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
^this.

I don't have anything against personalized ads based on information that I willingly share. If I am following a bunch of groups of kite-surfers, I actually welcome ads for kite-surfing gears and services while browsing those groups.

If I explicitly decide to share my address on my social network profile AND, explicitly authorize the use of this information for targeting, I don't mind, and actually welcome seeing ads for carpet cleaning services from my city, instead of ads from this kind of business located thousands of miles away, WHILE I am using said social network.

But I don't want to browse the local newspaper, and having this targeting information being used outside the explicitly bounded context of that social network.

And above all, I don't want surveillance-style stuff things forced upon me to infer information about me that I never consented to share in the first place.

It is ok to me if I say, I have an interest on X, you (and only you) can show me ads based on that, and I also consent on you (and only you) using my <insert whatever personal info you may think ok> to target ads.

>>elzbar+CI
I am curious what widespread legislation on this front is going to cause. Not meaning to defend surveillance capitalism in the slightest, it belongs in the dustbin of history for reasons too numerous to articulate, but merely from the perspective that personalized ads that creep on you were essentially made a load-bearing column of the Internet before anyone knew how creepy they were going to get with it, and now just, every goddamn website out there with even a modicum of traffic has ads. And like, I'm sure the vast majority of people here block ads and I think blocking ads is getting more or more prevalent year over year, but like, they must be being seen by someone. Sites still use them, largely because there isn't a real replacement for a constant trickle revenue stream like them out there seeing wide adoption.

I guess in my ideal world, I would hope that these businesses could pivot back to a dumber, more privacy-friendly mode of advertising? But I wonder if the corpos are willing to give that up, or if they'll just continue trying to squirrel around this and any other laws to the point of absurdity?

>>Toucan+5K
> I am curious what widespread legislation on this front is going to cause

Everyone will get a prompt that asks them whether they want to consent to personalized advertising or pay $20/month to use the service. Everyone picks the first because nobody outside of HN bubbles and bored EU regulators cares about personalized ads (or actually prefers them).

Then the EU will start claiming that everyone should be able to use Facebook without advertising and without paying for it i.e. for free or for vastly reduced revenue potential. Eventually Zuck will get tired of the EU because visitors from there won't be worth much, and start to degrade or remove service for them entirely. New products and features won't launch there at all, see Threads for a preview of non-coming attractions. HN Euro-posters will assure each other that this is in fact a great victory.

>>nvm0n2+gl1
Mastodon.social had revenue (donations) of 326K EUR and operating expenses of 127K EUR in 2022 against roughly 191K users [1]. They have paid moderators to manage the server, and by most measures it's a healthy place. This suggests that the free market cost of social media is 0.6 EUR/year. The price charged to consumers shouldn't be much higher than this.

WhatsApp before it was acquired also demanded an optional donation of 1 USD/year from each person.

That is what people will be willing to pay, and what social media should subsist on.

[1] Annual Report 2022 https://www.patreon.com/file?h=90246790&i=16020862

>>abdull+cx1
Mastodon isn't a real social network though because they don't have seventeen layers of middle management and a C-suite raking in billions of dollars, so obviously this is a non-starter solution.

/s if not clear.