zlacker

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

Personalised ads are beside the point. The issue is how they are personalised, namely by building a rich profile of user behaviour based on non-consensual tracking.

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

This infrastructure should be, largely, illegal. The technology to end any form of privacy is presently deployed only for ads, but should not be deployed anywhere at all.

>>mjburg+kc
Upon logging into okcupid today I received a pop up inviting me to join The League (another dating app), with my phone number already pre-propagated. After accepting, they sent me this email.

> We use the combination of your Facebook and LinkedIn data plus your About Me and Photos to ensure we are building a balanced, high-achieving and diverse community. Our screening algorithm looks at indicators like social influence, education, profession, industry, friends in The League, number of referrals you've made to your network, as well as supplemental data like what groups you belong to, events you've attended, interests you list, and preferences.

Absolutely terrifying.

>>lapphi+ZA
One of those things y'all never upvote is papers about psychodiagnostic software that uses your social media posts, cell phone location data, etc. to diagnose both chronic and acute psychiatric conditions.

I'm fairly certain that if a person is highly active on social media such a system could produce a better diagnosis than most people get when they see a professional, if only because the quality of psychodiagnosis is poor since it is often seen as a scam to satisfy insurance bureaucrats, common conditions are never diagnosed, there are fads for certain rare conditions, etc.

>>PaulHo+MZ
I don't mean to sound flip, but I don't think identifying pathological psychological conditions via web browsing habits is all that difficult. I have a friend who went through a severe depressive episode. As soon as he started watching YouTube at 2am, he started getting ads for depression meds.

>>teachr+011
Worse yet, "web browsing habits" is just one neck of the hydra. What you buy (when, as mentioned) serves as strong signal for any number of factors; all your conventional demographics of course...

I'm not in the industry but I am very curious to know if we're already in the conditional-execution phase of surveillance/ad-serving/profile-updating: is there an idea [yet] of serving a challenge, and then both recording how/if it is engaged, with automated graph traversal to "look closer"... all offered stochastically...

The simple way to put that in part is, are we now getting A/B tests run on us explicitly, rather than merely implicitly?

(Personally, I'm 100% off Meta products and TikTok—but am leaking through LinkedIn and, regrettably, Google...)