(The latter still account for the ads I see most of the time, unfortunately.)
Some examples of what I'm fine with: if I visit a hardware store's online website and am then retargeted by their ads, or I visit a hardware magazine's website and am then targeted by hardware ads.
This is the value Facebook delivers (targeting and measuring), and it's about to go up in smoke.
Nobody will pay the same price for a billboard.
Or, the facebook pixel embedded in a page you (or your employer) put your tax info into.
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...
How so? Ad tech wants to eat as much of your data as possible. They’ll use everything they have to make inferences about things you want, things you believe, things you might believe later. I think you could go as far as saying they want ALL your data and then some..
However, personalized ads are more profitable, and so every single platform subverted the rights of the users. And instead of banning Facebook from continuing to do so until they present a plan that is reviewed and approved, which would be appropriate after years of violations, all the authorities now did is explicitly telling Facebook that they can't continue to break the law.
The headline is incredibly misleading. If you take a closer look at what is actually forbidden, emphasis mine: "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 across the entire European Economic Area"
They can still do behavior ads on the basis of consent. And because some DPAs decided that "pay or consent" is OK and there is no binding Europe-wide decision about it yet, that's what Facebook is trying next. If it gets decided that that wasn't ok, Facebook will be fined a fraction (possibly a significant fraction, but still a fraction) of the additional revenue they made by breaking the law, in a couple of years, and then, over a decade after GDPR went into force, they might actually follow it.
The site showing an ad knows the context of what I'm looking at, whether that's a specific news article or the weather. That's enough info for a reasonably targeted ad without needing to match back to my browsing history, who I bank with, my likely religious views or sexual orientation, etc
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/meta-wont-say-wh...