FB being some of the biggest companies in the world) because they provide a service of matching businesses with consumers interested in products. Targeted ads means they are much more enjoyable and effective at matching consumers to products they like. I've worked with dozens of small businesses that used targeted ads to survive and thrive. It's not a good trade-off for the EU to ban targeted ads, in short.
- manuelabeledo 3y ago
  > ... but are unable to produce specific harms Google and Meta ad tracking creates. One of the first results of a Google search: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3555102 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3555102 > Also all the data is out there and me and my family in a million databases. Just like in the 80s with the yellow books. Did you know you can buy a list of almost every American with an estimate credit score and income and other details? This is 50 year old tech. While one could argue that this is "old tech", the main issue is reach. Back in the 80s, there could be a way to contact someone and make an educated guess, using their credit score, as of what kind of products they may be inclined to buy. Nowadays, these databases may include data about diet, job situation, alcohol intake, or family issues, because those educated guesses are made upon information about your searches, your Facebook group memberships, your postings, etc. You also seem to be making the argument that, since either this data is already out in the wild, or other companies may have access to it, why target big tech specifically? And the counter to this couldn't be simpler: two wrongs don't make anything right.
belter 3y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair
elzbardico 3y ago
^this. I don't have anything against personalized ads based on information that I willingly share. If I am following a bunch of groups of kite-surfers, I actually welcome ads for kite-surfing gears and services while browsing those groups. If I explicitly decide to share my address on my social network profile AND, explicitly authorize the use of this information for targeting, I don't mind, and actually welcome seeing ads for carpet cleaning services from my city, instead of ads from this kind of business located thousands of miles away, WHILE I am using said social network. But I don't want to browse the local newspaper, and having this targeting information being used outside the explicitly bounded context of that social network. And above all, I don't want surveillance-style stuff things forced upon me to infer information about me that I never consented to share in the first place. It is ok to me if I say, I have an interest on X, you (and only you) can show me ads based on that, and I also consent on you (and only you) using my <insert whatever personal info you may think ok> to target ads.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  I am curious what widespread legislation on this front is going to cause. Not meaning to defend surveillance capitalism in the slightest, it belongs in the dustbin of history for reasons too numerous to articulate, but merely from the perspective that personalized ads that creep on you were essentially made a load-bearing column of the Internet before anyone knew how creepy they were going to get with it, and now just, every goddamn website out there with even a modicum of traffic has ads. And like, I'm sure the vast majority of people here block ads and I think blocking ads is getting more or more prevalent year over year, but like, they must be being seen by someone. Sites still use them, largely because there isn't a real replacement for a constant trickle revenue stream like them out there seeing wide adoption. I guess in my ideal world, I would hope that these businesses could pivot back to a dumber, more privacy-friendly mode of advertising? But I wonder if the corpos are willing to give that up, or if they'll just continue trying to squirrel around this and any other laws to the point of absurdity?
  - troupo 3y ago
    > I am curious what widespread legislation on this front is going to cause Nothing. More dark patterns to trick people into accepting tracking. Look to how the industry reacted yo GDPR. > personalized ads that creep on you were essentially made a load-bearing column of the Internet before anyone knew how creepy they were going to get with it You can have personalized ads without invasive and pervasive tracking
leoh 3y ago
Yes, it is the data collection. But the main incentive is monetizing that data which Instagram makes billions off of via ads. Cutting away this incentive may cut away the incentive to collect such data in the EU market.
giancarlostoro 3y ago
> increasingly microsoft Will the EU fix Windows by banning the insane amount of tracking they do? Would be nice. The OS is literally at its peak in terms of being great, but all the telemetry, forced accounts and Microsoft ads keep the meme alive that Windows is awful, when in fact, if you remove those three things I mentioned, you have an insanely reliable and polished OS, all my issues with Windows have always come from customizing the core OS, it just doesn't quite behave the same, I would eventually format due to issues, the moment I stopped tampering and tinkering, I've stopped reformatting Windows.
- alexvitkov 3y ago
  The telemetry, ads and forced online accounts are the only major changes since Windows 7 that I can think of. What useful features has Microsoft added since then to make you consider it at its peak currently? I haven't been using it as heavily and I'm genuinely interested if there's something great I've missed.
  - bad_user 3y ago
    For developers, the great addition has been WSL2. But that's about it. For regular users, Windows 7 has been the best, and after noticing how my parents struggled with the updates, nothing can convince me to think otherwise.
    - xxs 3y ago
      While wsl2 is great, it has more to do with developers being forced to use windows/teams to begin with
    - taway1237 3y ago
      So the greatest thing about Windows 10 is Linux? (Sorry for the snark but I couldn't resist)
      - moffkalast 3y ago
        It's not even snark, it's just fact.
germandiago 3y ago
Governments do exactly the same: they track you in the name of a million things. Now they have in the works even a law for 'free information' (in trh European Union) that can force journalists to disclose sources in the name of national security... I am not saying this should not be illegal. Probably it should. What I am saying is that noone should be able to track but the state can do it. Noone should be able to.
amelius 3y ago
The ad networks could have self-regulated and perhaps could have received a better treatment that allows some forms of personalized ads. However, they blew it, and now we have this law that takes away their incentive to infringe our privacy. The needle is now on the other side, but not as far as it was before. I'm happy.
i8comments 3y ago
It is not deployed just for ads, but also for various world governments, police and military that buy and violate your data and privacy.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
How would you stop it? If I wanted to, right now, I could build a deep profile for every single user of HN, simply by downloading the public pages, and cross-referencing comments, upvoted/favorited stories, etc with usernames. I could then create a weighted index that tells me how likely a user is to be a libertarian, gay, wealthy, etc. Then I could e-mail those users and offer to sell them privacy-focused freedom-loving lgbtq+ products. I can pretty much do whatever I want with this database, partly because you don't even know I have it, but also because it's all public information you've posted to the web voluntarily. Maybe the ToS will say I can't, but they have to catch me/stop me. I could just hire some Russians to do it for me and collect the data later. I'm not saying this should be allowed, but it's probably going to be impossible to stop, and the implications (esp. for political concerns) are enough of a motivator that just making it illegal probably won't end the practice. We have to consider alternatives so that we aren't stuck in some information arms race that makes the problem worse. For example, we could say that private data should remain private, and public should remain public. Data which everyone has a reasonable expectation to be private - like the private photos you upload to Google Drive - should never become public, and thus should never be aggregated into some product (trained for an AI, etc), used to sell you something, etc. But data which does have a reasonable expectation to become public - like comments on a public forum, likes on public posts on Facebook - should remain public, and thus be used the way any other public thing can be. We already have legal limitations on uses of some public things, but we can expand that if need be. Then we can legally define what constitutes private and public, and construct tech so that it's very clear to people what's public and what's private, and then they can decide what they will post where, or what sites they will/won't use in what ways, etc. It's already clear what's private and public out in the real world. We just need to make that same distinction clearer for other cases, like when and how companies collect data and what they can use it for. It's going to require case-by-case analysis, but we can totally get there without having to ban everything or allow everything.
d3w4s9 3y ago
"non-consensual tracking" Pretty sure it is written in the ToS. Maybe don't agree with that legal agreement and continue to sign up for the service in the first place?
- waveBidder 3y ago
  They build a shadow profile regardless of whether you sign up, so this is just victim blaming
- taway1237 3y ago
  This is not a reasonable expectation. GDPR got this right and the consent must be explicit. When almost everyone has abusive ToS you might as well advice people to build their own internet.
speed_spread 3y ago
> end any form of privacy [..] only for ads It is safe to assume that all intelligence agencies have taps on ad networks allowing to legally (well, not in EU anymore) collect mass of information on the cheap, which they can then de-anonymize at will by cross-referencing with other data sources.
drdaeman 3y ago
> mass collection of personal data True, but even if EU bans just the personalized ads, chances are that this personal data hoarding bubble is going to finally burst and die, because the belief in "big data = big money" was powered almost solely by the ad industry. I believe ads (and outright abuse, but that's not exactly a business model) were the only use case/reason for why this data is collected and why it's considered valuable. We'll see attempts to rapidly change the tune (possibly something about "AI", given it's the buzzword of the day) from the companies whose valuation is strongly tied to this myth/meme, as they'll desperately try to keep their $$$-faces. But, I believe, chances are, if using personal data for showing ads will be illegal in a major market like EU, many companies will stop collecting because the data will become worthless, a liability rather than an asset. And then I have this silly dream that one day a transhuman age will come closer and I will have machinery to aid myself, personally, that would collect and store my interactions with the world, strictly locally, strictly for my own personal use - an extension of my own mental or physical capabilities (I need glasses to see, I suspect I'll need a hearing aid someday, and I have some concerns about my memory and attention spans - so, you know, From the Moment I Understood the Weakness of My Flesh.meme.txt). So every time I hear things like "we're outlawing facial recognition/conversation recording/data collection" without a "(*) for businesses" I'm kind of disappointed. Of course, my hope is that those laws will be reviewed accordingly as we'll get closer. Thus, I believe, a ban on targeted ads alone could be a possibly better outcome than a blanket ban on data collection. But, uh, whatever works, I guess...
dspillett 3y ago
> Comments here so far focus on personalised ads as the issue -- but that's a symptom of what's being banned, which is the mass collection of personal data. Exactly. There are places where the data is being collected without direct adverts or other visible signs being present (certain web analytics services for instance). This activity tracking gets married up to the other personal information the various companies hold about you. > Personalised ads are beside the point. I think they are an important part of the point, just not the whole point. Being able to sell adverts for a bit more usually is what makes it worth a company's hassle implementing and maintaining their stalking infrastructure. Without that the online commercial stalkiness would die down an awful lot. On the face of it some might think that this ruling achieves this, but it would not have that effect unless: * other significant territories imposed the same sort of restrictions * those restrictions were routines enforced * and the enforcement (when transgressions are found) was sufficiently inconvenient to the companies
rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
It's like human organs (like kidney). In my country, I can donate my kidneys under strict conditions but not sell them. For good reasons. Yet, they're mine and mine only. We should do the same with personal data. You can share it however you want but not sell them. There are good reason why selling data can be worse socially: your data could also be about me (if it's about relationship), whereas organs cannot.
dfxm12 3y ago
This is why Facebook charging for an "ad free" experience doesn't matter. I care less about whether I get served ads or not and more about if my behavior is being tracked and thrown into some data lake along with personal info just waiting to be mined and combined with who knows what other info, etc., until crackers are withdrawing my social security, defeating the security questions on my banking website, scamming my family, etc.
deleted 3y ago
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throw8383833jj 3y ago
yeah, i really don't get why people are so against personalized ads. As a user of these platforms, I feel the ads are already nowhere near targetted enough and now looks like we'll be getting ads that are even more irrelevant. at this point, I think they're just trying to find more way of fining fangs as a means of selective taxation and punishment.
rednerrus 3y ago
> It isnt even clear that there's a meaningful sense of 'consent' to what modern ad companies (ie., google, facebook, amazon, increasingly microsoft, etc.) do. There is both an individual harm, but a massive collective arm, to the infrastructure of behavioural tracking that has been built by these companies. What is the individual and/or collective harm done here?
deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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mliker 3y ago

Don’t forget Apple has a billion dollar ad business!

kibwen 3y ago
Perhaps this is being downvoted because Apple's ad business is far larger than a measly billion. One can already detect the hint of fecal matter on the wind.
cm2012 3y ago
They has grown enormously as Apple used its monopoly power to make every other advertiser less effective. Apple still uses the same user targeting they banned for every other advertiser, of course.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Do they track your activity in non-Apple apps in order to feed their ad selection algos? I really don't know, but I would guess not, and that's the thing they banned for others. (FWIW I find their move into ads alarming because it threatens to ruin everything I like about them)
  - cm2012 3y ago
    Yes. They have conversion optimization which means non apple tracking.

dr_dshiv 3y ago

Why should it be illegal? I don’t understand the moral threat. Personally I feel that privacy gets too much airtime as a value — I see lots of other more direct issues (like political manipulation) that will remain an issue even with “strong privacy.”

mcv 3y ago
Political manipulation is a lot easier if the manipulator knows everything about you.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  And doesn't even have to build & fund the infrastructure themselves. Same for government surveillance - adtech/marketing is a boon to it because they don't even have to build/maintain their own surveillance infrastructure anymore.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    Not only that, but they can now just buy information that they wouldn't legally be able to collect themselves.
hedora 3y ago
Modern political manipulation techniques rely on the same data as ad targeting. Ad targeting infrastructure is expensive and hard to hide, so banning it would defeat many political manipulation attacks.
lewhoo 3y ago
Maybe not illegal but optional (opt in not opt out). More issues are of course at hand but strong privacy should be a step in the right direction regardless. Let's not forsake traffic violations just because there are killers on the loose.
deleted 3y ago
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3y ago

lapphi 3y ago

Upon logging into okcupid today I received a pop up inviting me to join The League (another dating app), with my phone number already pre-propagated. After accepting, they sent me this email. > We use the combination of your Facebook and LinkedIn data plus your About Me and Photos to ensure we are building a balanced, high-achieving and diverse community. Our screening algorithm looks at indicators like social influence, education, profession, industry, friends in The League, number of referrals you've made to your network, as well as supplemental data like what groups you belong to, events you've attended, interests you list, and preferences. Absolutely terrifying.

devoutsalsa 3y ago
Reminds of the days when your name, address, and phone number were automatically listed in the phone book. You had to pay the phone company to not list your information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory
- firecall 3y ago
  Being ex-directory was a status symbol in the UK!
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Sidebar: it used to be completely normal to publish your phone number and address publicly yet far less people had the information. The people who had it were basically a subset of people in your local community. Looking back at this point in time, the world felt so huge because it wasn't so connected and centralized.
- cobbaut 3y ago
  Phone books were local, as in the neighbouring couple hundred thousand people max, so about one in ten thousand less than current social media. And, at least here, they contained last name and one letter of the first name. No information on gender/interests/articles read/ads clicked/locations visited/family/friends/devices used/apps installed/items bought/...
- 3y ago

alkonaut 3y ago

I think in the context of privacy "personalised" always means "personalised by using information the publisher shouldn't have". Facebook has my age and home town, knows what many of my interests are via groups I'm in. I don't think it's wrong to say I have given them that information voluntarily and so long as they keep it on their servers only, I'm ok with them showing me a mountainbike ad because I'm a 40yo male who is in a mountainbiking facebook group. I don't consent to them showing me an ad for a specific mountainbike that I placed in the shoppingbasket at cheap-mountanibikes dot com last week, and then abandoned there, and the reason they know is because the store has some kind of arrangement of any kind with facebook. That's the kind of thing I don't think I should even be allowed to consent to.

s3p 3y ago
I totally get where you're coming from. Isn't that the approach Apple took with their (small) business running app store and news ads? they only allow generalized location and user info, and in app store context its almost entirely query based. but there's no identifying info. FWIW I absolutely hate the ads I see in apple news and they seem to be AI generated images with shitty headlines such as "New government program can wipe out debt. see how much you could save". Instagram in comparison sends me a ton of personalized ads and I actually really like them. I have a modified .ipa of instagram (Rocket for iOS) and while it turns ads off I actually have that setting changed so I still see ads. Sometimes I find things I really like.
l33t7332273 3y ago
>That's the kind of thing I don't think I should even be allowed to consent to Why not?
- alkonaut 3y ago
  Because I think it's a net negative for society.
  - l33t7332273 3y ago
    It is clear that you think that. Almost never do people say that they think something should be illegal while simultaneously believing that thing is a net good. I’m asking why you think that it’s a net negative that you’re able to consent to that.

red_admiral 3y ago

Indeed. Targeted ads far predate the internet: someone who advertises in the Podunk Catholic church magazine is targeting a different audience to someone advertising in the same town's Baptist church newsletter. All ads are somewhat personalised to their intended audience. It's the tracking thing that has to go.

Eridrus 3y ago

Do you have any evidence of an actual harm being inflicted on a meaningful amount of people that would be sufficient to shutdown such a large amount of economic activity?

gpvos 3y ago
Cambridge Analytica.
- cm2012 3y ago
  FYI - referring to Cambridge Analytica like it has any meaningful relationship to privacy, ad tech or election results is the silliest thing you can say to someone who has any understanding of the subject. Cambridge Analytica is a like a canary in a coal mine that says, "this person has no actual understanding of the issues".
  - itishappy 3y ago
    Why? They harvested personal info from 87 million users under false pretenses. They're also an explicitly political company. We can debate their effectiveness, but their stated intent was to influence elections. These seem like meaningful and relevant additions to a conversation about data collection and privacy. Your comment is rather light on information that might support your points.
    - Eridrus 3y ago
      I have two thoughts on Cambridge Analytica: a) Influencing elections is not a harm, even if you disagree with the political ends. b) They were notoriously ineffective, which further solidifies this into the non-story bucket
      - itishappy 3y ago
        > Influencing elections is not a harm, even if you disagree with the political ends. It feels icky, but still I mostly agree. I do think there's a limit as I would consider directly influencing elections (via force or deceit) to be harmful, but I'm largely ok with trying to sway public opinion. > They were notoriously ineffective, which further solidifies this into the non-story bucket. Unfortunately, they were surprisingly effective at the thing I care about which is collecting millions of people's personal information without their knowledge or consent. The fact they turned out to be incompetent does not inspire confidence.

cm2012 3y ago

Data privacy is one of the least important issues of our day. People (especially on HN) get very passionate about it but are unable to produce specific harms Google and Meta ad tracking creates. Could there be an issue in the future? Possibly. Are privacy laws like GDPR worth the economic and other harms? Probably not. The amount of wasted programmer hours alone has far overcome the negative impacts of big tech ad tracking. Neither real life or the internet are anonymous. We live with other people. But Google and Meta in particular have an amazing 15 year track record of basically never leaking user data. Various national governments have been much worse in this regard. Government risk from Meta and Google is meaningless in any case. The ISPs have all the same data and regularly share it with the government in response to warrants. Also all the data is out there on me and you in a million databases. Just like in the 80s with the yellow books. Did you know you can buy a list of most Americans with an estimated credit score and income and other details? This is 50 year old tech. On the other side, digital ads have a huge impact on the economy (Google and FB being some of the biggest companies in the world) because they provide a service of matching businesses with consumers interested in products. Targeted ads means they are much more enjoyable and effective at matching consumers to products they like. I've worked with dozens of small businesses that used targeted ads to survive and thrive. It's not a good trade-off for the EU to ban targeted ads, in short.

manuelabeledo 3y ago
> ... but are unable to produce specific harms Google and Meta ad tracking creates. One of the first results of a Google search: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3555102 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3555102 > Also all the data is out there and me and my family in a million databases. Just like in the 80s with the yellow books. Did you know you can buy a list of almost every American with an estimate credit score and income and other details? This is 50 year old tech. While one could argue that this is "old tech", the main issue is reach. Back in the 80s, there could be a way to contact someone and make an educated guess, using their credit score, as of what kind of products they may be inclined to buy. Nowadays, these databases may include data about diet, job situation, alcohol intake, or family issues, because those educated guesses are made upon information about your searches, your Facebook group memberships, your postings, etc. You also seem to be making the argument that, since either this data is already out in the wild, or other companies may have access to it, why target big tech specifically? And the counter to this couldn't be simpler: two wrongs don't make anything right.

belter 3y ago

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair

elzbardico 3y ago

^this. I don't have anything against personalized ads based on information that I willingly share. If I am following a bunch of groups of kite-surfers, I actually welcome ads for kite-surfing gears and services while browsing those groups. If I explicitly decide to share my address on my social network profile AND, explicitly authorize the use of this information for targeting, I don't mind, and actually welcome seeing ads for carpet cleaning services from my city, instead of ads from this kind of business located thousands of miles away, WHILE I am using said social network. But I don't want to browse the local newspaper, and having this targeting information being used outside the explicitly bounded context of that social network. And above all, I don't want surveillance-style stuff things forced upon me to infer information about me that I never consented to share in the first place. It is ok to me if I say, I have an interest on X, you (and only you) can show me ads based on that, and I also consent on you (and only you) using my <insert whatever personal info you may think ok> to target ads.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
I am curious what widespread legislation on this front is going to cause. Not meaning to defend surveillance capitalism in the slightest, it belongs in the dustbin of history for reasons too numerous to articulate, but merely from the perspective that personalized ads that creep on you were essentially made a load-bearing column of the Internet before anyone knew how creepy they were going to get with it, and now just, every goddamn website out there with even a modicum of traffic has ads. And like, I'm sure the vast majority of people here block ads and I think blocking ads is getting more or more prevalent year over year, but like, they must be being seen by someone. Sites still use them, largely because there isn't a real replacement for a constant trickle revenue stream like them out there seeing wide adoption. I guess in my ideal world, I would hope that these businesses could pivot back to a dumber, more privacy-friendly mode of advertising? But I wonder if the corpos are willing to give that up, or if they'll just continue trying to squirrel around this and any other laws to the point of absurdity?
- troupo 3y ago
  > I am curious what widespread legislation on this front is going to cause Nothing. More dark patterns to trick people into accepting tracking. Look to how the industry reacted yo GDPR. > personalized ads that creep on you were essentially made a load-bearing column of the Internet before anyone knew how creepy they were going to get with it You can have personalized ads without invasive and pervasive tracking

leoh 3y ago

Yes, it is the data collection. But the main incentive is monetizing that data which Instagram makes billions off of via ads. Cutting away this incentive may cut away the incentive to collect such data in the EU market.

giancarlostoro 3y ago

> increasingly microsoft Will the EU fix Windows by banning the insane amount of tracking they do? Would be nice. The OS is literally at its peak in terms of being great, but all the telemetry, forced accounts and Microsoft ads keep the meme alive that Windows is awful, when in fact, if you remove those three things I mentioned, you have an insanely reliable and polished OS, all my issues with Windows have always come from customizing the core OS, it just doesn't quite behave the same, I would eventually format due to issues, the moment I stopped tampering and tinkering, I've stopped reformatting Windows.

alexvitkov 3y ago
The telemetry, ads and forced online accounts are the only major changes since Windows 7 that I can think of. What useful features has Microsoft added since then to make you consider it at its peak currently? I haven't been using it as heavily and I'm genuinely interested if there's something great I've missed.
- bad_user 3y ago
  For developers, the great addition has been WSL2. But that's about it. For regular users, Windows 7 has been the best, and after noticing how my parents struggled with the updates, nothing can convince me to think otherwise.
  - xxs 3y ago
    While wsl2 is great, it has more to do with developers being forced to use windows/teams to begin with
  - taway1237 3y ago
    So the greatest thing about Windows 10 is Linux? (Sorry for the snark but I couldn't resist)
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      It's not even snark, it's just fact.

germandiago 3y ago

Governments do exactly the same: they track you in the name of a million things. Now they have in the works even a law for 'free information' (in trh European Union) that can force journalists to disclose sources in the name of national security... I am not saying this should not be illegal. Probably it should. What I am saying is that noone should be able to track but the state can do it. Noone should be able to.

amelius 3y ago

The ad networks could have self-regulated and perhaps could have received a better treatment that allows some forms of personalized ads. However, they blew it, and now we have this law that takes away their incentive to infringe our privacy. The needle is now on the other side, but not as far as it was before. I'm happy.

i8comments 3y ago

It is not deployed just for ads, but also for various world governments, police and military that buy and violate your data and privacy.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

How would you stop it? If I wanted to, right now, I could build a deep profile for every single user of HN, simply by downloading the public pages, and cross-referencing comments, upvoted/favorited stories, etc with usernames. I could then create a weighted index that tells me how likely a user is to be a libertarian, gay, wealthy, etc. Then I could e-mail those users and offer to sell them privacy-focused freedom-loving lgbtq+ products. I can pretty much do whatever I want with this database, partly because you don't even know I have it, but also because it's all public information you've posted to the web voluntarily. Maybe the ToS will say I can't, but they have to catch me/stop me. I could just hire some Russians to do it for me and collect the data later. I'm not saying this should be allowed, but it's probably going to be impossible to stop, and the implications (esp. for political concerns) are enough of a motivator that just making it illegal probably won't end the practice. We have to consider alternatives so that we aren't stuck in some information arms race that makes the problem worse. For example, we could say that private data should remain private, and public should remain public. Data which everyone has a reasonable expectation to be private - like the private photos you upload to Google Drive - should never become public, and thus should never be aggregated into some product (trained for an AI, etc), used to sell you something, etc. But data which does have a reasonable expectation to become public - like comments on a public forum, likes on public posts on Facebook - should remain public, and thus be used the way any other public thing can be. We already have legal limitations on uses of some public things, but we can expand that if need be. Then we can legally define what constitutes private and public, and construct tech so that it's very clear to people what's public and what's private, and then they can decide what they will post where, or what sites they will/won't use in what ways, etc. It's already clear what's private and public out in the real world. We just need to make that same distinction clearer for other cases, like when and how companies collect data and what they can use it for. It's going to require case-by-case analysis, but we can totally get there without having to ban everything or allow everything.

d3w4s9 3y ago

"non-consensual tracking" Pretty sure it is written in the ToS. Maybe don't agree with that legal agreement and continue to sign up for the service in the first place?

waveBidder 3y ago
They build a shadow profile regardless of whether you sign up, so this is just victim blaming
taway1237 3y ago
This is not a reasonable expectation. GDPR got this right and the consent must be explicit. When almost everyone has abusive ToS you might as well advice people to build their own internet.

speed_spread 3y ago

> end any form of privacy [..] only for ads It is safe to assume that all intelligence agencies have taps on ad networks allowing to legally (well, not in EU anymore) collect mass of information on the cheap, which they can then de-anonymize at will by cross-referencing with other data sources.

drdaeman 3y ago

> mass collection of personal data True, but even if EU bans just the personalized ads, chances are that this personal data hoarding bubble is going to finally burst and die, because the belief in "big data = big money" was powered almost solely by the ad industry. I believe ads (and outright abuse, but that's not exactly a business model) were the only use case/reason for why this data is collected and why it's considered valuable. We'll see attempts to rapidly change the tune (possibly something about "AI", given it's the buzzword of the day) from the companies whose valuation is strongly tied to this myth/meme, as they'll desperately try to keep their $$$-faces. But, I believe, chances are, if using personal data for showing ads will be illegal in a major market like EU, many companies will stop collecting because the data will become worthless, a liability rather than an asset. And then I have this silly dream that one day a transhuman age will come closer and I will have machinery to aid myself, personally, that would collect and store my interactions with the world, strictly locally, strictly for my own personal use - an extension of my own mental or physical capabilities (I need glasses to see, I suspect I'll need a hearing aid someday, and I have some concerns about my memory and attention spans - so, you know, From the Moment I Understood the Weakness of My Flesh.meme.txt). So every time I hear things like "we're outlawing facial recognition/conversation recording/data collection" without a "(*) for businesses" I'm kind of disappointed. Of course, my hope is that those laws will be reviewed accordingly as we'll get closer. Thus, I believe, a ban on targeted ads alone could be a possibly better outcome than a blanket ban on data collection. But, uh, whatever works, I guess...

dspillett 3y ago

> Comments here so far focus on personalised ads as the issue -- but that's a symptom of what's being banned, which is the mass collection of personal data. Exactly. There are places where the data is being collected without direct adverts or other visible signs being present (certain web analytics services for instance). This activity tracking gets married up to the other personal information the various companies hold about you. > Personalised ads are beside the point. I think they are an important part of the point, just not the whole point. Being able to sell adverts for a bit more usually is what makes it worth a company's hassle implementing and maintaining their stalking infrastructure. Without that the online commercial stalkiness would die down an awful lot. On the face of it some might think that this ruling achieves this, but it would not have that effect unless: * other significant territories imposed the same sort of restrictions * those restrictions were routines enforced * and the enforcement (when transgressions are found) was sufficiently inconvenient to the companies

rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago

It's like human organs (like kidney). In my country, I can donate my kidneys under strict conditions but not sell them. For good reasons. Yet, they're mine and mine only. We should do the same with personal data. You can share it however you want but not sell them. There are good reason why selling data can be worse socially: your data could also be about me (if it's about relationship), whereas organs cannot.

dfxm12 3y ago

This is why Facebook charging for an "ad free" experience doesn't matter. I care less about whether I get served ads or not and more about if my behavior is being tracked and thrown into some data lake along with personal info just waiting to be mined and combined with who knows what other info, etc., until crackers are withdrawing my social security, defeating the security questions on my banking website, scamming my family, etc.

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throw8383833jj 3y ago

yeah, i really don't get why people are so against personalized ads. As a user of these platforms, I feel the ads are already nowhere near targetted enough and now looks like we'll be getting ads that are even more irrelevant. at this point, I think they're just trying to find more way of fining fangs as a means of selective taxation and punishment.

rednerrus 3y ago

> It isnt even clear that there's a meaningful sense of 'consent' to what modern ad companies (ie., google, facebook, amazon, increasingly microsoft, etc.) do. There is both an individual harm, but a massive collective arm, to the infrastructure of behavioural tracking that has been built by these companies. What is the individual and/or collective harm done here?

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