zlacker

>>pbrw+(OP)
I know in HN there is a big "personalized advertising" is bad sentiment, but I don't get what the problem is.

I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet.

It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here.

Can someone explain to me what the problem is? Honest question. Thanks.

>>kwanbi+07
There are parts of my life that are fine for ad companies to know. What clothes I like, what music I like, what sports I like etc. These are all benign, and even useful to me if ad companies know about them. The sentiment of your comment makes sense when applied to these topics.

But then there are things that I don't want ad companies to know about. My medical history, my likely voting patterns, my political affiliations, my sexual orientation, the nature of my relationships with other people, etc. These are private, and I don't want ad companies (or anyone) to know these. Depending on the topic and where I live, it may even be dangerous to me for others to know these things.

One thing that has been made apparent by the advancements of ad-tech's excellent ability to find unintuitive patterns in consumer behaviour, is that the benign data can be used to predict the non-benign. So even if data collection is regulated to only collect benign data, or I am extra careful with where my sensitive data goes, I still have a problem.

That's why tracking on this scale is bad. That's why I hope we can build a society where we stop these practices.

>>SonicS+na
You also don't know if in 10 years time the country gets a radical, religiously fanatical government, that will then order these companies to list users who are non-believers, have "wrong" sexuality or supported the opposition.

When Nazis invaded a city, first thing they'd have done was getting to people register and getting names and addresses of "undesirables".

People have not learned their lesson.

>>varisp+db
Your hypothetical evil government isn’t going to go “aw shucks, I guess I can’t kill the unbelievers because Facebook doesn’t track them!”

Evil regimes have never had a problem finding lots and lots of citizens to kill in the 99% of human history before the internet.

>>wilson+cP
Big data aggregation makes this process much much easier. We are living in unprecedented times of mass surveillance, and we have yet to have a real reckoning of what that means in the hands of extreme ideologies.

Also things don't have to be as extreme as literally killing all members of a minority group for this to be deemed "bad". It can be as simple as targetted influence campaigns to push certain policies/agenda. The ability to influence on mass scales has never been easier and cheaper. There are many examples throughout the world of how that influence has been used. And while yes influence campaigns have always existed in some form, the degree of targeting and the ease at which this has been made is a case where and difference in scale is a difference in kind. This is a powerful tool that I don't believe anyone should have access to. States, companies, or individuals

>>SonicS+6k1
I agree it's cheaper and somewhat easier now, but there's always been the ability to differentiate messages to different audiences. (Not an audience of 1, but not hard to reach targeted demographics.)

Advertising in Inc vs Wall St Journal vs People magazine vs Wired vs TV Guide vs Car & Driver vs Cosmo vs Ebony all gave you easy ways to target different audiences. It's more targeted now, but I don't think it's multiple orders of magnitude more powerful (mostly because the reach isn't nearly the entire story; you still have to influence after reaching.)