I have the impression that google claims that personalized advertising somehow benefits users. I think I saw this kind of claims in some of their campaigns or somewhere. But is this really the case?
Well I can see how personalized ads benefit advertisers. But users? I mean at first, it seems like it make sense because personalized ads are based on what I'm interested in. But more I think about it, I'm not really sure if it is actually beneficial to me.
For example, if I want to buy a hard drive, the ads don't tell me what kinds of hard drives there are and what the pros and cons of each of them are. The ads are just what an arbitrary company X wants me to think of their product in order to change my behavior. They are rarely actually informative. Can someone give me an example why personalized ads are beneficial to users compared to non-personalized ads or no ads at all?
Edit: I'm afraid I haven't elaborated enough. I'm not saying that non-personalized ads are better than personalized ads. I just think they don't add much informational value. If I want to buy something, information access is so trivial these days that I can easily look for products myself, and the information I find will likely be a lot more helpful than ads. So what I'm trying to say is that personalized and non-personalized ads don't look a lot different in terms of benefits they bring to the viewer.
Ideally ads should be like a recommendation system. If you want to buy a hard drive, the 'best' ads should be of hard drives that suits you, either because of their price, their features, or whatever you personally want. In order to build this profile, the recommendation system should know you, your data. Lots of recommendation systems exists, and those who's first objective are users seems the best ones (preferably if they are offline so your data is not shared).
But what about an ad? By definition it's something someone pays to be shown. When Google shows you targeted ads, they aren't showing you the best ads for you, they are showing you the best ads of those companies who paid for it (and probably the price influences its ranking). The user is not the first objective.
In an ideal world, personalized ads wouldn't be called ads, and would be like having an assistant. You want a hard drive? Here is the best hard drive for you, or a list if you prefer, and then you buy it and the company earns your money.
In the current world, that's far from the reality.
Hard drive is a great example. And it shows that advertising is completely backwards.
It starts with a seller, who wants to sell this hard drive, no matter what, and then pays to find a buyer. Targeted advertising is a false promise that if the date of birth, sexual orientation, political preference, and the favourite color of everyone are known, the advertiser can somehow find buyers for a smaller fee. Indeed, most of the hard drive buyers are older than 20 and like women. There's a correlation to exploit.
This business model is completely backwards in the digital age. What is possible now, instead of profiling people, Google/Facebook/Amazon could have been profiling products, sellers, their supply chains, organize information, build knowledge graph, and rather than profit from a seller pushing their message, they could have took a commission for finding just the right hard drive for everyone, no matter what color they like.
The point is profiling sellers and their products is a harder problem than scamming and nudging unsuspecting users. We all know how great Amazon search is. Targeted advertising on the other hand is just the same as print era advertising but cheaper.
If someone knows that they want a hard drive with at least 100GB of storage, is it really necessary to construct advertising system infrastructure that can (attempt to) learn the users' requirements and needs (the same way an assistant might do)?
Isn't it simpler, cheaper and more respectful of people's own decision-making faculties to provide them with a way to retrieve a list of hard drives that match their requirements, and make their own choice?
My guess is that in 80%+ of situations, simple measurements and properties of products (with price, reliability, and perhaps other ranking factors to tie-break) are all that consumers want.
"In an ideal world, personalized ads wouldn't be called ads, and would be like having an assistant."
Right, I'm truly stretched to the limit to think of any ad that I've seen on the web that's actually been truly informative to me. For that I have to go back to ads in specialized technical magazines that used to list detailed specifications for the products they were selling, today web advertisers simply don't do that - all we get is hyped-up uninformative and often misleading crap that interferes with our access to the site's web pages.
Similarly, many, many websites that are selling stuff are cluttered, disorganized and otherwise hard to navigate (as well as being very, very slow). Of course, this is a deliberate marketing ploy but the effect on me is that I'm straight out of there as fast as possible.
Internet advertising has always been an unmitigated mess and unlike those old magazine ads, almost without exception, it's gotten in the way of the main presentation to the utter annoyance of website visitors. It's little wonder so many use ad blockers.
For years, my solution has been to block ads as well as all the accompanying JavaScript of which much is devoted to spying on the user.
Eliminating both ads and JS not only speeds up websites enormously but also it eliminates all those hesitant pauses and other jerky/delay-like responses that make browsing such a damn pain.
I'm now so used to 'clean' browsing that I cannot ever imagine myself returning to the standard defaults - ads and JS. For those who ask 'how do you do this or that without JS?' I'd just say this, there are millions of sites on the web, if one blocks me then I instantly move on (one good point about the web is that most of the information on it is paralleled across multiple sites and there are many sites that are more user friendly than others). That said, there are rare situations where I still have to use JS. When necessary I just toggle it on and off, the default being off.
As far as I'm concerned the web has been ruined by invasive advertising and we need a new paradigm to fix it. There are many options for that but it's too big a subject to discuss here.
Interestingly a problem we as nerds often have is thinking that if we have the best product or best skills that it will win out. In reality the best often doesn't win because there are many other factors (and we can see a history of superior technologies being beat out). That assistant that acts as an actual recommendation system and removes the human element could bring us closer to that meritocracy based product world, which seems beneficial to everyone. But determining what is best is a very difficult problem to begin with.
Good long-term relationship building can be as compelling a feature as what the product actually does. It's short-sighted to discount the value of enjoying having bought what you buy.
> But what about an ad? By definition it's something someone pays to be shown. When Google shows you targeted ads, they aren't showing you the best ads for you, they are showing you the best ads of those companies who paid for it (and probably the price influences its ranking). The user is not the first objective.
I mean, that is an assumption, unless you work at Google and is currently sharing the algorithm with us. Most likely, they show you the best ad they can based on targeting criterias and the information they know about you. It could very well be possible that Google not always picks the highest bidder. The winning score is most likely calculated based on a combination of signals, eg bidding price, user's preferences, user's buying history, etc.
Of course is an assumption (should have used the word 'probably', my mistake). My point was that once the bidding price enters the equation it no longer can be considered a recommendation system, even if it's only one factor of multiple (as I suppose).
> For example, if I want to buy a hard drive, the ads don't tell me what kinds of hard drives there are and what the pros and cons of each of them are.
Even if ads did this, would anyone believe it? The obvious conflict of interest removes all legitimacy from any claim in any advertisement.
Now people just search for reddit posts instead. We want to see what real people think about the product, not some paid-for opinion. We want to see the products compared with their competitors. Advertisers figured this out and have started astroturfing on reddit as well...
"Now people just search for reddit posts instead. We want to see what real people think about the product, not some paid-for opinion."
You're dead right, there is no other way to get real/accurate facts about products other than to check the experience of others.
One gets good at it too, one quickly learns how to distinguish those who've vested interests and hype up their products over those of rivals, similarly one learns to ignore the clueless who down rate a good product simply because they're incapable of reading the manual.
I've found that doing such research across multiple sites to be absolutely invaluable.
The only ad that ever helped me, and that was indeed because of tracking, was for a desktop computer I was buying for a non tech friend: I searched for it and knew where to buy it when an ad popped up from a competing company offering the same thing for a few 100E less. As I would have not found this company by myself (they have adwords but their seo is nonexistent) it helped my friend. This is the first time in 25+ years of having internet I clicked on an ad and bought something.
To not have this privacy invasion, I would have gladly paid a few 100 more though.
And a confusing thing (to me); why did that ad only show up in another site (some news site with an unrelated article) instead of in Google when I searched for those specs? It did not have to be personalized at all: it just could have shown when I literally was searching for it with the search results adwords?
I seldom buy stuff I see in ads (or anything really) but I recall one case where targeted ads actually helped me.
I was looking to buy an item but the store had so many options that I got completely overwhelmed with choice paralysis. Afterwards I started getting ads from said store in chunks of three items. It made it possible to evaluate things in peace over time since I was only exposed with a few options at a time in my regular feeds. I finally ended up buying one of those options.
Maybe it's more of a problem of choice paralysis but the fact that the options naturally and slowly showed up when I wasn't actively looking made it much easier.
Was looking for a light weight laptop with very a very long battery life and an add for one showed up on my Facebook feed. I wouldn't buy it just from that ad, but I definitely looked that model up and considered it - ultimately I went for the new Mac, but if not that would have been a good candidate too.
To the contrary I got an add for the local bus service, which I checked out and found to be targeted to everybody living in Denmark and being 18+. It was extremely not relevant to me because I am a happy driver (happy in particular that I don't have to use the bus service).
You don't have to buy the hard drive that is being advertised to you. At the end of the day, it's your decision. If ads were not targeted, you'd see a milk shake ad instead. How's that better?
Edit: my milk shaker example is not even that great. If targeting was killed, you'd most likely see ads from massive corporations only - those who have a lot of cash to spend on ads. Little players (small business owners, startup owners) would have zero chance to compete against those corporations. They'd lose every single ad auction.
This is not entirely correct. It comes back to CTR (click thru ratio) and with the loss of 'targeting' then the CTR will plummet unless the platform reverts back to 'market targeting'. That is, websites will need to choose the class of ads on their websites, and the more irrelevant they choose, the less they'll get paid (because CTR will drop). So, from a small advertiser's perspective, they'll need to make sure their ads only appear on relevant websites (eg. tech on tech sites, milk shakes on food sites).
A one-man-show (eg a plumber's business) already knows that social ads work better for them anyhow. Maybe billboards and local classified ads will make a resurgence as a result.
Edit: I should add that Goog is already ahead of the targeting ads for the small local business, with their "my business" product, which allows you to search locally for businesses.
I think you're right that it would be bad for small businesses. But for users(I meant users as viewers of the ads), I still don't think it adds much value. If getting information wasn't easy like the old days, I can understand how targeted ads are beneficial. But I can look for hard drive info and reviews easily these days. And the information I find will likely be a lot better than ads. Personalized ads and non-personalized ads don't look a lot different in terms of benefits they bring to the viewer.
>If targeting was killed, you'd most likely see ads from massive corporations only - those who have a lot of cash to spend on ads.
Why? If I run a niche site with ads I'd want to pick ads that fit my site and audience, similar to picking affiliate programs. Picking relevant ads should be my job a as a site owner.
Because most businesses run their ads through exchanges, where supply and demand meets each other. An exchange runs an auction. The winning bidder is the one whose ad your users will see. If small businesses won't be able to target their niche users, corporations will increase their bid price and swallow smaller auction participants.
Anonymously targeting neighboorhoods is OK, no one's name is involved in that, just a list of addresses.
This is different than surveilling people's private and intimate communications, building a profile from those, then targeting against those built profiles.
How do you feel about grocery stores inflating prices and then offering discounts across the board when using their loyalty programs for which you have to give up your information? This is then used to mail you targeted flyers for products they think you will want to buy based on your purchase history.
I think this is a very different scenario. In this case you have the option to not give up your personal information and walk away. If one particular grocery store is gaming you, you can go to a different store, or use an online store. If all of them are inflating prices unfairly, there are checks in place to make sure that doesn't happen.
In the case of internet and Google, we are being stripped of that basic choice. Google's browser, browser extensions, cdn, site analytics, dns, their prepackaged apps that are hard to uninstall on Android, all these are making it virtually impossible to walk away from that "loyalty program".
There may be people who like personalised advertising and I think they should have the choice to let Google and other internet companies scrape all the personal data they can from them in exchange for targeted ads. I'm not one of them. I want to surf the internet on my terms. I want to pay for the services I like to use like I do now for those that are available and uninstall apps from my devices without breaking warranty from my mobile manufacturer. I want that choice. After all, that's what life is about. If anyone says that we can't find that middle ground where people like me can browse the internet without personalised ads, then fuck personalised ads.
Is it? If it was really that easy to track and identify customers without using loyalty cards, why would they bother with the faff and expense of loyalty cards?
I half-wonder whether there's a more pernicious plan which actively wants customers to know they're being tracked, on the assumption that if they see their purchases as contributing to a persistent profile with unknown distribution, they'll try to curate that profile to make themselves "look good" the same way they do on Facebook etc. Don't want everyone to think I'm a cheapskate, better buy that more expensive brand even though I can't taste the difference...
1. What could I buy at a grocery store that would make me look bad? If I'm rich enough to be around people who will look down on me for what I buy at the grocery store I'm also rich enough to simply not care. Are there really rich or well-to-do people that actually care what cackling Karens think of them while shopping? This is a social issue not a surveillance-advertising issue.
2. Grocery stores are retail. They spend money on bulk product, mark it up, then sell it. Why would a grocery store simply not stock things it doesn't want people to buy?
3. If there is some master plan behind the scenes, who's paying the grocery store to keep product it's trying to shame people into not buying with loyalty cards?
It's more of an idle speculation than a serious hypothesis, but...
To your 1, I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised. "Value" own-brand ranges are typically packaged to look cheaper and cruder than fancier lines. The cardboard costs the same either way.
To your 2 and 3, it's about capturing consumer surplus, not stopping value sales altogether. The customer who can only afford the cheapest lines will still buy the cheapest lines. The one who could afford something a bit more upscale, but wouldn't normally care enough, might be nudged.
And looking further into the dystopian future: what if it becomes more than just status anxiety? What if buying the "wrong" things affects your (social?) credit score, or your health insurance premiums?
It's not that no one buys certain products, it's that the stores know who buys what and sends targeted advertising and coupons based on that. If they know you buy dog food, they can send you a coupon for a certain brand that isn't selling well and they're overstocked on. You're manipulated into buying things you otherwise wouldn't have just like advertising on the web.
I do not appriciate those, mail without your address (i.e. you have no relation to the sender). That should be opt in.
I feel the same about targeted advertisement.
Please, no. Advertising is like drugs: There‘s always a demand, and if it‘s not satisfied legally and transparently, it will find a way through other means.
I already can’t trust most influencers or any other "independent" reviewers.
Pushing ad dollars into prohibition will make the problem much worse than it already is.
Maybe I am out of touch with reality but it seems to me that there is mostly a demand, or maybe better a desire, to advertise something while I do not think that there is the same demand or desire to consume those advertisements. But all kind of media will happily take some of those advertising dollars and force the ads onto us, whether online, on paper, on TV, or billboards. And people don't complain because they get stuff cheaper or even for free, or so they think.
That would be an utopia indeed. Advertising suffers from a massive conflict of interest. People would be much better served by independent third parties evaluating products and publishing the results. We just gotta make sure they aren't corrupted.
Here in Germany we have Stiftung Warentest [1] and it is financed by selling their reports as magazines and online. They also receive some government support from the consumer protection ministry. Not sure if there are any competitors, Stiftung Warentest is certainly by far the most well known one.
Yes, I'm aware of Which? -- my parents used to get it when I was growing up.
It was only ever able to cover a tiny part of the market for a few selected things, though. (And of course only a small minority of people would ever see it.)
Wouldn't the death of tailored advertising hurt early-stage startups a lot (caveat: I'm one of them)?
When you're a tiny operation, you can't spend millions on a broad fishing net and hope somebody will match your ideal customer. Having the ability to precisely target who sees your ads is a great way to get some initial momentum and traction, without going under.
> Such measures should include a phase-out leading to a prohibition of targeted advertising on the basis of pervasive tracking
It sounds like targeted advertising based on a user's behavior on a specific site would still be allowed? i.e. I watch a lot of backpacking videos on Youtube, show me backpacking gear advertisements on youtube.
Right? I research products when I buy them and I'm more than happy to have ads on. I think a lot of people don't understand the real reasons I (and many others) use an adblocker though. 1) malvertising is a common attack vector and I can't trust most sites 2) tracking scripts 3) ads are fashy and distracting with popups and popunders 4) page load times are substantially faster. As long as there are enough bad actors in the space I'll keep doing it, but right now those bad actors include every major website (hitting all 4 points). Show me relevant ads to the topic at hand, don't shove it in my face, don't play sounds or be flashy, don't track me, don't put a billion scripts on your website, just respect me.
Honest question: As a company, would you think "I don't care about the users' privacy, I want a marketing company that gives me as much of my target audience as possible"? Would you care how that marketing company got the users' information?
How would you feel as a user? Are you always interested in being a "consumer" and willing to have your habits sold so you are the target of ads?
I'm a user and I prefer to see targeted ads instead of generic crap. I prefer to get recommendations that are based on my known preferences. I like the idea that my data helps makes services better. I also like to have the option to use some services for "free" instead of paying.
I would like to have total transparency about which personal information was used to target me so that I can opt-out of sharing a certain piece of information if I'm so inclined.
I would like to have the ability to revoke access to my personal information from companies that I don't personally like.
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I understand the anti-ad/privacy fanatics and share most of the values but the extreme end sins in too much short-sightedness and hypocrisy. Understand that if your will becomes reality day 1 will be a very different day from what you had in mind. In the meantime put your money where your mouth is and stop using any services that uses users' private data for improving the product: search, maps, youtube, twitter... you're pretty much left with Wikipedia. Oh, and thank you for the cookie bars, great addition.
You make some valid points; I would disagree with the term "privacy fanatics", though.
Privacy is a human right, and you seem to be putting the burden on the user to protect it, rather than on the companies to stop abusing it.
We live in "1st world countries" - I assume you do too - and we have the luxury of having regulations that allow us to opt out of some things, but others might not be so fortunate; I believe we should lead the way in preventing people from being products. It might be a pipe dream, but things are obviously not working at the moment
Seeing generic crap helps me to ignore the consumerist propaganda that's being hurled at me from all angles. It's easier to recognize it for what it is: an attempt to exert undue influence over my decision making.
Targeted advertising has always existed and always will, the difference is micro targeting. Google originally made all its revenue from targeted advertising. You search for books? Get sponsored ads for Amazon and Barnes and Noble. A big thing is that this kind of advertising isn't invasive on user privacy. I don't feel like my privacy is invaded when I see ads for NordVPN when watching YouTube videos nor Rocket Mortgage when listening to podcasts.
Let's just make it the end of advertising altogether, finally. Advertising's goal is to influence your behaviour in a way that benefits somebody else, not necessarily yourself. Of course we can easily imagine why having such a system in place is also beneficial for governments. That is IMHO all the more reason why it should be a basic human right to be free from advertising in all aspects of your life, if you want.
Even before influencing behaviour (which is not inherently wrong, by the way. Everyone tries to influence others all the time) the aim of advertising is to make your product or service known, it's to make potential customers know that you exist so that if they need what you sell you at least have a chance that they'll buy it from you. Advertising is an essential part of a market economy.
It's always useful to go back to basics: Let's say I'm a teenager and I want to make some money to buy a new bike by mowing lawns. Will I just sit on my front porch and hope that my neighbours will read my mind? Of course not, I'll advertise by knocking on doors or distributing flyers.
Then, targeted advertising is putting flyers only in the mailboxes of houses that have a lawn instead of distributing at random.
Banning advertising altogether is at best an ill-thought-out position, at worst a call to enforce a planned soviet-style economy. Banning targeted advertising does not seem much better (of course the article qualifies this proposed ban as only being "on the basis of pervasive tracking", not general).
The problem starts when your "targeted" advertising will send flyers to only those homes where both husband/wife work and have little free time; or households that have very young children or household with single parent or the household that owns very old lawnmower that was repaired recently etc. Then your "targeted advertising" starts charging more from households that have only senior citizens etc.etc.
> Let's just make it the end of advertising altogether, finally.
Are you ready to pay 5$/month to have access to google search, then 2$/month for hackernews, another 5$ for youtube, and then 3$ for your mail address... ?
The web runs on ads
Yeah definitely. If we assume that advertising works, then it follows that the total sum that all advertisers pay is extracted from all users in aggregate, only in a roundabout way. If we outlawed advertising totally (which is more severe than what I proposed in my first post) then it would just mean the hidden cost (or damage, in some cases) incurred by users due to advertising is made explicit. If that means some people won't use some services, I would say it's only fair, it's better than tricking people into paying for stuff indirectly.
I agree that even untargeted advertising can be manipulative. However, to end advertising completely would require the presence of established Consumer Reports-type media that are widely known in society, so that consumers are aware of what products are out there for their needs. Since most countries lack such prominent independent sources of product news, consumers have few other sources of information on what options they have than media that, in some way or another, is linked with advertising.
If advertisers want to inform people, and people actually want to be informed, I'm sure together they will find a way to communicate, even if it does not include shoving stuff into other people's faces. Of course well-researched, unbiased consumer-oriented media are very nice but the bar for replacing advertising as it currently is is much lower. You just need a place to put stuff, maybe sort it into categories, and give more room to advertisers who pay more. The only difference is that people will engage with it voluntarily.
Wouldn’t that mean an end to a lot of free services? If I want to pay for email there are plenty of services. If I want to trade viewing some ads for free email service shouldn’t that choice be up to me?
Wouldn’t that mean an end to a lot of free services?
They are not free, you pay for them with everything you buy, with the ad budget share of the price. And you are not only paying for the service you want, you are also paying for the entire ad industry on top of that.
Whatever the cost, it will increase significantly without advertising. Advertising pushes product into more hands which makes unit costs lower. Targeted advertising reduces ad costs because they are more effective.
Free services have no reason to exist without advertising.
Advertising pushes product into more hands which makes unit costs lower.
This is at the very least not obvious. Advertising does, again at least not obviously, increase the amount of money consumers [can] spend. If they shift money to one product, another one will see reduced consumption and get more expensive to manufacture.
Also what prevents one or a few companies from being very successful with their advertisement, becoming a oligopoly or even a monopoly and then inflating the price for more profit and to the disadvantage of the consumers?
>Also what prevents one or a few companies from being very successful with their advertisement, becoming a oligopoly or even a monopoly and then inflating the price for more profit and to the disadvantage of the consumers?
I think this is just as muddy as the bits you pointed out. Incumbents don't need to advertise but new players do and they have a better chance to gain market share with targeted advertising due to more effective use of their often limited budgets.
I think this is just as muddy as the bits you pointed out.
You are of course right, I only wanted to given some scenario with opposite outcome for customers. My point was more that one will have to provide much better arguments or evidence than some random macroeconomic interaction to convince me that advertising has any net positive effect.
I'm not sure what you mean by "advertising" here, but the way you state the goal of advertising is too close to the general goal of communication to make a blanket ban on advertising quite totalitarian.
And I say this as someone with an instinctual dislike for advertising and practically any sort of opportunistic promotion/marketing.
As a possible alternative, what if we just prohibited the use of passively collected data for monetization purposes? Instead, if a company wanted to do targeted advertising, they would have to ask you explicitly about your preferences, kind of like how YouTube sometimes throws up those interest surveys.
This is still a nascent idea; I don’t know how this would be enforced, and there are a lot of blurry boundaries. I think this would be an interesting thing to explore.
Europe's GDPR is exactly that. It forced the creation of modal popups that harass you on every web site you enter, prompting you to "Accept" being tracked and monetized.
And apparently it wasn't enough, since the EU was lobbied to update the law with "special interests" that allow companies to track and monetize you without opt-in anyway. So, the worst of both worlds.
These sites are likely non-GPDR-compliant, as the "Deny" must be as easy as the "Accept", and clicking "Deny" must afford you the same functionality. This is frequently not the case.
Even those places with a "Reject" button have the "special interests" enabled, and you need to explicitly opt-out - even from them building a targeted profile.
Yes, it's likely that those opt-out checks, hidden under a folded option and requiring literally hundreds of clicks to remove all third-party ad providers, are illegal. [1] That doesn't seem to deter popup developers from designing them that way.
As much as we love to hate targeted advertising here on HN, it's a godsend to small businesses. And, dare I say...some people like it? Step outside the techie bubble and I have friends who actually curate their Facebook interests to make the adverts more relevant to them (yes, they know it's making them easier to sell to and invading their privacy and no, they don't care!). I'm buying my girlfriend a £100 wool jumper for her birthday because she saw an advert on Facebook, from a company I've never heard of.
Targeted advertising (especially on social media) really levels the playing-field, as smaller businesses can target niche audiences. It's sad that Big Tech have ended up the de-facto middleman between all advertisers and all communities, but that's a separate question. If you want to make it easier for competing advertising agencies to carve out parts of the market the worst thing you can do is add onerous complex regulation.
IMHO, targeted advertising is completely ok, as long as you know you're being targeted. I think most people can deduce that their actions on Facebook change their ads on Facebook.
The problem is when you walk into an auto parts store, have to wait in line, so you play whatever the newest game is on your phone. The game figures out where you are via gps, reports that to facebook, and suddenly you're getting car part ads on facebook. This is not clear to most people. And I'd even say this behavior is just fine if you opt-in to it.
And it gets worse. You have a friend in your contacts list (which you shared with Facebook for some reason). Facebook thinks that they probably share the same interests as you, so now THEY are getting auto parts ads.
At least for me, as long as this is all clear and accepted, I'm fine with it. As of now, consumers either don't have a choice, or the choice they do have is so hidden that they don't know they have it.
You have friends that actually spend their free time modifying their profile to make advertising easier? The fuck? Is this a psyop post from FB lobbying group?
Instead of increasing regulation, the burden of which will fall on small businesses, the EU should encourage online micro-payments.
If individual users could pay a few cents to access content across thousands of websites, with the total spend level aggregated, this could replace the need for advertising.
That just leads to a scenario where people pay for stuff and are subjected to ads. There is no situation where business owners wouldn't benefit from putting ads into their stuff. Choosing not to do it means leaving money on the table.
Some turn to ads because they can't afford to host/build the content otherwise, even though they don't like having ads.
I think we do desperately need viable widespread micropayments system(s). We need an alternative funding mechanism. Plastering everything with ads is no good solution, whether they invade privacy or not.
It brings back a memory of an online shop that offered a discount if you didn't use Internet Explorer, they said maintaining the site for IE cost them extra money, so it makes sense.
I wonder if online shops would start offering a discount if the user says yes to targetted advertising.
Amazon offers discounts on their Kindle devices if you accept ads on it (as I recall they're fairly nonintrusive, appearing when the device is otherwise inactive not pop-ups jumping out at you during normal use). This is the same premise as some older free internet services and very cheap "internet appliances", back when those were a thing.
I wouldn't even mind this. There are a lot of services I would pay for to not have ads. But I also actually know people who like having ads tailored to them
Or if you subscribe to your local/regional weekly newspaper and it includes a few brochures of local supermarkets (with selection of discount offers for the week). Makes the planning for the (bi-)weekly shopping for cheap necessities easier without the constant information bombardment and invasive tracking that's inherent to internet-based advertising.
So glad euro privacy watchdog has made their stance clear on whether the end of targeted advertising should be called for. Ive spent too many sleepless nights wondering who will call for the end of targeted advertising, and when. For euro privacy watchdog to end all the speculation and call for the end of targeted advertising is a surprise, but a welcome one indeed, bravo sir!
The ugliness of the web site as shown in your link is not directly caused by any law. The obnoxious cookie banners are meant to be obnoxious, in order to 1. get you used to clicking “OK” all the time and 2. convince you that the law that was made is somehow to blame for all this. It is not. If companies really wanted to make a nice clean experience, they would do what the law requires and stop hoarding all personal information. But they don’t want that; they want to make a political statement about how that nasty law is somehow making them do annoying things. But they brought it all on themselves. Don’t be fooled.
What would you say if there was a law that said everytime you made a purchase from a shop that uses a credit card reader then there had to be a lawyer present from the business to walk you through 50 pages of legalize that you had to read, initial and sign for your "privacy" because Visa might get a record of what you bought. You'd had to do this for every new store you visited even if it's to just pick up milk on your way home.
At that point I wouldn't care about "intentions" behind such regulation.
The cookie law was intended to get website to stop using tracking cookies. Instead the pain was offloaded to users and the tracking continues. In a way, the proposal in TFA would be the "cleaning up" that you ask for.
Which (giant to very large) companies besides Alphabet/Google and Facebook would suffer dramatically if this happened? (I couldn't really think of any.)
The CMA in the UK did an investigation into this, and targeting is worth a 30% bump in price. It is very effective for all parties.
That being said, it is possible to get around this. The trade-off is: the privacy cost versus efficiency of advertising. I don't think there are any easy solutions short of coming down definitively on privacy. All the pop-ups are very annoying, and introduce friction to just using the website (I go onto Google, I search, I click result, stuff starts leaping on my screen...Agree to this...ad blocker on? Do this please...what a mess).
Well I can see how personalized ads benefit advertisers. But users? I mean at first, it seems like it make sense because personalized ads are based on what I'm interested in. But more I think about it, I'm not really sure if it is actually beneficial to me.
For example, if I want to buy a hard drive, the ads don't tell me what kinds of hard drives there are and what the pros and cons of each of them are. The ads are just what an arbitrary company X wants me to think of their product in order to change my behavior. They are rarely actually informative. Can someone give me an example why personalized ads are beneficial to users compared to non-personalized ads or no ads at all?
Edit: I'm afraid I haven't elaborated enough. I'm not saying that non-personalized ads are better than personalized ads. I just think they don't add much informational value. If I want to buy something, information access is so trivial these days that I can easily look for products myself, and the information I find will likely be a lot more helpful than ads. So what I'm trying to say is that personalized and non-personalized ads don't look a lot different in terms of benefits they bring to the viewer.