So many words to defend the indefensible. Its not a "war", it is asserting the collective will of an entire continent (made up of fairly diverse cultures and a long history of painful social strife, political and racial oppression and persecution). The aim is to close Pandora's box that was (as it happened) opened by the amoral and asocial advertising industry that cannot see beyond its (admittedly long) nose.
The issue is not advertising, the issue is the construction, classification and use of human profiles through the collection of behavioral data, by-and-large without the subjects being aware or cognizant of the possible short and long-term implications. Once that practice has been legitimized and proven ultra-lucrative and empowering for its practitioners it has undermined the very foundation of digital society.
Just to be clear, there is nothing the adtech industry can do to assure us that behavioral targeting can be made safe. The large scale processing of human behavioral data followed by the direct algorithmic application of real life actions is a weapon of mass social destruction. It is inherently dangerous and should be outlawed. Full stop.
There is a case to be made for taming the nuclear energy of behavioral data in reactors (as opposed to bombs). But the architecture of such systems will be dramatically different to the digital wild-west regime that has been inflicted on society. Consequently also highly regulated with countless lead layers of protection (and thus also far less lucrative / interesting for the digital cowboys).
> The issue is not advertising, the issue is the construction, classification and use of human profiles through the collection of behavioral data, by-and-large without the subjects being aware or cognizant of the possible short and long-term implications.
I don't disagree that collection of data isn't bad, but two things:
1. The collection of data isn't the goal, the advertising is. The data is only practically valuable to do advertising better (and of course for surveillance, but I suspect the market for data for surveillance is orders of magnitude smaller). If you kill the advertising, you kill the need for data. If you kill the data, the advertisers will just find other ways to make their advertising convert better.
2. We should all be outraged at the idea of corporations using psychological tricks to influence our behavior. The human mind was not pentested before shipping to production. Some ads just remind you that a product exists, but many try to create positive associations to make the product more appealing or to make you think of it later.
We just let this happen and don't care. Mostly because we don't really notice it working. You don't think "oh yeah, I'll buy the name brand paper towels because I saw that commercial", you just buy them because they're the ones that your brain has an association with cleaning up the whole dribble of blue liquid. Of course you'll buy the one that works. Our brains are unpatched Linux kernels and advertisers are botnets.
Like, be outraged at the data mining and selling. But be more outraged at why it's happening.
I too see issues with advertising as such. It has created an unsatiable society that cannot find balance even though it churns through an ever growing slice of the planet. But I feel it is a longer term problem about how to organize markets and disseminate product availability in a less manipulative way. In a strange way the internet is actually a pull medium that should orient people more towards seeking information rather than being pushed stuff. In a sense the walled gardens and the timelines aim to replicate a push relationship (that was at its heyday during the TV era).
But I really think the risks from personal data based profiling are more serious and broad based. If these practises get normalized for adtech they are normalized, period. Every industry will want to get in the act. Car manufacturers will want to grab and sell behavior, supermarkets, banks, toothbrushes, fridges, thermostats and doorbells will want to do the same.
But ultimately I think we might be agreeing on the why things are happening as thus underlies everything: Unhinged pursuit of profit (= claims on society) without any care about the impact on that same society.
The various risks we are discussing will only keep multiplying and aggravating if we dont find more effective harnesses to channel these behaviors towards more positive goals.
> Car manufacturers will want to grab and sell behavior, supermarkets, banks, toothbrushes, fridges, thermostats and doorbells will want to do the same.
I'm curious why you think so if the goal isn't advertising. Behavior data is useful for business that deals with behavior. But I can't think of broad reasons for these companies to collect such data when you're already a customer, because they don't need to affect your behavior that that point, right? Unless they're advertising to you.
Exactly. I essentially think we need an amendment to the constitution that protects an individual’s right to not be solicited.
What law would stop Google and Facebook in their tracks is more the question we need to answer.
Data collection is a means to an end for advertisers and not in and of itself bad (nor are applications and/protocols that use PII or globally unique IDs, etc.), which is why GDPR hasn‘t really moved the needle much. It’s fighting the symptom not the cause. Invasion of privacy and “spooky” knowledge about individuals is all downstream.
And if I want to be solicited and psychologically manipulated into consume consume consume, then I really want it to be as relevant and effective as possible, don’t I? Yet another reason why attacking the data collection is ultimately barking up the wrong tree. But solicitation definitely shouldn’t be legal without my consent and probably broadly illegal to do to children.
Why should I be able to control what someone else knows about me? Seriously? If you sit in a park bench and watch me running around on a hot day I can’t compel you to “forget I was there”. And if you use that knowledge as data to support opening a lemonade stand, and even to reach out to me directly and offer a discount on cold drinks, who is being socially harmed? Where is the “social atomic bomb” here?
And, if I consent to this because you can offer me better prices if I allow you to cookie me, and I don’t see a problem, it seems everything is humming along ethically and harmlessly.
So I’m not sure I buy the conclusion that “behavioral advertising is ethically bankrupt”. Notice in your comment you have to evoke the idea of “mass behavioral knowledge”. What does this mean and how is it bad or different from “minor or regular behavior knowledge”?
Please understand I’m not writing this comment to defend the advertising industry. I’m writing it because I also believe this stuff is potentially grievously detrimental, but I don’t think we have a good foundational construction today for why. And we can’t say what is wrong. If we could, we could more easily point a finger at it, declare it unethical, and make laws against it.
But, no, I don’t think we’ve yet landed on the answer. It’s not some innate “right to be forgotten” and it’s not GDPR telling everyone abstractly that “you can’t use PII in your application”. (The GDPR bit is kinda moot because you argue that it’s unilaterally not okay regardless of consent and the GDPR argues it’s okay with consent, so the GDPR is not a solution to your argument.) There’s something else here to build a case against.
If real harm is impacting individuals or society then shine a light on it! Otherwise it’s just ra ra we hate behavioral advertising because it’s spooky. Which while fun to rally around, doesn't really carry social and legal weight. Pointing this out does not bring me snarky joy, rather it frustrates me because I think we’ll be stuck banging our tech heads trying to make every internet standard and protocol 100% anonymous fighting the digital boogie man until we try a new approach. In order to make social and legal progress, because I do suspect the solution is social and legal, we need a really clear understanding of the problem.
In the face of a globally connected world, what new fundamental right do humans have, that behavioral advertising robs them of, that we must take extreme measures to protect as a society?
Great question. Let me first answer the meta question that i see all the time, from someone who studies systems science. There’s a supposed “crisis” with the scaling of X that involves millions or billions of people, and our largest societal institutions. Here’s a simple folksy example of x that’s not really much of a problem, how is that different from X? The answer is always the same, because scale matters, always.
In this case, here’s why scale matters. We know these ads work. On an individual basis let’s say you have a 0.31% chance of buying a thing you wouldn’t have otherwise. On this individual scale it seems like no big deal, certainly no amoral or unethical undue influence. On a massive scale however a 0.31% increase makes the advertiser a lot. AND there’s a network effect because desire is contagious, so the more people that buy, the more others will want - double winner. Now let’s say there’s a organization that wants to push some new technology into people’s lives, let’s say voice assistant smart speakers. At scale this doesn’t just sell smart speakers, now 5% of homes have one, and this now has the power to fundamentally change a small slice of culture more broadly as it becomes more common, ubiquitous, and relied upon. And the drift in a small slice of culture drifts the ultimate the trajectory of our civilization - simply by using small but statistically proven edge to influence people. Not to mention in this case, it further entrenches this power of corporate data collection and influence! And now, imagine instead of selling smart speakers, an organization wants to push a political idea, let’s say for example, that democracy is an conspiracy built by elite bankers. I think you can see where this goes.
Further (replying to my own comment), watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix. I almost didn’t watch it because I thought I’ve heard it all before. But it really shocks the conscious when you see it all laid out clearly with strong real world examples - building from the mental health crisis, to the culture wars, to the erosion of worldwide democracy writ large - all driven by the power of adtech.
To be honest, personally I’d argue for a stronger stance: the right to not be solicited. I think all advertising is poisonous and insidious and leads to the things you describe, not just targeted behavioral profiling. So I’d say the missing right that we need to codify lies somewhere in that realm.
Still I think we’re a little stuck on the consent bit. If 98% of society consents to be solicited, all the problems of scale come back. So we need a framework to declare that the power granted to solicitation networks, if centralized, is too great and either reserve it for the gov’t or ideally outlaw it.
It’s illegal, in many places, to sell your vote. Extending that example to a general principle — if you have any decision making power/responsibility over others, then allowing it to be subverted (for pecuniary or other benefit) is a dereliction of fiduciary responsibility.
If you are only selling consequences on yourself (we can debate the legality of that, and protections necessary against exploitation) that’s a different scale of potential harm compared to selling away the power concomitant with your duties.
By that logic, it might be possible (if the potency of behavioral advertising can be established) to forbid people from holding decision making responsibilities (including voting) if they wish to sell away their decision making power for benefits.
At the extreme, imagine board members or government heads deciding a question of enormous importance, and their decision making getting hacked by personal behavioral targeting. If that sounds too fantastical, imagine a popular streaming service promoting an emotionally charged war drama (for Washington DC subscribers) when Congress is in session discussing geopolitics questions. Or more precise targeting analogues — aiming at key decision makers, or their friends/family. I doubt shareholders / stakeholders would be okay with that.
I actually really like this construction/framing. I’ve been wondering for awhile how we claw out of this state where voting is a right not a privilege. You can’t discriminate on anything close to a protected class for obvious reasons, which roundabout includes education. But discriminating on whether you allow yourself to be solicited or not seems kinda brilliant. I don’t want peers who sell their souls to the sexiest corporation casting votes that have been tainted by corporate marketing dollars. I don’t want politicians in office who are exposed to that either. Amd of course I would love to flip a switch and have it be illegal to solicit me and never see another internet ad or receive another flyer or fake important envelope in the mail. Seems like it could be fruitful to draw a hard line between being open to being influenced by advertising and having any sort of political power.
Try going around a park photographing what everyone is doing. Further, start giving selectively (to kids and other vulnerable people) lollipops in exchange for them identifying everybody in their friends and family circle by name. At best you would be chased out of the park. At worst you would be lynched.
The cry to identify "real harm" is insidius and malevolent. There have already been documented instances of political manipulation. Given the opaque nature of the sector and the massive leverage it affords its very likely this was just the tip of the iceberg. Risk management is not just making sure you dont die of food poissoning today. It is also about avoiding that heart attack that will come decades early.
Again, its not about the act of advertising as such. It is the behavioral profiling that is the toxic practice. What grave harm can behavioral profiling possibly insert into policing, medicine, finance, education, relations with state and corporate employers etc? Its not even a rhetorical question. Its a societal disaster of historic proportions.
The moral bankruptcy of the adtech industry is not just the original sin of rolling this practice out, but, (after they have been outed) to pretend that they have this under control. That it is a sandboxed environment. It is not. The digital domain is interconnected and leaky. Economic and political dynamics is unpredictable and all the above mentioned domains come into play with adtech itching to expand its reach.
Its not a "new right" that people to defend, the framing is again odius. Who gave the right to certain entities to institute mass surveillance? They simply abused the lack of regulation. Moved fast and broke things.
At stake are fundamental questions about human agency, transparency and accountability of the actions of organised enterprise (and public sector), and the very nature of our social systems as we move deeper into the digital era.
The start of that era is certainly dystopic-looking with unscrupulous private sector and captured governments. The major question is if the (unexpected to be honest) principled stance of the European Union will help boot into an alternative operating system.
It's the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes. It's one thing if a single lemonade stand keeps track of its customers. When the same lemonade stand can almost instantly access its customers' complete life history, it's a completely different thing.
Imagine being hailed by a random lemonade vendor, "Hello Mr. dcow, I have some cold lemonade for you! It's sugar-free, so don't worry about your diabetes. I can even put it on your tab, since I know you've never been late with your payments and you pass through here every Saturday"
It sure might be convenient, but that doesn't make it less creepy.
> Why should I be able to control what someone else knows about me?
Why should companies be allowed to relentlessly spy on everything you do without your consent?
For instance, Google literally buys a copy of everyone's credit/debit card transaction data.
> as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
Note that the GGP is arguing a stronger stance: that no amount of consent makes this okay. You’re saying “it’s okay with consent”. You’re taking a weaker stance, one which I don’t necessarily disagree with, but that’s besides the point.
> Why should I be able to control what someone else knows about me?
The right to privacy is:
- complete sovereignty over oneself, including data about oneself
- control over public knowledge about oneself
In other words: I am my data, my data is me. I own myself.
To deny my fundamental right to privacy is to deny my personhood, to deny my membership in a society of equals.
--
It's corny, but I sometimes liken privacy to the "true name" plot device. In fantasy, knowing a person's "true name" gives one power over them. In sci-fi, the "true name" would be something like a password or root private key.
Usually the responsibility falls on the individual to not reveal their true name, though. Once known no-one gets to litigate knowledge of it. Usually one must change their identity so much that their true name changes as well, or forever be vulnerable. Everyone does have a right to privacy, to not be tracked and surveilled, what’s being discussed here is an extension of that that argues it’s unethical to retain any data about anybody period, even with their consent. I’m having a hard time making that much of a leap.
Would your answer really turn on whether the observer had imperfect memory? What if they had photographic memory?
Think the retention period for ad tracking is only a few months or years - probably because storage is too expensive these days and there isn't a terrible amount of value in keeping raw data forever.
Behavioural advertisment runs counter to the goals and aspirations of a free democratic society. We have enough atomization of the information space as it is.
What makes me pause is that there are truly people who are like "Pff! Free society!" or "Pff! Survival of the human race on planet earth!" and then go to explain how their profits are really what the rest of us should care about. In their worst version these people would sell Cyclon-B to the nazis if it just made them a good enough profit and there are people who see that kind of apocalyptic nihilism and confuse it with strength and power.
The rest of us should ban, tax, punish and prevent more of this totally braindead behaviour. Go ahead and make a profit, but if you can't manage to make it in a way that doesn't impact the rest of us, you can go fuck yourself.
If you ask the average man on the content "would you like your behaviour tracked?" he will indeed reply "No!"
But if you ask him "If you have to choose between seeing ads for women's clothing or ads relevant to your interest, which would you choose?", then he will pick the option that requires behavioural tracking.
I don’t think that’s true, I think most people would actually choose to have adverts that are irrelevant, much easier to tune them out if the signal to noise ratio is low. I think most people don’t like or want adverts in their lives at all.
The case you describe can be served with contextual ads, no need to know anything more than what I have searched for just now.
No history, no fingerprinting, no profile that follows me everywhere, that gets sold, stolen, triangulated and potentially used against me without me even even knowing.
Maybe I take human history too seriously. Maybe others are morally bankrupt and will try mental and moral somersaults to justify their stance. You judge.
I can think of many searches that do not at all make clear which ads I would find interesting.
I don't think anybody is claiming you should be tracked against your will. The more interesting question is if we should force everybody to oppose tracking, which is what's happening now, with the consequence of less relevant ads being shown.
I don't work for Google, I'm just annoyed that the ads I'm forced to watch are getting less and less relevant as a consequence of (well intentioned) privacy measures.
As a lawyer working on these topics, this is a poor phrasing. EU regulators don't need to "war" with advertisers - they have complete control over them. There's no other side of this war, just regulators issuing commands that industry tries to follow.
It's confusing as a war is because the regulators decided not to make the law say, 'behavioral advertising is illegal,' and instead have spent years slowly awakening to that conclusion, at the cost of zillions of dollars in legal fees.
The megacorporations are at war against humanity and won't stop until forced: they must profit and grow at the expense of civilization, climate, and biosphere.
It's true the EU does not recognize it's in a war yet but they are at least trying to slow them down. The US is further behind.
Is EU really trying to slow it down? TikTok ban in US seems to be a common talking point. Meanwhile here very few people talk about it and those are seen as lunatics in most cases.
Most people seem to happily approve all the GDPR dialogs too. While doomscrolling TikTok/Instagram/FB.
The only reason TikTok was banned in US is because its Chinese company. Have you completely missed all-out trade/informational/technology war US has declared on China in past few years? Huawei, ban on chips and so on and on.
Facebook is doing exactly the same and wish to emulate TikTok as much as possible, sharing all data with US 3-letter agencies as required (most probably meaning everything all the time). They are just behind and lost the social momentum. Haven't heard anything about Meta products ban in US, probably because it will never ever happen.
And here in europe we can’t even deal with the Chinese because muh German car market. Let alone local and murican corporations who have a lot of leverage.
Personally I nearly always take the time to scroll through and untick all the permissions, or find a different site because screw them, that's why. I realise I'm in the minority.
Thank you for this; I've been manually unticking everything since these regulations came into effect and have to admit it was getting a bit tiring (plus sometimes I was too hasty and accidentally clicked "Accept" when the cookie buttons were in a weird order or had non-standard wording.) I hope this helps me decline all the things more efficiently.
Well, that made me unreasonably happy, thank you
Edit: and then realise it's not applicable to android Firefox where I do most of my browsing, but thank you anyway.
I wish I had more time and / or money because this is commonly ignored, and I would love to take all organisations who don't abide by this to court just for the hell of it. Many times it's under the guise of "legitimate interest" under a separate unselected tab and I would love to test that in court.
I feel like the EU should have made it so that you could actually sue corporations for GDRP violations (as long as you have enough evidence for a court to hear the case) and for the accuser to get part of the fine if you win. Would have been a much more effective enforcement strategy.
We serve a web application for logistics so our users are planners, administrative people, drivers, etc and we see the same behaviour. A lot of users ignore the dialog (so no analytics can be used, default to answering no) and learn to live with the cookie pop-up in the corner of the screen.. :-D
I rarely see yes/no. Websites doing no tracking (thus no dialog) seem more common. Usually it’s „accept recommended trackers“ or customize by unchecking trackers one by one.
The cookie banner 2.0. Where you either approve all the „recommended“ tracking. Or have to go to advanced dialog, uncheck all trackers and then click non-primary submit button.
There may not be many fines but Facebook, Google, TikTok and Microsoft were all fined due to making it hard to refuse cookies.
Amazon was also fined for not properly asking consent. If I remember correctly, one of the company making those annoying cookies banners where you have a list of trackers to uncheck was also fined for this behavior.
It is illegal to not offer a clear and unambiguous opt out.
>If informed consent is used as the lawful basis for processing, consent must have been explicit for data collected and each purpose data is used for (Article 7; defined in Article 4).[11][12] Consent must be a specific, freely given, plainly worded, and unambiguous affirmation given by the data subject; an online form which has consent options structured as an opt-out selected by default is a violation of the GDPR, as the consent is not unambiguously affirmed by the user. In addition, multiple types of processing may not be "bundled" together into a single affirmation prompt, as this is not specific to each use of data, and the individual permissions are not freely given. (Recital 32)
Really? How about that politicians constantly spamming antisocial networks? What would they do without those tech corpos? Big tech literary give them a power. And manipulate with politicians as well. You'll not free once you caught into trap of likes and virtual audience dopamine.
that’s exactly my point. they took that power that those companies gave them and used it for their own goals. they’re infinitely worse than any company just by the power they yield. the abuse part is the cherry on top.
This doesn't make sense to me. You make it sound like a rosy cooperative relationship where advertisers want to follow the rules and regulators just haven't made them. Even so, regulation isn't "complete control" in any way. It seems more like the advertisers are always going to try to make the advertisements as effective as possible while toeing the letter of the law as closely as possible and ignoring the spirit of the law completely. What are you actually trying to say here?
I'm saying the laws EU has released are too complex and indirect and cost too much money, and that if they wanted to ban behavioral advertising outright they should have and could have done that instead of what they have done.
> I'm saying the laws EU has released are too complex and indirect and cost too much money
No, and no, and no.
Most privcy-adjacent laws that EU has released in recent years are neither complex, nor do they cost too much money.
Well, they cost some money because businesses have this entrenched idea that they have an inalienable right to your data, so they don't even know which data they collect, sell, exchange, let leak, or use throughout their systems. Well, boo-hoo. Spend some time and money to get rid of this idea.
And the laws are "indirect" in the sense that all laws are indirect. They have to be general enough to be applicable not just in the year they were released to the technology of the time.
> Most privcy-adjacent laws that EU has released in recent years are neither complex, nor do they cost too much money.
Please visit https://gdpr-info.eu/ and read the text of the 99 articles that make up the GDPR. You don't think 99 separate statements of the law are too many? Not complex? Add in reading all of the CJEU opinions and the original directive behind GDPR (which remains in force). Also add the e-privacy directive, a 15 year old law that is also still in force. How can you say that isn't complex?
> Well, they cost some money
My argument is that it costs more money than it's worth. Hard to find good statistics, but we can leave it at that.
It’s the fact that our browsers don’t solve this issue in a standardized way.
Everyone who serves HTTP in the Eu and includes third party tracking, shows you an idiosyncratic consent banner. Often these things download a large amount of JS as well.
That’s completely and utterly idiotic.
- It’s confusing for users.
- It interrupts the user’s flow everytime they visit a site.
- It’s bad for overall performance.
- It’s bad for people who publish content.
- Developers have to defer to legal experts for trivial stuff out of FUD.
- It doesn’t work correctly on the technical side.
- It doesn’t work from a user’s perspective, because they just get annoyed or uncertain and falsely consent!
Nobody wins.
It should just be a standard, global feature in browsers. A site should only ask you _once_, if at all from a user’s perspective.
The browser should send a “profiling and tracking” whitelist, or simply make it available via a JS API.
> Everyone who serves HTTP in the Eu and includes third party tracking, shows you an idiosyncratic consent banner. Often these things download a large amount of JS as well.
> That’s completely and utterly idiotic.
Yes. And that's not the fault of the law, but the fault of the companies.
1. The law doesn't talk about browsers, or cookies, or banners. It's a General Data Protection Regulation. It applies in equal measure to browsers, apps, VR, AR, offline interactions, and whatever you can think of
2. The law is ridicuously simple for 99% of use cases, and is extremely cheap to implement. It says, "Only use data you need for the operation of your business. If you collect any other data, you have to ask users for consent. Consent has to be informed, and it must be as easy to say no as it is to say yes"
> Why is this not the case?
Because the companies think that tracking you and selling your data on theopen market is their god-given right.
And the standard is literally already there: it's called GDPR.
As a very much devils advocate, one could argue that some companies make a revenue steam or of serving ads, so taking steps to do that is their legitimate business. I personally think that's a screwed up business model but there you are. I've always found legitimate business to be annoyingly vague.
You can still serve ads without tracking, collecting enormous amounts of data etc.
"Legitimate interest" is there to cover areas that are too numerous to cover in a law. E.g. combating fraud is a legitimate activity, and it requires more data than you strictly need to operate your business.
However, as with all things, companies will try and exploit any and all loopholes possible.
They had such a standard called Do Not Track. It was used by the ad industry to track users. So Do Not Track was removed.
So why would companies who don't give two shits about user privacy bother with any implementation or standards? The law already tells them to provide a yes/no option, and yet here we are.
Browsers removed the Do Not Track header because it was... used to track users.
This should give you the answer to "why this isn't sufficient". The ads industry does not respect anything until it's driven out of existence by fines.
If they were to “ban behavioural advertising”, then advertisers would simply rebrand it: “oh no it’s not behavioural advertising, it’s ’interest-centric’ advertising, completely different”.
The point is to ban it in “spirit” not in “letter”, because a ban in the lette would simply get lawyered around and end up not being worth the paper it’s written on.
The advertisers know that these regulations ban behavioural advertising effectively, which is why their immediate tactic is to decry the wording as “too hard” and “too confusing”. This is an obfuscation tactic. Like with GDPR, it’s actually shockingly easy to comply with:
Any idea as to way they'd opt for this indirectness, rather than an outright ban? I'd imagine it would be to protect some niche, or to avoid getting the law dragged through courts for ten year.
As far as I know, the EU legislation is primarily aimed to protect privacy. Behavioral advertising is related because it requires tracking, and tracking requires the consent and understanding of users in the EU.
There was (is) a huge dependence on US software in Europe, that's probably why there was some reluctance at the start in enforcing it.
However since "America first" the EU is trying to be more independent and boost its own European made software, that's likely why the climate for other software has worsened.
And/or they realize that trying to introduce too large changes in one go will throw the markets into damage control mode, and the results will not be favorable to the legislators and their constituents. Better boil the frog gradually than have it jump out and take its money elsewhere.
> There's no other side of this war, just regulators issuing commands that industry tries to follow.
We know how well the industry "tries to follow" from how industry follows GDPR and how Facebook keeps pretending that it's their god-given right to use tracking data in advertisment.
> It's confusing as a war is because the regulators decided not to make the law say, 'behavioral advertising is illegal,' and instead have spent years slowly awakening to that conclusion, at the cost of zillions of dollars in legal fees.
It's not confusing. Regulators do what they always do: they let companies do whatever companies do. And when the companies keep doing shitty things, regulators regulate.
Surely the other side is public opinion. If corporations convince the public that the regulators are going to make their life worse, the regulators lose.
According to what definition? It has clients, it needs to be marketed. Budgets are assigned to deliver it. A good ad campaign gets awards. A commercial is intellectual property.
Infinite money glitch for big tech, with dramatic externalities pushed to non-consenting general population.
These externalities include death of traditional media, extreme levels of political polarization, and climbing suicide rate of teenagers, girls in particular. These things are caused in very large part by the big tech companies maximizing consumption of ads, and efficiency of ads targeting.
This is good in theory, but does not hold for day-to-day reality.
News reports, announcements, updates, etc are often announced and hosted on social media and YouTube. The main news outlets hardly host their own video, and half the useful announcements got made on Twitter first (before Musk torched it lol), so unless “remain deliberately ignorant” is the alternative - which I don’t think it is, then the reality is that you end up on one of these tech giants real quick.
Or take some mildly grey area technical steps to get around it. I don't see too many ads these days between the pihole & newpipe & whatever adblockers I've got on Firefox. Traditional TV when we watch the news is basically it. That not open to everyone I know since you need some technical knowledge to set it up.
You must accept their Terms of Service to use them. These terms of service state that they will show you advertising, and in order to use the website, you must agree to these terms. They have very clear consent.
> The only non-consenting advertising I can think of is public billboards
There is advertising in public washrooms, there is advertising on people's clothing, there is advertising playing on PA systems, there is advertising embedded in movies, there is advertising presented as news. There is nonconsenting advertising everywhere. In my experience, more of it is nonconsenting than consenting -- probably because very few people would actually consent to it.
As bad as advertising in old media was, at least it wasn't a platform of targeted surveillance and psychological manipulation. An advertisement was just an advertisement, you could pay attention to it or not, and your attention if it was noted at all was only noted in aggregate. Your radio or tv didn't know who you are, know where you live, develop complex behavioral profiles on you, record all of your browsing, shopping and communication data, listen in on your with microphones or watch you with cameras.
Google didn't expose the corruption of old media, rather it supplanted it with even deeper and more insidious corruption.
I wouldn't underestimate the psychological manipulation of old media, but you're right there's a whole industry around gathering and leveraging metrics, it still feels primitive but my imagination always wanders into how you can tie data points together. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of the fence.
It is a product, just not for consumers. Other companies buy the product and it is applied onto the consumer, to the consumers distaste.
Advertising is itself always balancing on the tradeoff between disgruntling the consumer and the benefit the consumer gets from the media/tool they're actually trying to engage with. It's an implicit bargain for most people, not an explicit one.
For me, advertising crossed that line a long time ago. If I had to watch the amount of ads YouTube actually puts in front of you, I wouldn't use it. Thank goodness for ad blockers.
Uh... hmmm. I work in the industry and this article is very even handed but still a bit off.
We don't really have have a term for "behavioral" advertising. So a lot of things are being lumped together that don't necessarily fit.
For example, Facebook USED to be highly valued because of the amount of "targeting" (again, we don't use the term "behavioral") data they had. When you went to tell FB what you liked and didn't like they used that. They also kept that valuable data under lock and key - they have no interest in sharing it.
Things are a bit different now. Since they and everyone else switched to an endless "doomscrolling" experience, all that data is worthless. No one keeps their likes up to date, no one engages with content. So there's really not that much targeting ("behavioral") data out of FB anymore. So native ads are less effective, but people look at much more.
"Data brokerages" are pretty niche. They don't exist to the extent that people think they do. And the data they provide is often absolute garbage. Users switch phones, emails, numbers way too often to actually get anything resembling a permanent "lock". Marketing data ages FAST. Do you go to a store and find they have an address that is like 4 moves old? That's kind of the quality of brokerage data - it's good for filling in gaps, but is not nearly as valuable as first-party data.
So part of what you are seeing is not necessarily advertisers responding to upcoming EU regulations, but organic changes in what sort of advertising is even effective anymore. Third party cookies are not as useful as they used to be, and they cut into the big advertisers' monopolies on user data. So they are being phased out anyway.
> Attribution / measurement of advertising campaigns became more and more precise
This is the exact opposite of what is happening in the industry. There are so many different data sources that all conflict that data quality is often very dire in most large organizations. So there is a ton of fraud and snake oil used to justify advertising budgets.
However, where the author hits the nail on the head I think are future outcomes: EU markets are being deprioritized (it doesn't hurt that economically, consumer wealth in Europe is falling like a rock). Users are opting in to more advertisements (Instagram is quickly becoming the QVC of the internet). One thing he misses is the rising importance of sponsorships and physical marketing..
> it doesn't hurt that economically, consumer wealth in Europe is falling like a rock
Falling like a rock? Where is this comming from? What Europe are you talking about? The EU, the continent, the eurozone, the UK, Russia?
Granted, high inflation, primarily caused by higher energy prices after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has slowed down consumer spending in the EU, but generally speaking the outlook isn't that bad.
- Total financial assets of EU households grew almost continuously during the period 2011–2021, falling only in 2018. Their total value increased from €21 331 billion in 2011 to €34 982 billion in 2021, a 64.0 % overall increase. (Source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...)
- Consumer Spending in European Union is expected to be 1804.00 EUR Billion by the end of this quarter, according to Trading Economics global macro models and analysts expectations. In the long-term, the European Union Consumer Spending is projected to trend around 1836.00 EUR Billion in 2024 and 1869.00 EUR Billion in 2025, according to our econometric models. (Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/consumer-spendin...)
- In June, Eurosystem staff revised down slightly the outlook for growth in the euro area for the next two years. The economy is expected to slow to 0.9% in 2023 before rebounding to 1.5% in 2024 and 1.6% in 2025 as energy prices moderate, foreign demand strengthens and real incomes improve.
(Source: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2023/html/ecb.sp230...)
Damn I knew the EU wasn't in a great place from the last few years but I didn't realize it's post covid recovery was so horrible compared to the USA. Hopefully they can turn it around!
If what you say here is accurate, that's all very good news. But how does that square with the fact that the online ad industry continues to be at war with people who don't want to be tracked?
> If what you say here is accurate, that's all very good news.
Ummm. Except for the part where basically a few players will have a monopoly on online advertising. It's really a slow return to how TV advertising and etc worked.
> continues to be at war with people who don't want to be tracked
How so? There are infinitely more privacy rules and safeguards than there were a decade ago. Let alone the amount of tools like AdBlocker or Ghostery or Brave or etc.
Keep in mind that the awareness of your online presence is probably growing faster than your actual online presence.
In fact, just like standard of living, it's easy to lose perspective of just how fast our entire idea of privacy has changed. 100 years ago, hotel beds used to be shared amongst strangers. Within our lifetimes, books with every person in town's name, number, and address used to be delivered to everyone's home.
>Within our lifetimes, books with every person in town's name, number, and address used to be delivered to everyone's home.
This example is only half-hearted at best I feel. Anyone touting this as an example also leaves out it was very possible to be omitted from this book or have a name other than your legal name listed. It is absolutely not possible with online tracking. Anyone throwing out this as an example of how "not bad" their industry is can take a long walk off a short pier.
> Except for the part where basically a few players will have a monopoly on online advertising.
Not being in the ad industry, this seems a lateral change to me. I can see how it would be problematic to others in the industry, though.
> How so? There are infinitely more privacy rules and safeguards than there were a decade ago.
The online ad industry has poured enormous amounts of time, money, effort, and even lobbying to bypass efforts from end users to prevent being tracked. And that effort continues.
There are more privacy rules and tools than before, but that's just because of the back-and-forth nature of the battle. Sometimes privacy edges ahead, then the ad companies push the gains back or route around them, then privacy edges ahead, etc.
> Within our lifetimes, books with every person in town's name, number, and address used to be delivered to everyone's home.
I'm old enough to remember phone books. And I remember that people who didn't want to be listed, or only wanted limited information in them, had that option. Those books never had every person's information. They were, in modern parlance, opt-out (although you did have to pay a fee to be omitted, which was considered outrageous in the day, but there wasn't a way around that.)
> It's really a slow return to how TV advertising and etc worked.
TV advertising is the opposite of targeted. Literally every person picking up a broadcast signal sees the same ads.
My neighbors having my name and address in the phone book doesn't bother me the way Google tracking every damn thing I see on the internet does. People don't notice it, but the latter is far more invasive.
> Literally every person picking up a broadcast signal sees the same ads.
This is technically true, but only because it implies the word "same" before broadcast too.
Regional ads injected into the ad slots were definitely a thing with TV already back in ~2005. So households getting their signal from the same transmitter got the same ads, but just a few kilometres away you could see entirely different ads during the advertising break.
Most of my viewing is Freesat, i.e. free-to-air satellite broadcasts, which I receive via a Sky box with 2Tb of storage. I scan the schedules daily, and mark what interests me for recording. Periodically I go through my recordings, and delete stuff I'm never likely to watch.
I used to have a Netflix subscription; I cancelled it when I realized that there's nothing worth watching (for me) on Netflix. Very occasionally I head to YT, but content discoverability on YT is poor.
I do care what I watch; sometimes I find that I've run out of pre-recorded shows that I'm interested in; then I stop watching. And I never have TV on "in the background".
I find both hotel and phone book examples pretty weak. Neither proves we got a lot of privacy. Temporary sleeping with a stranger while traveling is loss of fonfort, but nit meaningful loss of privacy.
With phonebook, you could ask to be omitted and more famous people routinelly did that. Also, information about you was very limited. Stalker or violent ex could use it, but it would be impossible to si thousands of strangers into harrasing you. It was nit the same as posting address on 4 Chan.
> Within our lifetimes, books with every person in town's name, number, and address used to be delivered to everyone's home.
And our opinions towards that changed precisely because some people started abusing that data to do targeting (and adversarial discrimination), exploiting scale, and the whole thing got out of hand.
The two things do not seem to me as contrasting, there is an industry gathering the data and selling them (with promises and snake-oil) and other people buying those data.
Whether what is sold is accurate or not is another thing, as long as it is perceived as "good enough" by the buyers it will be bought anyway.
I don't think that many companies (buyers) have the guts to stop for - say - 6 months all advertising on a given channel and see what happens.
Again, take the data buying and selling and set it aside. That's kind of like a whole separate thing.
Even without data brokers, there is tons of fraud and snake-oil. When you are comparing advertising success, website traffic, email delivery, product usage, etc - actually getting consistent user data between them is a nightmare. Everyone has incentive to pump up their own numbers. And oftentimes the reporting you are engaging in is so complicated that a lot of companies rely on consultants to do all of the work.
> I don't think that many companies (buyers) have the guts to stop for - say - 6 months all advertising on a given channel and see what happens.
Our company had a broken ad run on LinkedIn for 6 months. It cost us over $100k. The manager's response was "Can we turn them on again until we fix them? I need to spend the budget or I will lose it."
Yes, we are saying exactly the same things, though in a slightly different way.
The results of this (or that) advertising are either non-measurable or poorly measured, and the way advertising budgets are calculated (and spent) is - to say the least - perverse.
Median consumer is getting fucked by central bank loan rates, sky-high housing prices wherever jobs are and overall inflation. Talking from EU perspective, but probably applies to most of the world pretty well.
Great post. Adding that the article misreads the legal events too. The Norwegian decision for FB isn't a watershed moment. The Irish enforcement against them is not.
I think the author has the terms "opt-in" and "opt-out" reversed, which was a bit confusing. If something is "opt-in", then you have to explicitly decide to opt-in, which means that by default you won't be included.
A good example of this is organ donation. Some countries have it opt-in (i.e., you have to decide to donate), whereas in other countries it is opt-out (so you are a donor by default).
I think it describes a somewhat common scenario, where it's on by default but there's an effort made to make it seem like you went out of your way to agree to it.
Like a pre-checked box on a form about your desire to receive marketing mails.
> Prior to ATT, every app by default had access to your advertising ID, i.e. it was opt-in by default.
Nitpicking, it was not opt in, as the user did not opt in. It would be more accurate to say: "consent was implicit", or even "the app could access the user's advertising ID without the user's consent".
I feel that it's important to distinguish "opt in" as something that requires explicit user action.
I think that's not just a nitpick - it's a misuse of the word. "Opt-in by default" should just say "opt-out". You can see the same misunderstanding, I think, in the strapline of the article.
Just wanted to say I thought this was an excellent description of the Internet ad market and the recent changes that have occurred. I don't work in the ad space (though I've worked on consumer sites so I have a fairly decent understanding), so I thought this article did a great job thoroughly and clearly explaining the details.
Ads should be completely outlawed (stating from paper ads in the mail)
We need a place for manufacturer (not sellers) to put _full specifications_ of their products. If you think you make something useful you put it there.
Then people can use filters and search to find the products they want/need and then search for the right price/seller or directly contact the manufacturer/reseller network.
I really wish Canada would grow a pair, and stand up to the big social media platforms -- especially in the light of the latest shenanigans with the availability of / paying for news. Whichever side of that debate you fall on, you have to admit that meta et al are in a position to strong-arm a country and have an impact on its laws. That's a terrible precedent, already having played out in Australia.
Anything that chokes off the flow of money via advertising to these companies is a two-tier win in my book.
Canada is saying FB has to pay if they want news on their platform. FB doesn't make any money off of promoting news articles for free, so they take news off their platform. What's the controversy? Was FB just supposed to pay for news out of their own goodwill?
I'm no Meta defender but I'm also very confused about what the legislators thought the law was supposed to do.
> I'm no Meta defender but I'm also very confused about what the legislators thought the law was supposed to do.
Cui bono?
The law was supposed to siphon funding from foreign companies to Canadian media, who the Canadian government are in bed with. That's why it doesn't appear to make sense: it's not public-benefit lawmaking, it's plain ol' corruption. Same as the earlier Australian law (there, it was Rupert Murdoch leaning on the Coalition government which he largely kept in power with his local media empire).
It's why the Canadian government is so apoplectic about it; Meta's unexpected pushback exposes the law to scrutiny it simply cannot withstand, and highlights a rather unsavoury side of the government in having ever passed it.
Yeah, that law and the govt's response seems so absurd until you line up their incentives with the incentives of the Canadian communications oligopoly and suddenly things make sense.
How does it protect online news websites to prevent people from sharing links to their articles on social media? That's a major discovery mechanism for their content.
I’m no fan of the power of big tech, well, except when it involves standing fast against the blatant political corruption of a government devising a bizarre and nonsensical law to funnel money to their corporate buddies (according to PBO analysis the most money goes to bell, rogers and Shaw).
Yes, Canada should develop strong privacy and competition laws, but I’ve lost hope that they wouldn’t just be whatever serves the interests of our local oligopolies.
I want to see what business models people come up with without ads sucking up all the oxygen in the room. We tried ad supported content, it was bad, let’s roll the dice again and see what we get.
You don’t need to track people to pay for things with ads. You can advertise based on the surrounding content pretty effectively. It’s what TV channels have done for years.
I want to consume content that was made by people who simply want to make that content for the sake of sharing information.
I don’t care if content that is made by people that only make content to make money is pay walled. They can have their 10:01 long YouTube videos and recipes with a preamble of their life story behind a paywall. Sounds good to me.
The GDPR is part of a much longer and older saga concerning 'data sovereignty'.
US courts have in the past repeatedly forced EU companies to divulge personal data and business information, in US lawsuits (discovery etc..).
The reasons the US justices always gave for allowing this, was that there were no sanctions for these EU companies making it illegal to cooperate with such judicial processes.
The GDPR expressly forbids this and also applies tough sanctions on companies and regimes that try to force it. By making it illegal to do business with such countries.
This is why Privacy Shield is so important for the US and the EU, it hashes out to what extent the US may infringe on EU data sovereignty. And vice-versa.
> The EU is just protecting its own partner states' IT industries
Doesn’t the GDPR go back to a largely grassroots effort, including from members of the Pirate Party phenomenon that people initially scoffed at? I have no doubt that there has been local IT lobbying, but one cannot deny some level of true popular will.
The pirate party, not the green party, had a bit of support in Scandinavia, a lot less in Germany, and in France, in 2011, they could barely present 200 candidates in 50k areas, and i'm pretty sure their only access to 'powerful' people was the condescending sympathy of a single billionaire and maybe some secret service.
And a single member in the French parliament (900+) ever listened to pro-liberty lobbies like lqdn, and fought for it. So yes, it's pretty grassroots.
Legislatively, yes. Politically, it's from ex-members of the 2011 pirate party (many of its members ended up in the greens).
And I'm arguing against 'it's not grassroot'. My argument is that it's as grassroot as support for Snowden, wikilealks, whistle-blower protection. Because all of the was in the 2011 pirate party manifesto. It happened that only this legislation caught interest of other parties, but it's origin is grassroot. Have you heard of framasoft?
Yes it does. The whole idea that grassroots organizations and - gasp - actual voters are behind the DPD and later the GDPR is something that some people have problems with, they would prefer it if the EU government was playing some shady protectionist game rather than to work on behalf of EU citizens, who very much appreciate them standing up to big telcos and big tech.
Google is so afraid of the EU legislators that they have literally plastered the whole of Brussels Airport ('Zaventem' for the locals) with wall to wall ads on how fantastically pro-end-user privacy they are. It's comical.
I have never even heard anyone suggest such a thing. Whether a fringe grassroots privacy politics effort existed in Sweden at the time is not up for debate. It absolutely did, but it was not "popular" by any stretch of the imagination. Average voters simply don't care about privacy, no matter which country you're in.
The EU was explicitly formed to compete with the US economically. Nobody should be surprised if their most flagship legislation to date is motivated by the same intent.
Furthermore, it is being generous to say the EU is a pseudo-democratic institution. If an actually popular privacy movement did exist in Sweden at some point, the chances of it penetrating the EU are slim to none, and the chances of it having any political influence in the EU are even lower.
> It absolutely did, but it was not "popular" by any stretch of the imagination. Average voters simply don't care about privacy, no matter which country you're in.
Go tell Germans that with their very recent memories of Stasi. You can even tell Swedes that with their very explicit laws against mixing and accessing various government databases.
> Nobody should be surprised if their most flagship legislation to date is motivated by the same intent.
Instead of parroting whatever the latest internet conspiracy is, you could actually go and read the legislation, and have an opinion of your own.
Small businesses use this kind of advertising as much or more, proportionally speaking, as corporations. And with a virtual guarantee of worse data security/privacy practices when applicable.
> If you use the internet, or an app, you must protect yourself.
That's easier said than done when it comes to the tracking that enables this sort of advertising. What method do you suggest?
> I assume everyone is a capitalist
I don't think that's a valid assumption. Also, there are many different kinds of capitalists. I'm a capitalist in the most basic sense, being an entrepreneur, but I see a lot of things asserted under the banner of "capitalism" that I disagree with.
> so wouldn't adding laws here somehow subsidize and therefore tarnish the market?
I honestly don't understand what you're getting at here.
Liberals lied when they told you about it. There is no free market and the whole concept would only work if actors had equal powers which is not the case.
Why do you think adding laws that forbid advertisements in certain configurations are a subsidy?
Contextual targeting hasn't been a thing because it's not very easy to accurately extract structured targeting signals from unstructured documents. At best for now, we may extract a set of word embedding per page which likely misses precise contexts as well as subtle nuances. Now we have LLM which has objectively better capabilities to do that job and everyone is now forced to invest more into contextual targeting, I guess there will be significant developments on targeting systems. The question would be how to make super cheap models which can handle both pre-processed offline web page context as well as online usage contexts.
I think this will evolve advertising in interesting ways.
"Ads 1.0" had a viewpoint of trying to scrape every last little bit of data about a user's interests: from their email, messages, calendar, search history, friendships, and discussions. There was a mental model that you can't really know what's going to resonate with a person until you have their life under a microscope. This the "surveillance capitalism" take.
There's a view, perhaps not universally shared, that humans may not actually be as complicated as all that. That if you have a person play a short game, engage in a chat session a few minutes long, swipe on people they find interesting, or even just pay careful attention to how much of a video someone watches -- that discerning their personality and interests is challenging but totally viable.
Let's remember: the Cambridge Analytica debacle didn't stem from a full dump of someone's private Facebook history - it was mainly personality tests that were very quick to complete. It turned out that such a quick & casual test is mostly sufficient signal to be actionable re: how they were likely to vote and how to influence that vote.
In this mode, we'll see the rise of superapps that have rich ways of engaging and rich telemetry to discern your interests without having to "snoop" on you. They'll just engage you directly.
In this way, privacy is preserved nicely but ads can still be well-targeted.
I am profoundly anti-advertisement because I believe in the pull model: if I want something I ask. So I think about 95% or more of advertisement today is annoying if not outright evil.
But your comment got me thinking. Is there a world where advertisement is, um, just simply good?
In other words, what makes advertisement bad today and how would these superapps make advertisement good?
> Is there a world where advertisement is, um, just simply good?
I think there can be. The fundamental idea of advertising is certainly a win-win sort of deal: informing people of products and services they may not be aware of.
But most advertising is not that. Most of it is not informative or useful for making purchase decisions, most of it is manipulative to the extreme, and a lot of it relies on surveilling people without their consent. That sort of advertising isn't anything I can support.
Inherently there's a conflict in advertisement. The consumer expects entertaining and unbiased information and the advertiser expects the consumer to buy something.
One example how this conflict plays out: The youtuber Colin Furze tells people about Surfshark, a VPN solution. The way he does is funny (being in a bathtub with a shark mascot and his dark grey tie on), but I am not sure whether this is enlightening and useful information,
Because of this conflict I think there will always be some tension. One example is that one extension for Youtube marks these parts as advertisement and enables skipping it. And sometimes I feel the need to skip it. When thinking about it, it is because I don't want to listen to it and try to separate the information I am after from advertisement I am not willing to listen to it.
So I still think that the pull model is the best way. When I am ready I am willing to listen to what companies tell me.
It's like learning. If your mind is ready, learning is quick and easy.
We've definitely seen a rise of "advertising as content" where the ad itself is just so good that people will watch it for its own right vs having it imposed on them.
The Superbowl is a classic example here - some meaningful fraction of those watching are doing so for the ads vs any interest in football! But YouTube, TikTok, etc have all seen great success in organic/viral campaigns (Old Spice comes to mind).
To answer your question - how might a superapp make advertisement "good" would probably be not only showing you an ad that you're likely to commercially engage (to purchase the good/service) based on your observed interests but also where the ad itself is something you're likely to find interesting/educational/amusing and not annoying, because in the latter case you'll like/comment/reshare to percolate it "for free" and amplify their campaign. And the interestingness can be judged based on your history of interactions.
I can imagine a world where advertising is good in the sense that it's always relevant, but such a world places heavier weight on ad "fit" than on the advertiser's bid for that ad inventory. For example, it's a bad user experience when you search for a product/vendor and the first result is their competitor instead because they bid more for that ad placement.
Unfortunately, I don't see how "good" advertising can exist outside of small niches with the economic incentives being what they are.
In concept advertising is good, I'd love to know about good products that serve my purposes for good prices, the problem is that as far as the people in these companies are concerned they just want to sell stuff.
Many companies don't make great products, so what ends up happening is they compensate with advertising that's just borderline false. Filled with emotive words, gish gallop etc that doesn't actually provide very useful or accurate info but hopefully convinces you to buy anyway.
Your second model of advertising ("humans may not be as complicated") is how advertising worked for thousands of years, and how it continues to work today.
Even for Google and Facebook, the vast majority of ad spend is not narrowly targeted.
What you call "Ads 1.0" is a snakeoil fad and isn't successful in the industry.
The reason the big Internet giants collect user data isn't really for advertising (that's only a justification), they do it to have leverage when dealing with nation-states and governments.
t. Working in the ad industry for the last 17 years.
11 years ago Apple bought a patent for something that would work great with personal llms to turn behavioral advertising into a circus. But they will probably keep it buried so a Hacker will have to build a clone of this and become the real John Connor in our fight against the machines.
Along with the dark patterns of “confirm my choices”, where my “choices” are an endless list of checkboxes hidden under expandable sections of complete gibberish.
Those dark patterns are not GDPR-compliant. GDPR says, "it should be as easy to say yes as it is to say know" and on top of that those huge lists do not present informed consent.
I think the preamble to the legislation sort of goes over it. I remember a section talking about marketing and it seemed to imply that businesses have a legitimate interest to market their own products to their own customers.
For example, a Dutch company might look at address data and see that they get a lot of orders online to ship to Germany and they can use that to open a store there. Obviously the business is interested in selling to its consumers effectively and obviously those consumers are interested in those products. When they start selling that information to other people, it isn't really legitimate anymore.
Until I read that, I held the belief that GDPR was really pretty clear and easy to implement. But reading that, it seems to me that the ICO doesn't really have a clue how you're supposed to distinguish a legitimate interest from an illegitimate one.
Perhaps the "legitimate interest" base needs to be deleted. It looks like a deliberate loophole.
The EU's war is on US companies. They wouldn't be playing fast and loose with these regulations if their home born companies were the ones getting disadvantaged.
They push draconian surveillance laws then claim sainthood when they go after Facebook.
I guess you can hate Facebook et al and welcome this stuff but it's hard to deny how these laws are basically trade barriers aimed at the US tech industry.
Funny, then, how as a US citizen I'm all about this.
I don't want to undermine Facebook's business model because I hate them. I hate them because they run on a business model I want undermined.
There are real, present dangers to having your data hucked around like it's going out of style.
<Tinfoil hat section>
Let's also think for a second about the unprecedented level of propaganda and general bullshittery this stuff enables.
The whole reason we're so desperately divided right now is because the marketing managers in politics have been able to see with fine-grit granularity what makes people tick, so they know precisely which buttons to push to start the next distraction/flamewar every time people start talking about dangerous topics like election reform, lobbying, and antitrust - all stuff that people on both sides of the aisle have no trouble getting behind. Quick, get em talking about guns and gays!
How do you come to that conclusion? These laws apply to all EU based companies while non-EU companies have the clear option to opt out of them, which many do. If you want to do business within the EU, then you need to respect citizen privacy. Though I do agree that they should eat their own medicine, but here in the EU, we do tend to view private corporations as less worthy of our data than our own governments.
That being said. The branches that are working to secure citizen privacy and the branches that are working to ruin online encryption and monitor everything we do are often very sepperate parts of the government. So it's not exactly the same people.
1. The magnitute of effect these laws have on EU companies is miniscule compared to the effect on the US tech giants
2. The EU has no honest respect over the people's privacy as they fully surveil their citizens
Thus it ia very safe to conclude that the EU pretends to care about people's privacy as an excuse to protect it's industry against the ultra-high yields of US tech companies
No, you just have to follow the regulations. It's no "war on US companies" or anything like that. They wrote some good law (Albeit it has a few weaknesses), and enforce it now. And if you want to do business in the EU, you have to follow them.
I would say it's more a problem of the US companies, if they can't do business without violating EU regulations.
If we're being a bit generous it's easier for the EU to make these rules, because it has very little impact on it's own companies. The majority of the large companies being impacted by these laws are US based.
Similarly you could argue that the companies are US based, simply because the US have pretty terrible privacy rules which makes it easy for them to get started with a fair amount of users/targets.
The TL:DR of GDPR is "just don't drack your users without their consent". Why is that difficult for US corporations to follow? Even '90s web was by default GDPR complaint.
"Won't someone please think of the big-tech ad profits?" - You
Why should the web's profitability or lack thereof, be my problem as a user? That the SV elite can't buy platinum plating on their yachts? Are they sharing that wealth with me? Then, good riddance! My privacy is more important than your wealth.
There's been profitable SW companies and careers before user tracking became the norm. Remember when Windows came without any ads and blogs and forums had generic non-targeted ads?
Same how the big tobacco industry got kneecapped for our own health and the greater good, a similar tech industry correction is long overdue. Is this the world you want for your kids?
You must list all kinds of data processing you perform, find the appropriate legal basis (and data retention duration, etc.), make sure you only gather data you need (data minimization), know to who you transfer data, make your services secure by default, monitor for unauthorized access, and tell affected people when there is a breach. Perhaps make a risk assessment, but it depends on the processing you do.
Yes, it's work. But quite frankly, I'm cool with a law that expects anyone who processes personal data to secure their service, to properly inform people, and holds them accountable.
Personal data has a very wide definition under GDPR:
>‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
An IP address, or an email address is personal data. Even a pseudonym or a session ID is personal data. Yes, having a log for security purposes (GDPR recital 49) captures personal data (even just access dates and requested URLs may be considered to be personal data). Yes, a comment section on a blog may capture personal data.
Once again, I'm fine with all of this. But ignoring GDPR by not capturing personal data is more complex that it might seem.
Spoken like a person who never even touched it even on a small project.
No cookies... so no language preferences. That is a profile cookie.
Right to erasure. What about invoices and orders? When can it be anonymous and when is it old enough to anonymize.
Do I get away with replacing personal data random data? Do I replace references to real people with 'anonymous person'? Will my sql constraints still work?
When I restore data from backup and someone has been anonymized in the meantime, what mechanism will be used to anonymize the user after restore?
Right to data portability. How much of the database and in what format?
> Right to erasure. What about invoices and orders? When can it be anonymous and when is it old enough to anonymize.
Invoices should typically fall under the “legal obligation” legal basis (article 6(1)c). See for how long the law requires you to keep them. In my country, it's 10 years.
>Do I get away with replacing personal data random data?
Yes, see WP216.
>Do I replace references to real people with 'anonymous person'? Will my sql constraints still work?
How do you do when someone deletes their account?
>When I restore data from backup and someone has been anonymized in the meantime, what mechanism will be used to anonymize the user after restore?
It's up to you to decide.
>Right to data portability. How much of the database and in what format?
The same as for a DSAR. As for the format, it's up to you to decide, provided it is a commonly used format.
I've also implemented GDPR. Of course it's complex, it's a continent wide law, how could it not be complicated?
But I still think that "don't track your users without their informed consent" is a good summary of the intention of the law.
And I would also say that's it's only really complex to implement if you were already tracking your users and now you need to change everything. If you weren't doing that, you'd probably find it remarkably easy to implement.
The EU is not an uniform entity. Yes, you have citizens who sue Facebook, but then you have some members of the commission that wants to ban E2E encryption; but then, you have other members that absolutely don't want that, and the EDPS reminding everyone that it's actually illegal.
I violently agree with you and am stunned at the amount of pro EU/anti US rhetoric on this forum.
You make an excellent point about the EU surveillance laws. They clearly don’t give a shit about privacy. None of the folks disagreeing ITT seem to be willing to discuss that point.
The EU spends more resources regulating US corporations than they do building their own. If they want to reverse course on their economic trajectory they’re gonna have to start competing in a genuine way.
> You make an excellent point about the EU surveillance laws. They clearly don’t give a shit about privacy. None of the folks disagreeing ITT seem to be willing to discuss that point.
You can be for privacy and against survailance. Often the politicians who work to implement data protection laws and politicians who work to increase survailance come from opposite sites of the political middle. So it's not really a very good point unless you can only deal in black and white.
The EU can clearly be good on some areas and terrible on others. As it is with most things. Another example could be how the green party members of the EU are working toward clean energy while the conservative branch is working to increase the markets for fossil energy simultaneously. They do so by positioning them in the legalislative branches where they get the most influence acording to their political agenda, and while that may be "weird" to people from a "winner-takes-all" sort of system, it's how the vast majority of the EU democracies work.
Is this a typo? Of course you can they’re literally opposites.
You’re performing mental gymnastics if you think that the EU is somehow “pro privacy” just because they created cookie banners via GDPR. State sponsored surveillance is FAR worse than corporate sponsored surveillance.
So one issue that this article glosses over is how contextual advertising interacts with attribution.
Essentially, as an advertiser, in order to do effective contextual advertisement, you need to have some idea of how ads perform in a particular context - on a particular web page or app. So what you would really like to say is that "people who saw our ad on X were Y% more likely to visit or website, or buy our product". However, in order to actually measure that, when a user comes to your website you need to know which of your ads they've seen. Traditionally, you'd just serve the ad from your domain and set a cookie, but now you can't do that.
This is more relevant to brand advertising than "click here and buy product X" (direct response), but I think that the people saying "oh, just use contextual advertising" are underestimating the extent to which GDPR makes contextual advertising difficult.
> However, in order to actually measure that, when a user comes to your website you need to know which of your ads they've seen.
That may be the case, but so what? If an industry can't function without abusing people, I would argue that it shouldn't function.
But this doesn't mean the industry can't function. It just means that advertising becomes less efficient (i.e., more expensive). Which is fine -- if it's more expensive to operate in a manner that approaches being ethical, I don't see that as a real problem.
You're right, it's just that the word "abuse" is doing a lot of work in that statement. I've still never seen any example of any person being actually damaged by the "tracking", so calling it "abuse" feels pretty harsh.
I think "abuse" is a fair term, but I acknowledge that it's emotionally loaded. If a company is spying on me (collecting data about me, my machines, or my use of my machines without my informed consent), then I think it's not out of line to call that abusive.
Every web server logs request information. Is that spying on you too? If you go to a website, they aren't "spying" on you, you are volunteering your information to them. Stop hitting yourself.
Interesting how this is forcing these companies to objectively improve their products -- chronological feeds, friends and follows only, etc is what users have been begging for and being ignored, because advertising trash salad is more profitable.
If the long-term effects end up being along the lines of the big social corps withdrawing from the EU, I see that as an enormous win for that economic zone. The presence of these companies, the influence of their products on society and individual mental health have been shown to be overall harmful.
> Interesting how this is forcing these companies to objectively improve their products
Is it though? Facebook only used to show me content from friends and pages I followed. Now it's a nonstop hose of garbage content that only exists to stuff the space between poorly targeted ads.
I’m confused, do you prefer chronological feeds from friends and family or not?
GP is saying that feeds driven by friends and family would be an improvement to their products, and new EU law will drive that behaviour by making it hard for companies like Facebook to indiscriminately force black box recommendation algorithms on people.
Isn’t that exactly what you say you want? And thus you agree with this statement
> Interesting how this is forcing these companies to objectively improve their products
> I’m confused, do you prefer chronological feeds from friends and family or not?
Yes. I would prefer this.
FB no longer gives me a customized feed. I get a generic feed tailored to my demographics - brain achingly dumb posts about Disney and Marvel and memes I don't care for. And I am unable to unsubscribe from any of them because none of them are based on my preferences.
This has been FB's response to the EU sanctions (as well as dropping user engagement) and is the "Non-Personalized feed" that the article is describing.
I went through the earlier process of objecting to personal data processing.
Since then, my feed has been 25% videos of trains and model railways, 50% vaguely sexist or sexual jokes (blondes, 'little Johnny' etc) or cartoons, 25% posts from random Anglophone police forces showing them catching speeding cars, or advising to use seatbelts.
As a whole I think it's good evidence that they no longer use anything they know about me to show the adverts.
I’m confused, do you prefer chronological feeds from friends and family or not?
Yeah I don’t get it either. I’ve unfollowed most of my family and friends. I’m not interested in their re-shared political pieces. My Facebook feed has morphed into a stream of stuff from my hobbies. It’s basically replaced Reddit for me.
Couldn't that be an effect of algorithmic feeds though? What's the point of posting something if the people you want to see it probably won't because it's buried under a mountain of "content". Or worse, the opposite happens: it goes "viral" and people you don't want seeing it see it and decide to make you the internet's punching bag for the day.
Why do you think complex algos, complex feeds, across large search space (all content instead of friends and family) turns out to be more profitable? Are ads suddenly more valuable in that context? I don’t think so. And it’s certainly much more expensive to operate than a simple chronological feed of friends and family.
It comes down to time spent. People spend more time on the apps and see more ads. We can argue over whether that’s a sign people like the app more… but no one is being forced to scroll a feed they don’t enjoy. Interesting that people “are begging for changes” yet using the apps more and more anyways.
Addictiveness is not necessarily an indicator of utility. Drug addicts keep going back to heroin even if it's ruining their lives.
Just because I feel compelled to scroll and endless, algorithmic feed it does not mean that this is how I want to use social media or that such usage reflects the role I want it to have in my life.
The average American watches close to 3 hours of tv per day— I just don’t see what the fuss is about. It seems like you simply don’t approve of how other people choose to spend their time.
Scrolling a feed doesn't mean a person is watching the feed, in fact you could argue the opposite. It seems like the content is engineered to be skipped over while still registering as a view.
My, thank god people are perfect utility-optimising machines and not complex brains with a ton of psychological and neurological weaknesses and quirks :-)
If people behaved like you're saying there would be no drug addicts or gambling addicts, or even obesity or depression.
There's definitely a school of thought that goes "If they're gambling, then gambling must be their highest value; and they're lying if they say otherwise."
"Revealed preferences", if you want something to search for. The most obvious issue is that humans aren't utility-maximizers.
> If the long-term effects end up being along the lines of the big social corps withdrawing from the EU, I see that as an enormous win for that economic zone
it will be a major net loss. the EU is already becoming the internet’s new china. what you’re writing will just make it clear the EU is a non-start for internet companies.
I suspect "suggested content" is not going anywhere. the profit incentive is now lower, but it's still in these company's interests to keep you as engaged as possible for as long as possible, and the casino model is the best way they've found to do that
5 min on yt shorts and I'm fed a diet of Andrew-Tate, Joe Rogan, or if I disagree with this genre and rage-click it away, I get left-wing US hate on why aren't you outraged about Dave Chapelle - because you should be?
Youtube feed for content discovery of intelligent men has died long time ago. It is US propaganda at it's finest but for a global audience.
YT shorts gives me almost exclusively shuffle dance videos, language learning / expat videos and super uplifting stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Yp84ARq7kQ0
I don't want to watch hours of it, but it's definitely a positive slice of my day.
Well out of the people you mention I only recognise Joe Rogan By name - never seen anything of his in my recommendations. Almost 20 year old YouTube account. I watch shorts regularly as well.
good for you if yt knows you and caters to your interest. it is well known that if you show up with a new device, this isn't the case. and for most newcomers this means radicalize in 1 of 2 directions
your government is not telling you what you should like, they're making people literally spying on you for profit something that you aren't opted into by default. if you want people to spy on you for profit, click accept, you still have that option
I'd really like Meta and TikTok threaten with withdrawal from the EU, after subsidizing the EU budget with violation fees. The thing is that then it might create a junk information void which will be promptly filled by Russian propaganda. They're already vehicles for propaganda distribution but more easy to regulate and control than lots of other small channels spreading misinformation.
I would rather be the subject of behavioral advertising and keep privately encrypted comms than the other way around, but apparently the EU has other ideas.
That means that we're living in your ideal world then... :)
Right now, behavioral ads are on their last legs, and privately encrypted comms are still around. Proposals to limit encryption are being thrown around, but they are met with serious resistance, and none of them are currently close to implementation.
I have no doubt that Signal is now compromised, since its board was overhauled recently and now includes people with a US government background. Yes, the encryption model theoretically remains secure, but 1) Signal now uploads your contact list to their servers and claims it is secured by Intel’s secure enclave, but multiple vulnerabilities have been found in that, and 2) if targeted, most users are defenseless against a malicious update. Meanwhile, WhatsApp, which is heavily used by EU citizens, claims end-to-end encryption, but it leaks metadata and also chat content is leaked through the automated backups that most users don’t disable.
The only question is to what extent Five Eyes members besides the US get access to all that. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any initiative inside the EU to protect users better, while also letting us enjoy an internet without behavioral advertising.
EU legislators are experts at coming up with a bunch of good regulations but then cancelling it all out with a hefty dash of blanket, pro-surveillance legislation.
Well it certainly wasn’t equitable, connected computers were the realm of the rich. The problem with free services is scaling them to significant portions of the entire population.
My family wasn't rich and we had a "connected computer" in 97/98 before ad-tech really took over. Getting online was far less costly than the computer itself.
Damn an in my country (Indonesia) even in 2010 it's still the other way around. Even to this day I can't see my fellow countrymen paid for anything online partly because everything used to be so expensive we always have to find cheaper (pirated) version. By comparison privacy is worthless (for us).
Did you also have access to free email (beyond a measly few MBs), maps, video hosting, and private data storage? Because that's what ad-tech enabled. Getting online wasn't the hard part.
Not saying that ad-tech is purely good, of course.
Seeing many folks ITT questing the value of advertising (behavioural/contextual) so some points:
1. Advertising ideally works as match making by connecting buyers to sellers where the seller is unaware of the buyer. (i.e. the unknown unknown problem). Companies usually collect advertisements and place them on limited ad slots.
2. In earlier, physical, forms of advertising such as newspapers, TV, Retail Stores etc, the same ad used to be shown to everyone so ad slots were fewer, much more expensive, and typically only big businesses could afford them.
3. In Digital ads where ads can be personalised to users, there are now a lot more ad slots and small businesses could effectively reach out to niche buyers who otherwise wouldn't be aware of them. The ads are thus cheaper as their budget is better focused on the right users.
4. Digital ads are broadly of 2 types: Intent ads, where the user submits their intent (Eg: Google search, Amazon, Maps etc) or Discovery ads, where the user is typically not present for any single intent (Eg: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc)
5. Discovery based ads in particular can help open up completely new behaviours (in an ideal world) where the seller wasn't aware of the buyer's product but found it very useful (i.e. The unknown unknown problem)
6. Both Intent and discovery ads can be harmful to the user. Intent ads basically charge a tax to prioritise their results (i.e. rent seeking: pay more to jump the queue). Discover ads degrade the user experience (i.e They could've shown you something more interesting but decided to show you something less interesting to you and received money for it from a 3rd party).
Some opinions below:
1. Making digital ads more like physical ads (Eg: By removing personalisation) will probably benefit big businesses by increasing ad prices and making it harder to match sellers to buyers. It's often small businesses who have a niche which increase competition in a market (The Innovators Dilemma)
2. In the EU's case, the ads can be personalised, just not based on behaviour but on context. So this will probably still increases prices but still not change digital ads fundamentally (i.e. they can still be personalised somewhat to the user) at least for now.
1. Modern digital ads can be very well measured. At least the ones focused on direct conversion and not branding. Advertisers can measure the impact of their spending independently and the results can be seen fairly quickly. (Again, not brand advertising).
2. Advertisement match-making isn't perfect (which is why I wrote "in an ideal world"). There is some time and signal buffer till we get enough signal to show the right ad to the user (if ever). The intentions of the ad platform also have to be taken into consideration (Often not the case for Big Tech but even here).
3. Advertisements do have negative consequences. We can also target drugs, cults, gambling etc more effectively as well. Often the law has to play catch-up with the more controversial categories. Advertisers can also dupe/defraud buyers with false/misleading advertisements.
You've missed the main negative part: the attack on our attention and mindfulness.
I really hope that the results of neurologic research won't take much longer to put an end to this disgusting behavior, which attacks central parts of the consciousness of every victim.
> In earlier, physical, forms of advertising such as newspapers, TV, Retail Stores etc, the same ad used to be shown to everyone so ad slots were fewer, much more expensive, and typically only big businesses could afford them.
Well, my local newspaper shows ads for family businesses, and they don't pay that much for it. I've found my local newspaper quite interesting as well, diverse in political articles, with good cultural recommendations, and generally of higher (content) quality than the ones sold nation wide.
I think your point applies to those with most eyes on them, but... The same is true in the digital age. We often give too much credit to the content we partake in. I don't think much has changed on that regard, I just think it's much more obtrusive now.
It's about margins. We have a box of paperclips that costs 10 euro. 100 people sell it for prices ranging from 11 to 100 euro. 11 is probably to low to build a reliable business, 13 is within reason, 15 would allow for some advertisement budget. Everything below is out. Then we have a market with advertisement budgets ranging from 1 to 85 euro per box. These expensive boxes make a hell of a lot of noise! The customer is left choosing between the 80+ and the 60-70 euro screamers.
And then, then they go to AliExpress and buy it for 8 euro from someone who wants out and you've made us all look stupid.
And now a moment of silence for the thousands who failed to want paperclips regardless of systemic encouragement.
"Meta recently conceded that in-app behavioral advertising in the EU can no longer be opt-in by default, marking the end of an era. The regulators won, at least for now."
"Opt-in by default". In other words, "opt-out". Is this some wordplay designed to "comply" with regulations against opt-out.
Yes, it's opt-in, with the opt-in box already checked to save people the trouble.
I don't really understand singling out the specific combination of (advertising, behavioral targeting). The problems with behaviorally tailored content delivery products exist even if advertisers cannot directly monetize it. I think the focus on advertising is a real red-herring.
I wouldn't mind that, especially wherever behavioural profiling is involved.
You'd call a person wearing a tinfoil hat a crazy, yet we are tolerating what effectively could be considered an effort at mass scale, targeted mind control. It's obnoxious on the less competent end of the spectrum, and an outright violation on the other.
I used to consider advertisements an intellectual equivalent of fast-food; I think it's gone far worse than that, and as individuals, we are poorly equipped to stand up to it. I do understand businesses rely on advertising to stay alive, but without regulation, there just seems to be no end to how much abuse adtech is ready to inflict upon us.
The reason is that the user's data privacy rights come first. If interests collide, privacy must come out on top. I'm curious on how you could have missed this ideological position that powers those regulations after years of headlines after headlines about the topic.
europeans did not go to the streets because they were afraid of advertising. politicians ran with it because it sounds good
instead they go to the streets because of the awful economy, unemployment, inaccessible housing. Still waiting for a pan-european affordable housing regulation (not gonna happen because EU is run by the boomers)
Housing is a local, or at least federal matter. EU is about interstate commerce. The advertising/consent regulations are about commerce so it makes sense. Pan-EU housing regulations wouldn't as those are typically in the domain of each country/locality.
You’re really not in a position to speak for all Europeans. You’re painting a complex issue with a broad brush, and of course painting it in such a way that it supports your position.
If that's all it were, then the trade would be "you can get this [free like beer] service if you agree to give up some personal data, otherwise you don't get the service."
As it is, the law says "You, company, must give users a service for free even if they choose not to give you the data."
"Personal data is one of those things" - disagree.
When people say "Google isn't free, they provide it in exchange for your data" that is precisely saying that there's a market and a trade involved. You may not like that trade, in which case, don't use Google services...
The mere factual existence of a trade/market does not imply governmental or societal acceptance of that market. Going back to the organ example, if you search deep enough you can probably find sites and examples of people willingly trading their own organs for vast amounts of money.
Yet that doesn't stop the practice from being illegal, and in most of society's view, reprehensible. Governments exist, in part, for that reason.
I'm not seeing the benefit from behavioral advertising.
I should be an easy person to target -- I buy techy stuff that fits into pretty neat categories.
Yet Amazon seems to be completely unable to figure out some very simple patterns, like that if you're not a company, you're probably not looking to start a collection of printers, cell phones, UPSes or monitors, and that buying one is a sign of that you're done with the product category for a while.
It's much less efficient to do mass ads than targeted ads. Giving a huge advantage to entrenched firms, and cutting off small startups. I guess that's what the EU wants though - protecting it's existing elites through exorbitant income taxes and regulations like these that favours big companies.
every regulation favours big companies in the trivial sense that there's a non zero cost to comply with any rule. However this is hardly a reason to not have rules, we also don't let startup companies throw waste into the river.
Smaller companies aren't somehow inherently virtuous, if they can only exist by violating user privacy even more so than large companies, I'd rather deal with large companies. Small companies aren't an end in itself. Banking is another good example of this. Canada has five big, heavily regulated banks and has not had one bank failure in a century. In the US tax payers bail out SV bank
I hear you that small companies can suck even harder than big ones. But the idea of capitalism is that it’s a search function, looking for optimal solutions.
So having many firms positioning themselves differently is better than having a couple in that you’re more likely to find a good best solution.
We need some rules, but we need to err on the side of fewer not more rules.
My point is that mass ads requires massed capital. There will be few, huge, entrenched players. It’s much better to have a dynamic economy with piles of mom and pops as well as a couple of huge companies. This can only happen if mom and pop can afford to advertise. This can only work with targeted ads.
Ad targeting may be old good regional advertising. Or advertising in specific content rather than trying to target specific human beings based on their profiles.
What if the target market for your specific content is 10k people? And they are spread out geographically?
Let's say you develop a new product/service aimed at a thin slice of the population - say, dentists in Chicago, or 19 y.o. females across the US, or beginner coders, or people with older dogs in the state of Utah.
How do you reach these people?
Not through a national/regional ad campaign - your ad budget is likely $10-$100/day. This is why we all need targeted ads.
What could be a product only for such a specific niche?
All dentists is Cervelo market :) Even if you really really want to target specifically Chicago dentists, you’re probably better off doing a presentation at local dentists’ union or something along those lines. Or just doing old good cold calls.
As for 19 year olds, just advertise in whatever is popular among such crowd? If 18 or 20 y/o sees it, it’s probably not far off, eh?
Why your budget and timing should take higher priority than my privacy? Arguably social coherence is at risk too since targeted ads in politics may be very nasty. Targeted ads benefit few at expense of the whole society.
I immediately thought of Ali G, too. But please don’t post memes on HN, the community really doesn’t want that.
(It is also worth pointing out that Ali G’s American drugs sketch simply used word-for-word the same jokes as the original sketch with a British policeman, and most fans regard the original British version as superior.)
i mentioned the destruction of the eu advertising market. as a consequence tech in europe remains unfunded and therefore nonexistent (because the silicon valley machine literally runs on advertising money)
people should remember that advertising was equally vilified at all times , whether it was on TV or print or radio. But at the time the EU was wise enough not to destroy its media economy. This time it's different
Ok, but can you provide an actual argument explaining why advertising (in general) is a good thing for society and the economy?
You've mentioned multiple times the "it's good at extracting huge sums of money out of people making decisions against their own interests, which goes on to fund other endeavors" argument, but I don't think that's a good thing on the whole.
If you can forgive a huge exaggeration from my part, to me it sounds similar to saying that criminal activities are great because the money earned from those activities can go on to spur economic activity in the region (I'm not saying advertising is a criminal activity, but I think you get my point).
That was an interesting comparison of behavioral vs non-behavioral ads, thanks.
But my question was geared towards the value of advertising itself, in general (if there is any).
I am aware of the unknown unknown problem you mentioned (I think), but in my experience as a layman, very very rarely (if ever) was I introduced to a great product or service through advertising that I wouldn't be aware of in other ways.
Conversely, the amount of ads for substandard products and services (i.e. those which I know for sure there are better alternatives, at least for me and others around me) is infinitely greater.
And I don't think it's just because the ads are not targeted enough. I'm pretty sure I am a hugely interesting target for many, many companies, but I am simply not interested in them (and never will) because other companies have much better products/services (many of which I already use).
I am assuming, of course, that the only reason they're interested in targeting ads to me, is to influence me to make a buying decision that I wouldn't do otherwise, and not just because I wasn't aware of the product/service. Because if it wasn't for influencing me making a buying decision, why would they spend the money to show me an ad?
That's why I always try to ignore (and block) ads as much as possible, even though that's not always possible (e.g. street ads). Yet, I am still being bombarded with non-stop ads and I have no question that I'm being negatively influenced by them, especially in those areas I know very little about (e.g. cleaning products) or am susceptible to being influenced against my own interests (e.g. fast food or other crappy, addictive food products).
In my experience, the success rate of my own research (when looking for a product/service) or even word-of-mouth recommendations has far, far outweighed the success rate of all the ad campaigns I've ever been a target of, from my own perspective (not from the companies' perspectives, of course).
So it's not that I don't see any value in advertising, which I don't (unless you're the advertiser), it's that I think it's actively damaging to society (due to leading people to make bad buying decisions) and the economy in general (due to increased inefficiency).
Thanks, this does mirror my experience in many ways so I'll try to reply to each of your points. In my comment, I did talk about the value of advertising itself (not just contextual/behavioural).
Regarding your experience, a lot of advertising is retargeting or keeping the brand alive in the minds of buyers or remind them constantly (since humans are forgetful). This statistically increases the probability of purchases made amongst a cohort (very measurable). Personally, I think this is user-hostile and is a strong case for having more control over the kinds of ads we're exposed to or limit/penalise harmful ones. Taken to the extreme (going on a slight tangent here), if we really owned/controlled our devices and software, which means having control over consumption, we'd block all ads which would incentivise platforms to remove the distinction between content and ads and we'd do more content filtering on the client (This is however computationally inefficient, a sort of arms race).
Regarding influencing behaviour, it's a lot more efficient to match the right seller to the right buyer rather than influence buyer behaviour (which is hard). However, to achieve that extra marginal gains/returns on ad spend, advertisers often do attempt to change buyer behaviour (through building brand associations, retargeting etc). Again, better user control would help here.
Agree on street ads and other public real world ads as there is no consent here (Real world movement is a need, not a choice).
Regarding ads vs word-of-mouth, Ads really are very effective for many people, in a measurable way, both quantitative and qualitative. It of course will differ from person to person.
Regarding increased inefficiency and effect on the economy more generally, ads actually increase efficiency in the system as long as they are not rent-seeking (i.e. pay to jump the queue) or user-hostile. Eg: It helps many niche businesses reach customers which are otherwise very hard to reach (due to geographical or novelty constraints). Taken to the extreme, all value gained from advertising will ultimately flow to the ad platforms. Even in this extreme case, overall consumption increases (due to buyers buying more) as well as competition (due to many more competitive small businesses, innovators dilemma theory) which is good for a capitalist economy (i.e. makes it more dynamic in both choice and inequality) and increases GDP (a poor metric).
As an aside, it's also a progressive tax (I.e rich and poor both consume the same good but advertisers pay more to reach the rich, thus funding the good for the poor).
Some extreme opinions below on the fundamentals:
<Rant>
Even in localist/anarchist/decentralised utopias, ads won't die (especially personalised). It's a fundamental need of humans and the only other form of payment (apart from paying for compute itself) that doesn't depend on a system of violence to enforce it. As long as there exists economies of scale, there will be marketing (to increase consumption and hence cheapening it per capita i.e. use less labor), and hence advertising (to solve the unknown-unknown problem or presenting/impressing).
i.e. Even when we eliminate competitive enterprise, build localised production of needs, and have full control of our devices, if we want to build something cheaply or spread an idea, we'd have to advertise. It would look a lot more like "advertising on the merits" with full user control though considering human nature, there will also be a lot of "advertising focused on presentation".
Wow, thanks for the really long and thoughtful answer!
I think your answer made me realize something which might explain some of the different viewpoints we have.
You seem to have the general idea that, with some exceptions, ads are useful. This reminds me of my experience of doing a coast-to-coast road trip in the US and being amazed at how many more signs with ads I would see by the road and inside towns, compared to Europe. I was also fascinated by the radio ads, as everything was so different than what I was used to. The amount, creativity and sheer diversity of ads was astounding and something to behold.
As a tourist, I associate these ads positively in my mind because in many cases, I would have no idea of all the different things that there were around me if I didn't see those ads, like restaurants, museums, supermarkets, local attractions, etc. A few of these ads were extremely useful, but many were also interesting because it made me experience a part of American culture that I wouldn't experience otherwise, including its great capitalistic nature (I love capitalism itself) and all the variety of businesses that there were. Perhaps with the occasional exception, I don't recall these ads being obnoxious.
My experience with ads as a European citizen is the polar opposite. Here, I don't find them useful at all. I always see all the same ads, all the time. They're repetitive, loud, obnoxious, with no creativity, no diversity and transmit no useful information.
It's mostly large, multinational companies, with the occasional local or national company whose ad you see or hear over and over again, thousands of times, to the point of exhaustion. This is especially true in TV, radio (including online radio) and also the same outdoor signs which you always encounter when driving to the same spots.
If you've seen one Coca Cola ad, you've seen all the other thousand of them, basically. Especially when they are exactly the same ad. But I can't turn them off. It can get quite maddening when your favorite local radio only has 3 ad spots and they're always the exact same obnoxious ads, for months on end.
Or when you're watching TV and it goes to commercials and you always see exactly the same $huge_company ads, in the same exact order, over and over again.
Online ads, such as in Youtube or social platforms, can in most cases be a similar experience. In my subjective experience, it seems like I've been exposed to 1000x more Coca Cola, Burger King, and $giant_car_brand type ads than things which could actually be useful to me.
Really, the only memorable experiences which begin to approach your arguments in favor of useful ads is if, say, I'm watching some video or podcast about some really niche topic and most or all the ads are related to that topic. The vast majority of these are still completely useless to me, but at least I don't find these as obnoxious as the generic ones as long as they're not too repetitive or in-your-face (which unfortunately is also common).
I also have the anecdotal experience of buying many different types of ads for a local business of an acquaintance, for extended periods of time, to see what worked and what didn't. This includes times when it was just physical ads (geographically constrained), or just online ads, in different ad platforms, at first somewhat generic but later increasingly targeted ads, to the point where in the end we were only showing ads to people we thought would definitely be interested in the service. We also tried a company that specializes in online ads. Perhaps our experience was not representative, but I can tell you without a doubt that it was a complete waste of time and money, as the acquired customers were very few and very low quality. What really worked, by far, was simply stopping the ads and relying on word-of-mouth recommendations. That's how the business really got going. This is not a niche business, it is something that is occasionally needed by most people, either by going to the business physically or online. The competition was only small, mostly local businesses, there are exactly zero large national or multinational businesses in this market.
So I don't know, maybe the ad market here where I live is crap or maybe it's simply that it's completely dominated by all the giant companies, but all I can tell you is that I would praise the Gods if all ads magically disappeared tomorrow.
If you (yes you, OP) are in the online advertising sphere, surely you're at the losing end of many battles, not just this lil EU thing? I'm thinking the ever-growing prevalence of adblockers, tracker-blocking, e-mail trackers being blocked etc.?
For you it must be like a game of whack-a-mole, except your mallet is increasingly smaller, and the moles' velocity is approaching lightspeed
that s not how it works though, tech is a big ecosystem. At least 3 of the trillion-dollar tech companies depend on advertising , which feeds money into the content system. The rest of the ecosystem is in the business of supporting and distributing this content. Advertising is very high in the pecking order of the tech business sector. Without it, the internet would be the equivalent of USSR era Pravda (and we'd probably have a different job)
>Without it, the internet would be the equivalent of USSR era Pravda
Yes, remember USSR Windows XP from the era when it came without ads? It was so terrible. /s
Didn't know I was using USSR internet in the '90s-'00s before the advent of user targeted advertising.
In fact most websites and products were way better back then compared to the mess of today.
> At least 3 of the trillion-dollar tech companies depend on advertising
Boo-hoo, let me play you and them the world's smallest violin.
Some of us work for big companies that still basically make what they did 50-70 years ago, just faster and better now, with the help of computers and data science.
So your assertion is that there would be no online media in the absence of behavioral advertising?
I rather suspect that's incorrect, for two reasons. We had plenty of online media before online advertising existed at all, and there are many ways of doing advertising without it being behavioral.
Not mine as far as I know. As a consulting company of course we advertise, but not really to normal people. At least I don't think I've ever seen online ads for services that involve a team of programmers and large sums of money.
I’d happily take a hit if it meant removing behavioral advertising and tracking from the internet. There’s more to life than making money, but this isn’t really something that “people” in advertising usually understand.
Unless you have unusually good psychological resistance to ads, you're ultimately paying that money back in in one way or another, since advertising is a net profitable business.
It's not "online advertising", it's just behavioral. There's nothing preventing corporations from advertising the old-fashioned way, like they did on TV, radio, newspapers, etc.
>they always did, to the extent that was allowed by the tech of the time
As someone who spent five years doing advertising market research, and whose parents each spent 30+ years doing the same prior to ubiquitous internet use, I call bullshit on that statement.
While there certainly were efforts (with millions spent collecting data) to identify market segments and emotional triggers to better target market products/services (cf. BSB GlobalScan as an example), the idea that it was the right of ad sellers to monitor everyone's activities as their right in order to "target" advertising was never an option, nor was there ever any push to do so.
Convincing folks to participate in telephone/mall intercept/door-to-door surveys was used to identify consumer preferences and advertising efficacy.
No one ever asked (or did so without asking) to go through a consumer's mail, personal communications or effects as a method to determine how to target ads.
Since all those things are pretty much de rigueur these days, I'd say that's not a just difference of degree, but a completely different mechanism for gathering information about consumers.
And just because it wasn't possible to snoop through (without a potential breaking/entering and/or burglary charge) the private documents and communications of consumers, doesn't mean those folks would have done so if they could.
So yes, there's a big difference between the market research (surveys, focus groups, etc.) done in the past and the blatant spying/snooping on people's private documents and communications we see now.
You're making an assertion which doesn't match the facts.
Feel free to disagree, but I was there, and that business paid for my housing, food, clothes and everything else for more than twenty-five years -- both as the child of marketers and as a marketer myself.
I'd also point out that the Advertising Market Research industry was a very small group of people (perhaps a thousand employed by ad agencies/large corporations and a few thousand more employed by market research supply houses and interviewing/focus group companies.) and, as such, if there was a market for breaking into people's houses and rifling through their papers/mail, wiretapping their phones, etc., I'd know about it.
We wouldn't know which products to buy! We would all be standing there at the entrance of the supermarket, hungry but not knowing what to buy. We would wait for that old lady then follow her around talking amongst our own (on our phone ofc), what is she doing? What would she be up to with that? Chat GPT would have to baby us though the apple pie from scratch as the only one who remembers all those marvels of SEO recipe websites from back in the days.
Isn't the destruction of advertising (not just online) a good thing?
It's skewing markets by creating demands that were not there before, but only for the big players who can afford to be in peoples faces everywhere.
Advertising is often misinforming (or not informing) people about the products/services. It promotes a throwaway society where resources are wasted.
Exactly... As a general rule, all other things being equal, the more informed the participants in a market are, the better the efficiency of the market.
Advertising negatively affects markets because it leads people to make decisions based on things that are not necessarily in their interests, i.e. it leads people to make more uninformed (or misinformed) decisions.
In effect, it's basically exploiting a market externality: vulnerabilities in human psychology.
I mean, this is not always true. Sometimes, you might become aware of a great product or service due to advertising. But I am entirely convinced that, in general, the negative effects hugely, hugely outweigh the occasional benefit, just by observing how people usually make their buying decisions in their day-to-day lives (including me, I'm not immune to that!).
The issue is not advertising, the issue is the construction, classification and use of human profiles through the collection of behavioral data, by-and-large without the subjects being aware or cognizant of the possible short and long-term implications. Once that practice has been legitimized and proven ultra-lucrative and empowering for its practitioners it has undermined the very foundation of digital society.
Just to be clear, there is nothing the adtech industry can do to assure us that behavioral targeting can be made safe. The large scale processing of human behavioral data followed by the direct algorithmic application of real life actions is a weapon of mass social destruction. It is inherently dangerous and should be outlawed. Full stop.
There is a case to be made for taming the nuclear energy of behavioral data in reactors (as opposed to bombs). But the architecture of such systems will be dramatically different to the digital wild-west regime that has been inflicted on society. Consequently also highly regulated with countless lead layers of protection (and thus also far less lucrative / interesting for the digital cowboys).