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
I've heard that countries that kept better records of their population had more Jews captured by invading Nazis than those countries that had worse records. I don't seem to be able to find hard evidence for that though, so maybe it's not true.

Still, I think it's clear that data can very quickly go from harmless to harmful depending on who gets their hands on it. The Nazis absolutely did have a problem finding all the Jews they wanted to kill, and abundantly available data about the religious preferences of literally every citizen being immediately available to them would absolutely have caused much more death than already happened.