Personal data used to create highly personalised and targeted political ads.
It's not just about whether you get a nice notebook.
They don't: "We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads"
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en#:~:text=Th....
Do you have evidence that they do? I think Google said they did this a long time ago, but they stopped since email content didn't actually improve revenue on those ads. Message data just isn't very helpful for ads, they would do it if it was useful but it isn't so they don't.
[0]: https://netzpolitik.org/2023/alternative-zu-tracking-datensc...
I exclusively follow technical people. Devs of the software and tools I work with, PG, indie hackers, that sort of thing.
Personalized ads are a scam. They are not personalized to you. They are personalized to the imaginary profile advertisers want to see their ads. You're just the sorry victim that nobody cares about. Some of them are outright dangerous (see the first one in the album), and your interests always come last.
That doesn't even include the primary concern: The rampant abuse of privacy and collected data.
[1] - https://imgur.com/a/NGBsEaM (one or two are mildly NSFW)
To groups, not individuals. Soap operas cast a wide net, they don’t target you specifically. Which is very much possible with Facebook ads.
https://observer.com/2014/09/marketing-whiz-drives-roommate-...
Yes:
Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health (tau.ac.il)
Facebook collecting people's data even when accounts are deactivated (digiday.com)
Facebook test asks users if they're worried a friend is 'becoming an extremist' (cnn.com)
Testimony to House committee by former Facebook executive Tim Kendall (house.gov)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
A company can bar the exits, letting you burn to death [0]. A company can send private militias to force you to work [1] (or because you were sent the wrong set of MtG cards [2]). A company can improperly store pesticide, until the resulting explosion kills thousands [3]. A company can own every house and store in a town, managing your expenses to ensure you can't leave [4]. A company can bribe judges to provide them with child labor [5].
Some of these were illegal at the time they were done. Some of these were made illegal as a result of these events. All of them are within the nature of companies, optimizing in pursuit of profit regardless of the human cost. That nature is useful for improving lives, but must be carefully controlled to prevent it from trampling us all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)
[2] https://gizmodo.com/magic-the-gathering-leaks-wizards-wotc-p...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/fr/policies/discover-e... https://nce.mpi-sp.org/index.php/s/cG88cptFdaDNyRr
2 1/2 years, ago they opened up a loop hole for newspapers that they are explicitly allowed to do it (Either you pay, or when you use their free version, you must accept to be tracked for behavioural advertising).
Are they any better than facebook?
Some example news sites: www.zeit.de, www.spiegel.de
More information on this:
https://www.heise.de/news/E-Privacy-Verordnung-EU-Rat-fuer-V... (german)
And https://www.consilium.europa.eu/de/press/press-releases/2021...
Look here (referenced pdf in the above url): https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-6087-2021-I...
(21aa) In some cases the use of processing and storage capabilities of terminal equipment and the collection of information from end-users' terminal equipment may also be necessary for providing a service, requested by the enduser, such as services provided in accordance with the freedom of expression and information including for journalistic purposes, e.g. online newspaper or other press publications as defined in Article 2 (4) of Directive (EU) 2019/790, that is wholly or mainly financed by advertising provided that, in addition, the end-user has been provided with clear, precise and user-friendly information about the purposes of cookies or similar techniques and has accepted such use.
One of the first results of a Google search: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3555102
> Also all the data is out there and me and my family in a million databases. Just like in the 80s with the yellow books. Did you know you can buy a list of almost every American with an estimate credit score and income and other details? This is 50 year old tech.
While one could argue that this is "old tech", the main issue is reach.
Back in the 80s, there could be a way to contact someone and make an educated guess, using their credit score, as of what kind of products they may be inclined to buy.
Nowadays, these databases may include data about diet, job situation, alcohol intake, or family issues, because those educated guesses are made upon information about your searches, your Facebook group memberships, your postings, etc.
You also seem to be making the argument that, since either this data is already out in the wild, or other companies may have access to it, why target big tech specifically?
And the counter to this couldn't be simpler: two wrongs don't make anything right.
Here's a video [1] by a reasonably successful YouTube guitarist, Samurai Guitarist, on the various ways a professional guitarist might make money and how effective they are. It includes a section on content creators for social media.
The content creator part is what is relevant for this thread, but the whole video is worth watching if you are at all curious what a working musician who is not a big name star might make.
He gives some numbers from back when he was at around 50k followers, after two years of working full time trying to turn content creator into something he could make a living from.
He was getting $500/month from AdSense.
He was also getting about $500 for sponsored videos but he only had sponsors occasionally. He wasn't focused on something specialized gear reviews which would have probably gotten more sponsorships, so the sponsors were more general like VPN companies or game companies.
Patreon was around $300/month.
Amazon affiliate links to products he mentioned were around $50/month.
Spotify and other streaming services that he uploaded his music to were about $30/month.
He'd promote in his YouTube videos giving guitar lessons over Skype. That brought in around $750/month.
Fiverr gigs ranged from $80-500/month.
All in all a good month would be around $3000 at 50k followers.
When I visit facebooks https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity I see that lots of places have shared my information with facebook..
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/14/tech/amazon-ring-police-f...
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-...
This is false. May I introduce you to chat control or client side scanning on every device that you own?
That what is the proposal is currently. All the data would be funneled to Europol, which would have access to every text, every image , every thing you do on your messaging apps. Does that sound like consent to you?
> My take (being in EU) is that with weaker encryption, the EU tries to balance privacy with law enforcement needs, aiming to curb illicit communications while raising privacy concerns.
You can have encryption or no encryption. If the EU can read your messages, so can China, Russia, Iran and anybody else who either buys their way into the system or breaks in illegally.
> It's difficult to compare the data collection practices of EU nations directly with those of large tech companies like Facebook or Google, there are some parallels and distinctions to be made.
That's right at least with GDPR, companies have to delete my data after a certain amount of time but some governments of Europe don't have too. There is this thing called data retention:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
It's been illegal for some time now but some governments in Europe (France for example) have decided that they don't care and keep doing it. Welcome to the land of privacy.
From the press release (https://edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2023/edpb-urgent-binding-de...):
"On 27 October, the EDPB adopted an urgent binding decision ... to impose a ban on the processing of personal data for behavioural advertising on the legal bases of contract and legitimate interest ..."
We bought it in the same stores where we bought real food back then. We buy food in the same stores that have breakfast cereal now.
I haven't watched TV or movies for like the last 10 years, and I've blocked ads on my computers for ~20, so I've at least minimized the most blatant exposure, but I don't think myself immune. That's why I've done what I can to remove them from my life. But I'm naive too; like I didn't realize until recently that radio "callers" are just iheartmedia employees, or that you can just buy an "interest" piece on the news or Ellen or an "opinion" or "lifestyle" piece in the newspaper or whatever. It makes sense in retrospect, but the extent to which literally all media around us are just ads is hard to wrap one's head around, and a little unexpected IMO. I don't think it's intuitive or that you have to be dumb to be tricked. You just have to be honest enough that it wouldn't occur to you that everything around you is lying and that these people will relentlessly work to construct some Hell version of Plato's cave in order to sell you things and that it's basically legal to do so.
Maybe I'm just one of the dumb ones, but IMO ads like this[0] masquerading as national news should maybe require extremely clear labeling and disclaimers, or just be illegal. Maybe when shills on youtube say "this is sponsored, but this is my real opinion", the second half of that sentence should be illegal. Maybe they should have to say "this video is an advertisement for X, and I am not presenting my opinions on it".
The food desert idea is plausible, but the literal definition is useless (poor people can't walk 0.5 miles?), so I'm forced to be skeptical of any claims around it.
To me the plausible explanation for breakfast cereals is that people underestimate how evil these companies can be, and probably figure it must be illegal to sell candy advertised as food or something, so it can't be that bad if it's so common and if it's allowed to be advertised on TV. Surely they couldn't or wouldn't say it's "part of a complete breakfast" if it weren't at least mostly true. Surely if it's on the news, the reporter would mention if it's actually extremely horrible for you and surely the "report" isn't literally written by the advertiser.
[0] https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/oreo-os-cereal-returning-...
This is demonstrably not true. For over 100 years, advertising has had strong roots in emotional appeal. From wiki:
"In the 1910s and 1920s, many ad men believed that human instincts could be targeted and harnessed – "sublimated" into the desire to purchase commodities"
Just look at smoking ads from this time. Claiming health benefits that didn't exist, covering up health issues they knew existed, and associating smoking with cool people and socially desirable behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising#Since_1...
Not much apparently. The funniest: icons like chrome, round corners like mac.
edit: On the up side, Bing is actually much better than Google now.
Dark mode being use as a short hand - pretty much all "standard" controls used to have colors and font size defined. So if an application wants to draw text - it'd use the text area background and color, likewise for buttons. Being replaced with a single boolean configuration option is just a lazy downgrade. Also I don't quite see it as an OS function - in the end it just reads the registry.
Vulcan was supported on Win7 (along w/ the raytracing) and oddly enough Win7 had a port of DX12 by Microsoft [0]. It was quite an arbitrary decision to prevent Win7 & 8 to run DX12. I suppose one of the issues is that GPU drivers (esp. AMD) do not support Win7 (or 8)
[0]: https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/directx-12-windows-7/
Can you cite your campaign spending numbers? Wikipedia says the opposite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia... I'm searching for a source that says what you claim and can't find any: https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+campaign+advertising+o... https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+outspent+hillary https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+advertising+spending+v... https://www.google.com/search?q=hillary+spent+less+than+trum...
Is my google-fu shit? Maybe. Regardless...
> The Democratic party as a whole believed Trump to be so unelectable that they pulled money from the presidential campaign
The root cause was their arrogance. Hillary was barely campaigning at all. It would not have cost her much anything to call into the major news channels every day^ but instead Hillary was effectively incommunicado for much of 2016. It's as if she thought campaigning was beneath her.
Also, I don't know how you can break apart Americans disliking women in general and Americans disliking Hillary particularly. She personally has been a popular target for derision for more than 20 years before her 2016 campaign. The DNC may have considered Trump unelectable but they were burying their heads in the sand w.r.t. Hillary's own unelectability problem. Which goes back to the arrogance thing..
At least they've figured it out now. Nobody seriously talked about her for 2020 and nobody is seriously suggesting her for 2024.
^ Most of Trump's 'advertising' was given to him for free in this manner, maybe you're assigning some arbitrary dollar value to this news coverage to say he spent more?
OKCupid is actually a site some people reported as being the "better kind" of dating site, because they're geared toward successful LTR rather than hookup. The dating space is actually full of different interaction and match models that sometimes people don't seem to understand.
Some of the issues around risk, identity and power asymmetry are covered here [0]
Even when companies are only selling anonymized data, with enough money and sources, it's possible to cross-reference enough information to de-anonymize it.
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
You can't look at governments, but especially the EU, as a single entity. Some parts of it want to collect all data possible while others want to protect your privacy. Here is a good article on how EU courts and the Irish government for example had very different views on this topic [2].
The general pattern you can observe is some political entities and/or countries really like to push surveillance and data retention laws in the name of security, sometimes without possible understanding the amount of misuse this could enable [3]. On the other hand privacy activists and other political entities and/or countries fight back against those and push for laws protecting privacy and your data or prohibit mass surveillance [4]. Sometimes those political "battles" are pretty obvious, with a recent example being the chat-control plans of the European Commission that the European Parliament will hopefully/likely reject [5].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/12/google-android-location-tr... [2] https://www.politico.eu/article/data-retention-europe-mass-s... [3] https://netzpolitik.org/2021/urgently-needed-france-spain-pu... [4] https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/11/23719694/eu-ai-act-draft-... [5] https://www.aol.com/privacy-busting-chat-control-plans-17282...
The famous example I remember from growing up was a teen girl whose parents found out she was pregnant from a personalized (mailed) Target ad: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ... . There seem to be some skepticism in later articles that this is actually how her parents found out, but only because she told them first. They could have found out from the ad.
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/big.2017.0074 is a more detailed study of how Facebook likes can out people. It looks like the "cloaking" solution that the authors propose actually makes the model more accurate. From the article "false-positive inferences are significantly easier to cloak than true-positive inferences".
If you're the only one who knows what ads you see, that might still be okay, but if a platform can make these kinds of inferences to show you ads, they can use the same data in other ways. At the very least, they might leak this information to other users by recommending people you may know, etc. You might also reveal what kind of personal ads you get if you ever browse the web someplace where other people can glance at your screen.
Now, for a productive conversation, I'd recommend you putting effort in as well, instead of just sea lioning [6].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Privacy_is...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-mak...
[3] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/analysis-health-insuranc...
[4] https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/07/not-again-bone-grafts...
[5] https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/poopy-lettuce-at-wen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
This one is more positive but is checking that different diagnosticians get the same answer
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5980511/
and if that was applied to the "Thud" experiment you'd have poor diagnosis with a very high kappa (interrater agreement)
Unfortunetly because European cases usually do not involve punitive damages, it costs nothing to these actors to try their hand and keep up for as long as thier turn comes becasue there are a lot and they don't risk practically nothing for being found illegal initially. Only after being found illegal they risk fines for repeat violations.
What is being targeted is surveillance-based advertising methods. These involve the collection, brokering and combining of user data. This data is purchasable by anyone - including US government agencies which have been using it as way of obtaining information without oversight(1). There is an expectation that other governments and bad actors are also obtaining this data for advantage.
This type of advertising is also responsible for poorly targeted ads that follow you around the internet. Perhaps you mentioned something in passing on an instagram chat, or you liked a photo from a friend on holiday.
Consumers generally underestimate their digital footprint and the risks associated with having this information available. It's more information than what we'd trust our own governments possessing in a single, or any, database, yet we let others take it without any oversight whatsoever. Additionally the information gathered about them can be wrong or invade their privacy in ways they aren't expecting (E.g. infer their sexuality or private desires) (2). Furthermore individual users can be targeted which beyond being able to prank someone(3), is also ripe for exploitation. (4)
(1) https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23844477-odni-declas... or the easier to read: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-government-buys-dat...
(2) https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/16/facebook-faces-fresh-criti...
(3) https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/roommate-makes-...
(4) https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/15/researchers-show-facebooks...
And legal challenges to that are in the works. Some have even been partially upheld. “Pay or okay” done as a binary choice isn’t okay, like anything else, granular consent is important:
https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=DSB_(Austria)_-_2023-0.17...
Maybe watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film) and it's sequel from 2020 (linked from there) for starters?
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is just blatantly incorrect. Please inform yourself about topics before choosing to comment on them. https://www.facebook.com/help/152637448140583
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/meta-wont-say-wh...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/small-businesses-cou...
I'm sure I've read much more about that, some 20 years ago, and after. Some small blips in the press, several fora. Sometimes even from people who claimed to be, or have been working as postman, and described what they had to look for (like house being renovated, new windows, nice garden, door, car, or in appartment houses clean floors, door mats, no trash, graffiti, what 'sort' of people) how to write it down in forms, and so on. Which annoyed them, because it was a hassle, unrelated to their job/task.
Anyways, they do have that data, gathered by whichever means, and sell them. As is obvious from their own sites.
It may be that they changed parts of that recently, because incompatible with EU-Law, DSGVO/GDPR, whatnot, but they did it.
[German] https://www.deutschepost.de/de/d/deutsche-post-direkt.html
https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/netzwelt-ticker-deutsche...
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/faq-post-daten-101.html
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/datenverkauf-an-cdu-und-fdp-d...
[English] https://www.deutschepost.com/en/business-customers/dialogue-...
---------------------- Letter is lost. Shrug.