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[return to "EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram"]
1. mjburg+kc[view] [source] 2023-11-02 11:58:07
>>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.

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2. dr_dsh+kg[view] [source] 2023-11-02 12:22:21
>>mjburg+kc
Why should it be illegal? I don’t understand the moral threat. Personally I feel that privacy gets too much airtime as a value — I see lots of other more direct issues (like political manipulation) that will remain an issue even with “strong privacy.”
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3. poison+fi[view] [source] 2023-11-02 12:33:47
>>dr_dsh+kg
Wait until you read about Cambridge Analytica.
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4. shadow+6q[view] [source] 2023-11-02 13:17:47
>>poison+fi
Cambridge Analytica basically didn't work. For all the data it collected, it amounted to trying to build political influence by reading tea leaves.

The strongest decider in the outcome of the 2016 election is that the Trump campaign spent something like a factor of three more on advertising across the board than the Clinton campaign. Cambridge Analytica was more representative of the notion that the Republicans were willing to spend money on anything that might work than on the efficacy of that specific approach.

At the end of the day, that election came down to a combination of sexism in the voting base (Clinton's gender had a demonstrable effect on turnout among non-voters to vote against her; Americans don't want to admit it but in their hearts they're still pretty sexist) and good old fashioned, well understood rules of how spending on ads can move an election by a percentage point or two. The Democratic party as a whole believed Trump to be so unelectable that they pulled money from the presidential campaign to push it into campaigns down ticket in an attempt to win a massive political coup by controlling the House, Senate, and Presidency at the same time; they underestimated the political position of their opponents and it backfired spectacularly.

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5. crtasm+5x[view] [source] 2023-11-02 13:53:08
>>shadow+6q
What's your view on their effect on elections in other countries?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Elections

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6. cm2012+RJ[view] [source] 2023-11-02 14:55:03
>>crtasm+5x
As a professional advertiser who has worked in political ads, I can tell you it had no effect on any of the results of these campaigns. A bunch of bad people hired them after the Trump campaign because they bought the fluff too.
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7. crtasm+djb[view] [source] 2023-11-05 19:54:02
>>cm2012+RJ
Noting that CA and their parent company SCL were working on elections for years before the Trump campaign.
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