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.
Upon logging into okcupid today I received a pop up inviting me to join The League (another dating app), with my phone number already pre-propagated. After accepting, they sent me this email.
> We use the combination of your Facebook and LinkedIn data plus your About Me and Photos to ensure we are building a balanced, high-achieving and diverse community. Our screening algorithm looks at indicators like social influence, education, profession, industry, friends in The League, number of referrals you've made to your network, as well as supplemental data like what groups you belong to, events you've attended, interests you list, and preferences.
There's a book I found very influential, called "Missing Out" by Adam
Phillips. Not something I'd recommend for the casual reader as it's
psychologically heavy imho.
But it's the best antidote to FOMO, and so it's central theme "In
praise of the unlived life" is worth a mention; There's a lot of shit
you'll be glad you missed out on, but felt cheated at the time...
That bullet that whizzed past your head... you missed out on.
That plane you missed... that crashed... you missed out on.
That medication they wouldn't give you ... that turned out to have
lethal side effect...
These are silly examples compared to the sumptuous theme Phillips
develops about how so much of our whole of lives is a set of misplaced
expectations and values that are given to us by others but rarely
check out in the long term. It's a very affirming to get beyond
confirmation/survivor bias and retrospective rose-tinted goggles.
Being "excluded" from a group of people who are the sort who would
give their details to BigTech social networks may turn out to be a
blessing in ways you can't see yet.
> More and more people are okay with losing with privacy though, and
the more who take that position, the more you lose by not taking it.
I'm trying to simply that with an ear for contradiction;
If P; the more group A lose -> if NOT P; the more group NOT A lose. For
P -> L = some loss of privacy
(Okay it's late and I'm clutching at it a little, but something
doesn't ring true)
It seems like a formulation of "network effect" on the surface. But if
P => L it can't be the same L on the right hand side, no? For the
group who are the exclusion of A, their L has to be a gain. Or they
are not playing the game well/optimally,
Fair enough, you asked, and my attempts to think out loud in logic
isn't helping I admit. So the nub is that clearly, to me, when Levitz
uses the word "lose" above, s/he cannot be talking about the same
"lose" in both parts of the assertion.
Sadly, data collection has been completely normalized.
I've been thinking about buying a new car, but I'm very aware of how much tracking/telematics they include nowadays... so I decided to search "$manufacturer disable telematics". Every single thread I found was full of people saying variants of "Why do you even want to do that lol" and "Looks like somebody is doing something illegal".
Every time I see stuff like that, I'm tempted to jump in and share a plethora of examples about how tech companies misuse your data, don't protect it properly, sell it to all sorts of dubious actors, and, most importantly, use it for advertising - which I consider to be nothing more than gaslighting to get you to buy stuff and absolutely despicable.
I have to stop myself because I know I wouldn't get through to them, and I would probably sound crazy.
I go through this routine with my wife all the time. She either tells me, "I don't care." or ends up pointing out that all the data tracking landed her a sweet sale/coupon/etc. so she's actually happy that she's being tracked.
i get the having control of your data part (at least for address, name, social sec #, phone number and email - those are really important). but i could care less if an algorithm knows i like elvis presely or what my taste in food is, etc.
but i don't understand how personalized ads are harmful. if you don't like the product, just don't buy it? what am i missing?
personally, i only buy products that I really want or really need, so if an ad pops up that convinces me to buy, then it's done me a huge favor. but this almost never ever happens. usually, the ads are terribly targetted and don't show any clue of understanding who I am as a person. to me, it seems the problem is they're not targetted enough, rather than too targetted.
personalized ads are harmful because they can target your deep (sometimes even unknown by you) fears or desires sometimes in the most vulnerable moment.
So the choice to act is not as free as you describe.
You seem to think only about cases where personalized ads are used for products but the most harm is when people use this to influence groups. the same way they personalize an ad for a product that seems to be the perfect fit in your current situation the same mechanism/algorithm can personalize a message in a way that will influence you just a bit. and then tomorrow another small bit and so you find yourself (a general self not you) hating groups of people you never encountered so far.
Intelligence or IQ or whatever rational high points you have will not protect you from this over a long period of exposure.
Taste in food, the supplements you take, and things like whether you like Elvis Presely, can absolutely be used to out you in ways that you may not want.
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.
but judging how awful the targetting is, I don't think anyone watching your screen as you browse should be able to make any kind of conclusions of you. if anything, the ads we receive are a reflection of human beings at large or at least what advertisers think of them.
you wouldn't believe how irrelevant to me, the ads i get are.
Yes but that data never gets deleted really. So going forward you’ll have like profiles that are decades old and still available for analysis. For instance if you have depression they could show you ads for Prozac. Then if you get married and have kids, they know that your children are probably more prone to depression. Oh, and you live in a rural area and occasionally hunt. So your kid is now on some list. Or the other way, your kids phone gets sent ads from prager u.
These are far fetched examples but 30 years from it’s absolutely within the realm of possibility. We only keep adding to the mountain with devices like the Apple Watch.
You and I, and probably a few others here on HN, are slowly being sifted into a parallel "unsocial" world, I fear. It's genuinely disgusting to see the kind of personal data we're expected to pass out by the truckload for every little digital trinket and feature, let alone entire facets of society such as dating apps.
I'm in the same boat. My internet excludes a bunch of ASs used by surveillance shops.
This is what we're asking for. I am refusing to divulge information about me I don't want to share. Other people are building whatever on top of that data. I can hardly complain about lack of inclusion when I am the one refusing to feed their robots.
If you want people at Cheers to know your name, you... have to tell them your name. I'm fine being anonymous. It sounds like maybe you're more conflicted.
Ha ha - Cheers. I always found that lyric to be flat wrong. The place where "everybody knows your name" is the same place where you spend most of your time, and is almost certainly the place where "all your worries" are coming from in the first place, a.k.a. your life. (Which, if you're an alcoholic, could be a bar, sure why not.)
It "sure would help a lot" to go to such a place? Because you're constantly being bothered by total strangers at rates far in excess of the average? Because the first people police interview as murder suspects is everybody who doesn't know the victim? No my friend.
Of course now you can give out your name to total strangers many miles away, with a degree of efficiency undreamt-of in the 80s, yet not even have any fun times spent drinking with those people, so...
Only in the sense that I'm mad that it's hard to get any good new technology that isn't a privacy nightmare.
I see Cool App #354 and think it looks fun to use, but I am only allowed to use it if I give up my privacy. Since I don't want to do that, Cool App #354, which doesn't need any (or at least all) of that data to do the functions I like, is something I can only watch friends use.
I'm now feeling like social only exists in real life, not online. We were sold an illusion of connectedness when we were in fact the product being sold. Good marketing. We were told what we wanted to hear.
It's a dating site. The whole idea is that you upload all kinds of personal details so they can match you with a life partner. What exactly does a privacy-focused dating site look like?
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]
This question confuses me and I'm not sure we have the same understanding of digital privacy at all.
I'm not talking about the information they ask me to provide. That's a drop in the bucket and is also under my control to disclose or not. I'm talking about all the other shit apps hoover up without permission.
You should also wonder how many things you’re being participated in.
Even if you’ve never had an account on social media, chances are Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. know your name, email address, age, social graph, etc. because other people have shared their address book with them. Other users also might have tagged photos with your name, after which those sites concluded “that must be the same officeplant that’s in their address book”.
I expect LinkedIn to suggest people to connect because you’re their mutual friend, for example.
Its one of the reasons I contemplated keeping a facebook account to remain in control of a few things. I had turned on the option to let me verify all tags and it was great to be able to deny tags, but I always assumed facebook still knew it was me and could associate the same untagged face across photos that still had my name listed (just not tagged due to denying).
The sad part is that willingness doesn’t really enter into it. And refusal to use FB or linkedin doesn’t really provide much protection. Data brokers can create a rich profile of anyone who participates in the modern economy. Payroll firms, credit card processors, etc etc are all selling data to the highest bidder. I’m convinced that opting out of this system is not really possible without opting out of society in general.
So FB has one solid product that I wish they wouldn’t fuck up so much: Marketplace. Everything else about it sucks but MP is legitimately useful and the ability to see a person’s social profile along with their listings is very nice. It is the only reason I still have an FB profile.
Facebook Marketplace sucking the life out of Craigslist hits me hard every time I have something to sell and I really don't want to bother with ebay + shipping.
I don't use Facebook. I've got account there but I haven't bothered to delete as it seem s to be too much hassle than simply ignoring it.
I use LinkedIn. I haven't used it in years, now I'm back because that's where the headhunters are and where I can probably find a job. After I'll find new job, I'll switch to zombie mode again and won't use it until I need it again.
So yeah, the reason I use LinkedIn is to not miss a job offer. I don't have a reason to use FB thought.
Reminds of the days when your name, address, and phone number were automatically listed in the phone book. You had to pay the phone company to not list your information.
Sidebar: it used to be completely normal to publish your phone number and address publicly yet far less people had the information. The people who had it were basically a subset of people in your local community. Looking back at this point in time, the world felt so huge because it wasn't so connected and centralized.
Phone books were local, as in the neighbouring couple hundred thousand people max, so about one in ten thousand less than current social media.
And, at least here, they contained last name and one letter of the first name. No information on gender/interests/articles read/ads clicked/locations visited/family/friends/devices used/apps installed/items bought/...
and cross-referenced with your location at all times, all of your shopping habits, your viewing and reading habits, and every person you communicate with?
In an easily searchable database?
Sooo tempted to go Goodwin here and mention a nice use of computers from the late 1930s...
One of those things y'all never upvote is papers about psychodiagnostic software that uses your social media posts, cell phone location data, etc. to diagnose both chronic and acute psychiatric conditions.
I'm fairly certain that if a person is highly active on social media such a system could produce a better diagnosis than most people get when they see a professional, if only because the quality of psychodiagnosis is poor since it is often seen as a scam to satisfy insurance bureaucrats, common conditions are never diagnosed, there are fads for certain rare conditions, etc.
I think you've neatly summarised why it doesn't get upvoted:
1. "could" produce a better diagnosis. Not guaranteed. And better than what? How likely is it to really deliver a better result than appropriately trained specialists?
2. "scam to satisfy insurance bureaucrats". And you doing it digitally won't find its way to unintended recipients?
The undercurrent of this thread - and the original post - is growing awareness of the dystopian disaster that has grown out of "free" social media. So it's not surprising - to me, at any rate - that the general sentiment here is to be suspicious of any adjacent use.
I don't mean to sound flip, but I don't think identifying pathological psychological conditions via web browsing habits is all that difficult. I have a friend who went through a severe depressive episode. As soon as he started watching YouTube at 2am, he started getting ads for depression meds.
Worse yet, "web browsing habits" is just one neck of the hydra. What you buy (when, as mentioned) serves as strong signal for any number of factors; all your conventional demographics of course...
I'm not in the industry but I am very curious to know if we're already in the conditional-execution phase of surveillance/ad-serving/profile-updating: is there an idea [yet] of serving a challenge, and then both recording how/if it is engaged, with automated graph traversal to "look closer"... all offered stochastically...
The simple way to put that in part is, are we now getting A/B tests run on us explicitly, rather than merely implicitly?
(Personally, I'm 100% off Meta products and TikTok—but am leaking through LinkedIn and, regrettably, Google...)
It's not difficult at all. That's the point. A system like that collects a lot of data and very few people are going to feel that they need to dissimulate.
Well, if you've ever watched a movie like Real Genius [1], you may begin to understand some of the concerns of people building things with advanced capabilities.
Imagine how your tech could be used for evil and how profitable that would be. It could be a 2nd or even 3rd order effect, even.
[1] Film focuses on a college team building something they think is cool but really is a key part of a weapons system.
That sounds nice! Do you know of any offline linux-compatible software that could pull this off? I'm happy to try it on myself.
What I don't understand though is why do I also need to share my browsing history with faceless american corps that sell my data for profit. This sounds unnecessary for the main point (psychodiagnostic software).
> I'm fairly certain that if a person is highly active on social media such a system could produce a better diagnosis than most people get when they see a professional
What makes you so sure? (This is a serious question, not rhetorical.)
Mostly because the quality of professional diagnosis is poor.
Myself I have a condition which 5-10% of people have. As a child, I had two very high quality psych evaluations for the time where people observed all the signs and symptoms (particularly the first one) but failed to draw a line between them.
Since then I saw therapists maybe 6 times in 30 years (sometimes the same one) and it was always “adjustment disorder with …” and there was some truth in that in that in each case I had some very ordinary kind of stress which was exacerbating my condition but in reality there was always a chronic aspect to that.
I’ve known numerous people who have severe mental illness (way worse than the quirk that got me kicked out of elementary school) and contact with the psychiatric system and never got a conclusive diagnosis. The first line for a lot of people is to see a primary care practitioner and get diagnosed with either “anxiety” or “depression” and prescribe the same medication in either case. A referral to an actual psychiatric nurse practitioner who is taking patients is almost impossible in 2023 in the US never mind an actual psychiatrist.
That's not exactly strong evidence that "quality of professional diagnosis is poor" though... it's just evidence that quality was poor in cases you're aware of. It's also not evidence at all that being tracked by facebook would have come up with better results sooner.
I don't think that's the issue. The issue is they use your "profile" from other companies like facebook and linkedin to decide whether or not you're worthy of joining. What other things will people who refuse to use these apps be rejected from if more companies adopt this screening strategy? Jobs? Schools? Grocery stores?
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.
Yeah, it's so much more than most people realize. It's not just visiting websites with tracking pixels either. Like, companies you use will upload your data to facebook. They will take their pool of emails or members of their customer programs and send to facebook to be able to target you. Thus giving facebook more information about you.
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?
Maybe FAANG salaries will fall and teams of phds will have to spend their time on something other than raising ad targeting effectiveness by a fraction of a percent.
This is the largest damage in my opinion. How many thousands, millions of hours of some of the most brilliant minds of our generations have we dedicated to making the experience of lived daily life worse? Ads are a scourge upon the actual usability and safety of the internet. I understand the current necessity of the economics, it doesn't change the fact that the web without ads is an infinitely more pleasant and self-paced place without all the flashing imagery and psychological subterfuge surrounding every single piece of useful information you could ever find.
This massive wealth of intelligence, drive, ambition, all spent on something as useless as banner ads everyone explicitly tries to ignore or block anyway. It's insane. But money is the primordial force that allows the planet to keep rotating so inevitably someone will dedicate their intelligence to whatever cheap money they come up with. That's fine, that's good. I just imagine all that money could've cured some diseases, built better telescopes, put more powerful technology in the hands of the disadvantaged, maybe even, i dunno, fed some hungry people or something. What the fuck is the metaverse gonna do for anyone besides exploit them for maximum profit driven by distraction
I mean the banner ads are the tip of the iceberg in terms of what millions of hours of all those brilliant minds are up to. In my mind at least, that goes out to much worse things than banner ads: incitement of all kinds of engagement, the most effective being rage; the infinite scroll that traps people in apps not unlike a slot-machine; the curation algorithms that promote the most insane, bugfuck and completely-detached-from-reality topics, individuals and trends; the normalization of documenting one's life in excruciating detail for no audience, only to find yourself flung into the life of a celebrity at a moments notice without the resources of one to handle it; the weaponization/creation of culture wars and all the monetizable attention that follows them...
It really is no wonder all of this shit has so badly corroded our social structures, given the sheer weight of the resources we've piled into it. If only we could get this kind of effort out for problems that actually need solving, instead of just endlessly punching dopamine out of unsuspecting consumer's brains.
> I am curious what widespread legislation on this front is going to cause
Nothing. More dark patterns to trick people into accepting tracking. Look to how the industry reacted yo GDPR.
> 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
You can have personalized ads without invasive and pervasive tracking
Anecdotal observation from big-ish corps in EU: everyone started trying to look very mindful about what data they ask for in the first place, what gets stored where, what is shared with whom. In some cases, this led to actually being more mindful about those. At least in e-commerce, GDPR worked in the privacy-minded consumer's benefit to some extent, and not quite against anyone.
It was helpful for CA's GDPR-like law for Mozilla to find out about the whole sexual activity debacle. But it certainly didn't go far enough, because who would willingly allow a car company to collect that information? And why did such an outrageous data point not make its way to the public until Mozilla's investigations?
> 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.
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.
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.
I think in the context of privacy "personalised" always means "personalised by using information the publisher shouldn't have".
Facebook has my age and home town, knows what many of my interests are via groups I'm in. I don't think it's wrong to say I have given them that information voluntarily and so long as they keep it on their servers only, I'm ok with them showing me a mountainbike ad because I'm a 40yo male who is in a mountainbiking facebook group.
I don't consent to them showing me an ad for a specific mountainbike that I placed in the shoppingbasket at cheap-mountanibikes dot com last week, and then abandoned there, and the reason they know is because the store has some kind of arrangement of any kind with facebook. That's the kind of thing I don't think I should even be allowed to consent to.
The irony is that Facebook doesn't use the information you give them. I get garbage tier ads because I block their tracking, but with the information that I gave them, specifically that I graduated with a CS degree 10 years ago, they should be able to infer that I make good money and have nerdy interests, but the ads they show me are for cheap clothing.
I totally get where you're coming from. Isn't that the approach Apple took with their (small) business running app store and news ads? they only allow generalized location and user info, and in app store context its almost entirely query based. but there's no identifying info. FWIW I absolutely hate the ads I see in apple news and they seem to be AI generated images with shitty headlines such as "New government program can wipe out debt. see how much you could save".
Instagram in comparison sends me a ton of personalized ads and I actually really like them. I have a modified .ipa of instagram (Rocket for iOS) and while it turns ads off I actually have that setting changed so I still see ads. Sometimes I find things I really like.
It is clear that you think that. Almost never do people say that they think something should be illegal while simultaneously believing that thing is a net good.
I’m asking why you think that it’s a net negative that you’re able to consent to that.
Will the EU fix Windows by banning the insane amount of tracking they do? Would be nice. The OS is literally at its peak in terms of being great, but all the telemetry, forced accounts and Microsoft ads keep the meme alive that Windows is awful, when in fact, if you remove those three things I mentioned, you have an insanely reliable and polished OS, all my issues with Windows have always come from customizing the core OS, it just doesn't quite behave the same, I would eventually format due to issues, the moment I stopped tampering and tinkering, I've stopped reformatting Windows.
The telemetry, ads and forced online accounts are the only major changes since Windows 7 that I can think of. What useful features has Microsoft added since then to make you consider it at its peak currently? I haven't been using it as heavily and I'm genuinely interested if there's something great I've missed.
It's lots and lots. Just around things like DPI scaling and multi monitor there is quite a bit. You might not notice because maybe when you ran Win7 you had one non HDR standard def. Then maybe you had two. But today you might have multiple monitors with different scaling, some being HDR and so on. And that mostly just works in the later versions of Win10/11 where as the features just weren't there in Win7. When you dragged a window between a screen with 100% scaling to one with 200% scaling in Win7, it became tiny. Or it became blurry. Now the OS sends the app the info that needs in order to resize and stay crisp as it switches screens.
Windows Defender while not being great, at least means you don't need to start off by installing a third party Antivirus. DirectX 12 also comes to mind.
Obviously none, but that’s the point — you cannot have one without the other in the rest of the world. The EU believes this to be wrong to the point of being illegal. Which is why EU versions of windows — the N SKUs — ship without it.
There’s a separate OOBE where default browser, default media player, and so on must be selected (which was on US SKUs in 10 but removed in 11; it stays in N). One of the screens is asking about telemetry status, and the lowest option is “None”. There is no default selection.
It’s strange that Telemetry would be treated differently in those versions. If its’s truly anonymous then there would be no real reason for the difference, and if it’s not well then all versions needs the notice in the EU.
The GDPR has the concept of “intended to be sold to people in the European Union”. As in, if you have a product that is sold in the EU, that product must be GDPR compliant, but if you happen to have a very similar product which is not sold in the EU, not available for download if the website detects you are in the EU, not able to be purchased if your CC is from an EU country, and the only way to get it would be to self-import, that product does not have to be GDPR compliant. The N version of Windows, and only the N version, is sold in the EU. (There are N SKUs for every additonal SKU elsewhere, it’d a matrix)
But that's about it. For regular users, Windows 7 has been the best, and after noticing how my parents struggled with the updates, nothing can convince me to think otherwise.
Terminal app is another good thing, the clipboard manager that's built-in, snipping tool being built-in, Notepad having tabs, there's all sorts of other enhancements I can't recall. Not to mention Visual Studio is arguably one of the best IDE's I've ever used.
All the really nice bits of Windows 11 are lost to time because you don't notice them, but they all add up. The fact we're mainly worried about telemetry over anything else says it all.
Terminal is cool, but it's just an app that's not even shipping with Windows. The best terminal app for macOS, iTerm2, isn't built by Apple. It says something about the Windows ecosystem that it took Microsoft to come up with Windows Terminal.
Visual Studio is a good IDE, but at least back in the day it needed ReSharper to have the smarts that Jetbrains IDEs usually have. And the fact that it only works on Windows is a dealbreaker for me, as many people want to develop on the same operating system that they target for deployment.
I can certainly buy into small improvements, such as Notepad having tabs. And I'm not the one that mentioned telemetry. But now that you've mentioned it, I'll say ... such marginal improvements aren't worth the creepy spyware, or the ads, or the useless breakage in UX.
I have to disagree with the settings app. When i needed to change, fix, or update something in my parents old computer i always knew exactly where to go there was one central hub that contained every useful permission and setting that i could need to change or update to fix a buggy mouse or alter audio settings/devices etc.
Nowadays it's impossible to know exactly where some specific setting is anymore, and the settings app has been so dumbed down that most settings don't even exist anymore. Just the other day i tried to fix my dads touchpad and went on a wild goose chase through every possible setting location, of which there were too many, and kept coming back to the "settings app" in which the touchpad "settings" had only a single checkbox, fully unrelated to anything actually useful at all. The tab was there but there was no fucking settings in it. Nothing useful at all. In the end i tried driver updates, i tried rollbacks, i tried every setting app, i tried everything and the touchpad still doesnt work. You can click, you can't move, you can't scroll. The man didn't install anything, windows released an update and the single most important tool for interacting with the computer, one that is built into the hardware, was broken with no recourse to fix it, I'm simply not allowed access to the settings i require to maintain my own control over a functioning device.
That is the new settings app to me. Maybe if you stay within the ever shrinking bounds of control that Microsoft so graciously barely allows us to utilize, maybe then the buttons are rounder and the categories are better laid out. But if you need to fix anything that exists even slightly outside that toddler playground Microsoft is only ever making that more and more difficult under the guise of UI "improvements".
Dark theme isn't the windows color theming that always existed. It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode. It's in UXTheme.dll (an OS lib) and the function app devs use to query it is ShouldSystemUseDarkMode(). This was introduced in Windows 10 1903.
Drawing the line between the OS and "not the OS" is really difficult. Direct X is included with the OS and DX12 is not compatible with Windows 7 so basically DirectX 12 is something you did not have in Win7 and do Have in Win10.
> It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode.
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)
The fact remains there was no system setting for dark mode before Win 10 that apps could use to ask “does this user prefer dark mode”. Now it exists in windows as well as iOS, MacOs etc so its a pretty established standard by now to have that as a Boolean system wide (and that system apps follow it while third party apps can query it of course).
Even if dx12 is an arbitrary restriction to only work in w10 that’s beside the point. It’s a feature of win10 no matter how arbitrary.
there was no system setting for dark mode before Win 10 that apps could use to ask “does this user prefer dark mode”
There was no need for apps to ask that. Previously, apps would just say "draw this dialog box in the user's preferred color scheme" and it would work fine. The only reason this dark mode hint is necessary is because too many apps started ignoring the Windows system color scheme and doing their own thing.
Exactly. Apps ignore anything but a “use dark mode yes or no” option, so the improvement was to
add it. Tiny from windows perspective, huge for users (since the apps now actually respect it).
The difference to windows users is that you change a switch and apps actually change whereas before you couldn’t do that.
It wasn’t Microsoft’s fault before and it isn’t they who updated the apps now so they don’t get credit for that. But the fact remains you basically couldn’t use dark mode before and now you can.
> Dark theme isn't the windows color theming that always existed.
Yes, and no. The colour theming that has existed since at leats Windows v2 could be used to implement dark more quite easily if only your apps listened to the relevant settings (some did, many did at least partially due to the framework they were written in doing so, some didn't at all – partially is the worse option as it caused contrast problems between compliant and non-compliant parts).
> It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode.
The old theming was through system settings too. There were GDI API calls to read the values so you could make your app mirror the user's choices. Not as convenient as a single “dark mode” switch but no different other than that affordance. Many toolkits did this for you.
Yes but no apps (more or less) respected those settings. Yet in OSes with a single dark switch, it was seen as impolite for apps to not respect it. So basically Microsoft copied that. That’s the feature. That there is a switch that apps actually tend to respect. Nothing else. Might sound small or even like a regression from before, but it’s not imo.
Notepad has tabs and is insanely fast, Screenshot utilities are built-in, there's a clipboard manager, there's a "Terminal" app that lets you use PowerShell or even CMD and supports tabs. I didn't even need to go out of my way to install a special terminal or WSL just to SSH into another box. There's loads of things in Windows 11 that are useful, but Microsoft spits on the face of all of it by letting Marketing have any say in what goes where. Windows Marketing should happen outside of the software, not inside of it, period.
Much like Apple and Linux, windows even though it always had an API for it, supports Virtual Desktops finally.
> 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.
Exactly. There are places where the data is being collected without direct adverts or other visible signs being present (certain web analytics services for instance). This activity tracking gets married up to the other personal information the various companies hold about you.
> Personalised ads are beside the point.
I think they are an important part of the point, just not the whole point.
Being able to sell adverts for a bit more usually is what makes it worth a company's hassle implementing and maintaining their stalking infrastructure. Without that the online commercial stalkiness would die down an awful lot.
On the face of it some might think that this ruling achieves this, but it would not have that effect unless:
* other significant territories imposed the same sort of restrictions
* those restrictions were routines enforced
* and the enforcement (when transgressions are found) was sufficiently inconvenient to the companies
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.”
The ability to aggregate personal information of large numbers of people is a form of political power. Facebook can, if it so wishes, provide a list of all gay people in an area; all supporters of gaza or of israel; all people who have recently commented on an article about drugs.
The very ability to provide that list previously required an expensive secret police; today it does not.
This is an extremely dangerous ability for anyone to have -- human rights (such as that to privacy) were won against oppression. They aren't optional, they're the system by which we prevent those previous eras from reoccurring.
This is why i'm suspicious of the being a meaningful sense of 'consent' here -- if enough people consent, then the tracking agency acquires a novel political power over everyone. This is why the infrastructure of tracking itself is a concern.
Yes, and the handling all of that personal data should be strictly regulated. Ideally, companies would be treating all of it as toxic waste, and disposing of it as soon as possible.
This, exactly this. A big part of what got us into this mess is that data is very very cheap to collect, store and process with modern computing. And there is basically no other cost or downside to dealing with the data. This has led to a gold rush where every company became obsessed with data, thinking that any piece of data was valuable and could be monetized eventually.
If however there were strict liabilities for data leaks or privacy breaches, businesses would collect just the bare minimum data and get rid of it as soon as it is not strictly needed.
Credit company does not have microphone near your bed, they do not know which posts you like, or not, they do not have all your mails, and not necessarily know where you drive and how often.
Keeping all of the data under one company umbrella is vulnerable, target for hackers, and easy target for governments.
> and not necessarily know where you drive and how often.
They do tough. They know where you refueled/charged your car, hotels you've booked. Not only that, but they also know if you donate money to your local mosque/synagogue, spend just a bit too much at a liquor store, etc.
You have to use Meta? I'm not arguing for or against privacy here - just trying to point out that you still have options. It might be a pain to contact loved ones, check in on friends, etc. but so is using an ATM.
Do you have evidence that these companies are using the microphones in their devices for tracking? Or that they are using "all your emails" for ad targeting? If not please quit kicking that strawman.
There are real privacy issues here, but this kind of paranoia distracts us from mitigating the actual threats and has us jumping at shadows.
>Keeping all of the data under one company umbrella
This part of your post is also not correct. What company knows everything about you? There's insurance companies, credit card companies, social media companies... they all have a substantial amount of info about you but they don't all collude to aggregate it.
Every voice assistant enabled company store voice audio. Some by accident. Some to "make" voice assistant better. Some to do other stuff with it. Your voice is stored for undisclosed time on their servers. It does not have to be stored for long. Unknown contractors look at the footage of your iRobot,tesla.
No regulator will find any proof of anything though, as regular employees will not have access to such crucial data.
Regulators will also can be fooled by the maze of interfaces and servers.
There is also incentive for governments to "not see" any wrongdoings of the companies, if they profit from surveillance system.
Ad business is like Palantir in lord of the rings. You do know know who is watching on the other side.
All you have is some "vague" promise from corporations that your data are properly removed.
I don’t know how, I haven’t looked at or reverse engineered the code. What I do know is that topics I discuss with friends and family suddenly appear in the form of ads and user generated content in my FYP, when none of us has done a search or engaged in other online activity associated with them. Sometimes literally while we’re talking.
Even if your scenario were accurate, it's unlikely their data processing algorithms would pin the conversation down to within the hour of it happening, given that the schedules I keep are not fixed or typical in any way. Also, in my case for some of these, it's exceptionally unlikely given the individuals involved (a 20-something guy and a 40-something guy with odd senses of humor and esoteric interests in a romantic relationship).
Hence, the GDPR's making a distinction between data essential for operation of the basic service vs. more broad collection.
I take your point that some level of this power exists, necessarily, within internet-based companies with online users.
But I think there's a big difference between, say, signing up to Grindr where you submit a basic form with limited information (and presumably) can retain some minimal anonymity in how you use the app --- and a system whereby the history of all your actions across your online life (banking, social media, dating apps, etc.) is collectable by a centralised agency.
With laws like GDPR, broad datasets have become a liability for companies like telecoms, banks, etc. They don't want it. Accidentally forming 'rich user profiles' based on non-annoymous data is a legal liability.
This is exactly the incentive structure needed. Rather than have companies with an existential profit motive to build mass surveillance systems.
As far as whether a relational database that takes user data from a form is different to a whole system of streaming live event databases with massive streams of user monitoring across websites --- well, I think it wouldnt be hard to write a law against the latter.
These are political, moral, legal and technical distinctions that can be drawn.
You can frame it as tracking; but the fact is that the aggregation of data about people happens almost without intent. In order to provide services, you need unique id— and people want to be sharing and posting information. Facebook might be oriented around personalized ads, but even Friendster was based on an enormous amount of shared personal data. When we use tools like Facebook and Instagram and others, we want to provide our data. When I use chatGPT, I want to provide my data.
I think there are very good economic reasons why companies don’t dox their customers. They treat data cautiously even in the absence of regulation— since it would be a loss of business value to lose customer trust.
When we call for “privacy” — what does it mean when we want to share our data? Ok, one might say that you don’t want 3rd party sites tracking etc etc. That’s fine. You don’t want data sold. That’s fine. But if we make a big fuss about privacy in a world where we want to share so much personal information, I think we cloud the issues. We want a lot more than privacy, obviously, when we are so willing to give it up. I want those other desires made more clear and not lumped in as privacy. I think the GDPR just trains people to click “accept.”
There is a practical threat to society when a few nation-sized corporations operate pipelines of data collection and profile aggregation on every online citizen of the world.
Those profiles represent a massive amount of power, and that power is being let to accumulate in opaque organizations that have no explicit commitment to public benefit and extremely little accountability. That power is not yet being weaponized, but it doesn’t evaporate just because nobody’s using it for leverage or control yet.
The responsible, long-term, practical way to ensure that legitimate governments and the people that constitute them continue to have the power to shape their own society is to make sure that these techniques for accumulating power are dismantled and the already-accumulated power is dissipated.
Yes, we will lose some novelties and baubles in our online life when they can’t track you anymore. Yes, investing new power into government so that it can counter corporate profile-accumulation is dangerous as well.
But the greater danger of inaction against these corporations is that they are already only lightly-accountable and are on the verge of escape from accountability forever if they gain enough power. Modern governments, meanwhile, are comparatively slow and dumb and can still be steered as their dangers become manifest.
And doesn't even have to build & fund the infrastructure themselves.
Same for government surveillance - adtech/marketing is a boon to it because they don't even have to build/maintain their own surveillance infrastructure anymore.
The actual risk is data brokers, who aggregate this data and can use it for anything.
Using it to sell you shampoo isn’t terrible (it can be super annoying though). The problem is using that data to eg figure out who might be in the market for pregnancy related products. Or, ominously, who have stopped buying pregnancy related products early.
Or correlating interest in something they browse with voting intentions. Or interest in political action. There’s a lot of dodgy things you can do with that data. And little of this is being shared with *informed consent*.
Ads are NOT the problem. I love browsing through ads in magazines I buy. If online ads worked like outdoor ads or magazine ads, I suspect a lot less people would have a problem.
Because i don't want some private entity using my habits and preferences (which I didn't ask them to collect, btw, and, no, throwing a five page manifesto typed in 8-pt don't and making me agree to it or else doesn't count) against me and manipulating how I think
it's more than the ads. imagine if hacker news used ML to determine what articles you see on the front page based on whatever ad campaigns they think will result in a click from you. that would suck, right?
that's what these platforms do though, and that's not okay
You assume people stealing your private details for using it against you, are going to use it unaltered and in context. With enough bad faith and some manipulation, or just a bit of a twist, anything can be weaponized against you.
If private data is stored, there's already a chance of it getting out. You may get lucky, you may not, but for someone that hates you enough, any random detail can be a weapon. Even stuff that doesn't depend on your actions, like religion, country of origin or even medical details. People you associate with, even at a superficial level, can make you guilty by association. And let's not get into stuff like porn habits...
Political manipulation can be made real easy if they got dirt on you, too.
Maybe not illegal but optional (opt in not opt out). More issues are of course at hand but strong privacy should be a step in the right direction regardless. Let's not forsake traffic violations just because there are killers on the loose.
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.
I don't have nearly enough visibility on the political process of other countries to comment. I can only extrapolate by observing that Cambridge Analytica's core business value (harvesting personal data, using it to build a political profile, and microtargeting ads based on that profile) was functionally no better than just "spending more on advertising" in the American 2016 race. So I put burden of proof on those who claim otherwise to show that CA had meaningful influence in any other race.
It would be more surprising to me if they were uniquely unable to build a working psychological profile of an American voter versus any other voter then the simpler scenario that their entire concept was technological snake oil.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
Ah, thank you for calling me out on that; I completely misremembered the anecdote.
It wasn't total spend; it was online campaign spend. "Chaos Monkeys" cites a Bloomberg report on an internal Facebook memo that indicates the Trump campaign ran six million different ads on FB during the campaign and the Clinton campaign ran 1/100th of that amount. So targeted ads were involved, but the targeting approach was very traditional: pay a bunch of advertisers a lot of money to hand-tune ads, see how they perform, re-tune, rinse, repeat. The spend on Cambridge Analytica as a ratio and the effect it had on the total process were both minimal; CA didn't prove to be the "voter whisperer" that the owners made them out to be, and in the long run, the fact that they exfiltrated a bunch of private content from Facebook's datastores isn't as interesting as how the Trump campaign took advantage of the data in Facebook's datastores using the tools Facebook legitimately provides.
One feature the campaign did (according to the author of Chaos Monkeys) find useful was "Lookalike Audiences," which is nothing fancier than crawling the social media graph and expanding an initial targeted ad along friend networks (i.e. if an ad seems to be resonating with you, Facebook's own algorithm, if the advertiser has enabled the feature, will try pushing the ad to your friends and so on). In that sense, the data Facebook collected facilitated a Trump victory, though it wasn't anything more dangerous than the social graph itself... And I don't think the EU is proposing we ban social media or collecting networks of friends at this time.
... though maybe they should? You can do a lot of damage with the information people voluntarily share about who they associate with, if you collect enough of it.
> I don't know how you can break apart Americans disliking women in general and Americans disliking Hillary particularly
A good and fair question. So it turns out one of the largest blocs of votes in the 2016 election was various flavors of Christianity, and they generally chose to vote for a known womanizer and divorcée (with Protestants and Catholics, in particular, voting for Trump by a wide margin over Clinton). This would be considered curious behavior, except scraping the surface only a tiny amount reveals that they are almost 100% unified against the concept of women in a leadership position; some have structural taboos against it, and to some it is an existential threat in the category "God will strike us down for our hubris" because it goes against their notion of a cosmic order. It's ugly and I wish it were not so, but I think most political pundits wildly under-estimated that effect because, as the first woman to be nominated by one of the two major parties in America, their prediction models had no data on what effect it would have. I agree that the fact she already had a political service history that could be criticized (vs. her opponent with no such service) was also a factor, but I don't think it was as large a factor as the voters who turned out with fear of actual divine retribution in their hearts due to their religious beliefs.
FYI - referring to Cambridge Analytica like it has any meaningful relationship to privacy, ad tech or election results is the silliest thing you can say to someone who has any understanding of the subject. Cambridge Analytica is a like a canary in a coal mine that says, "this person has no actual understanding of the issues".
The moral threat is that your private data is processed and transformed into influence. And it's been the case over an over again that that influence is wielded without accountability or care for those being targeted. The methods of applying that influence are sometimes sophisticated, sometimes crude but almost always effective. The only protections against this an individual has is privacy. Yes there are other forms of influence, but targeted campaigns feed from data that _should_ be private is vastly more toxic.
How does political manipulation look in a world where the platforms can't tell two users apart? Without the ability to tell a different story to each user, you're left trying to sway the masses all together. That's not manipulation, that's democracy.
This is not true, as can be seen from Facebook maintaining 'shadow profiles' on people who don't have actual Facebook accounts but can in any way be connected to them (eg through third party data).
Google ads trace you, and Facebook tracking pixels keep profiles on you even if you never used any services. It’s literal theft. It’s just allowed for corporation but if I do it, it’s harrasment and stalking.
It seems dishonest to frame it as a market transaction when it clearly isn't. There is no explicit agreement, and most users probably don't have the slightest clue what data they're giving up.
Indeed. Targeted ads far predate the internet: someone who advertises in the Podunk Catholic church magazine is targeting a different audience to someone advertising in the same town's Baptist church newsletter. All ads are somewhat personalised to their intended audience.
This is why Facebook charging for an "ad free" experience doesn't matter. I care less about whether I get served ads or not and more about if my behavior is being tracked and thrown into some data lake along with personal info just waiting to be mined and combined with who knows what other info, etc., until crackers are withdrawing my social security, defeating the security questions on my banking website, scamming my family, etc.
It's like human organs (like kidney). In my country, I can donate my kidneys under strict conditions but not sell them. For good reasons. Yet, they're mine and mine only.
We should do the same with personal data. You can share it however you want but not sell them.
There are good reason why selling data can be worse socially: your data could also be about me (if it's about relationship), whereas organs cannot.
The ad networks could have self-regulated and perhaps could have received a better treatment that allows some forms of personalized ads.
However, they blew it, and now we have this law that takes away their incentive to infringe our privacy. The needle is now on the other side, but not as far as it was before. I'm happy.
True, but even if EU bans just the personalized ads, chances are that this personal data hoarding bubble is going to finally burst and die, because the belief in "big data = big money" was powered almost solely by the ad industry. I believe ads (and outright abuse, but that's not exactly a business model) were the only use case/reason for why this data is collected and why it's considered valuable.
We'll see attempts to rapidly change the tune (possibly something about "AI", given it's the buzzword of the day) from the companies whose valuation is strongly tied to this myth/meme, as they'll desperately try to keep their $$$-faces. But, I believe, chances are, if using personal data for showing ads will be illegal in a major market like EU, many companies will stop collecting because the data will become worthless, a liability rather than an asset.
And then I have this silly dream that one day a transhuman age will come closer and I will have machinery to aid myself, personally, that would collect and store my interactions with the world, strictly locally, strictly for my own personal use - an extension of my own mental or physical capabilities (I need glasses to see, I suspect I'll need a hearing aid someday, and I have some concerns about my memory and attention spans - so, you know, From the Moment I Understood the Weakness of My Flesh.meme.txt). So every time I hear things like "we're outlawing facial recognition/conversation recording/data collection" without a "(*) for businesses" I'm kind of disappointed. Of course, my hope is that those laws will be reviewed accordingly as we'll get closer.
Thus, I believe, a ban on targeted ads alone could be a possibly better outcome than a blanket ban on data collection. But, uh, whatever works, I guess...
Yes, it is the data collection. But the main incentive is monetizing that data which Instagram makes billions off of via ads. Cutting away this incentive may cut away the incentive to collect such data in the EU market.
Do you have any evidence of an actual harm being inflicted on a meaningful amount of people that would be sufficient to shutdown such a large amount of economic activity?
FYI - referring to Cambridge Analytica like it has any meaningful relationship to privacy, ad tech or election results is the silliest thing you can say to someone who has any understanding of the subject. Cambridge Analytica is a like a canary in a coal mine that says, "this person has no actual understanding of the issues".
Why? They harvested personal info from 87 million users under false pretenses. They're also an explicitly political company. We can debate their effectiveness, but their stated intent was to influence elections. These seem like meaningful and relevant additions to a conversation about data collection and privacy.
Your comment is rather light on information that might support your points.
I have two thoughts on Cambridge Analytica:
a) Influencing elections is not a harm, even if you disagree with the political ends.
b) They were notoriously ineffective, which further solidifies this into the non-story bucket
> Influencing elections is not a harm, even if you disagree with the political ends.
It feels icky, but still I mostly agree. I do think there's a limit as I would consider directly influencing elections (via force or deceit) to be harmful, but I'm largely ok with trying to sway public opinion.
> They were notoriously ineffective, which further solidifies this into the non-story bucket.
Unfortunately, they were surprisingly effective at the thing I care about which is collecting millions of people's personal information without their knowledge or consent. The fact they turned out to be incompetent does not inspire confidence.
> Unfortunately, they were surprisingly effective at the thing I care about which is collecting millions of people's personal information without their knowledge or consent.
I think this is the core disagreement, I do not see this in itself as an actual harm, just icky feelings.
Governments do exactly the same: they track you in the name of a million things. Now they have in the works even a law for 'free information' (in trh European Union) that can force journalists to disclose sources in the name of national security...
I am not saying this should not be illegal. Probably it should. What I am saying is that noone should be able to track but the state can do it. Noone should be able to.
They has grown enormously as Apple used its monopoly power to make every other advertiser less effective. Apple still uses the same user targeting they banned for every other advertiser, of course.
Do they track your activity in non-Apple apps in order to feed their ad selection algos? I really don't know, but I would guess not, and that's the thing they banned for others.
(FWIW I find their move into ads alarming because it threatens to ruin everything I like about them)
Perhaps this is being downvoted because Apple's ad business is far larger than a measly billion. One can already detect the hint of fecal matter on the wind.
It is safe to assume that all intelligence agencies have taps on ad networks allowing to legally (well, not in EU anymore) collect mass of information on the cheap, which they can then de-anonymize at will by cross-referencing with other data sources.
This is not a reasonable expectation. GDPR got this right and the consent must be explicit. When almost everyone has abusive ToS you might as well advice people to build their own internet.
yeah, i really don't get why people are so against personalized ads. As a user of these platforms, I feel the ads are already nowhere near targetted enough and now looks like we'll be getting ads that are even more irrelevant. at this point, I think they're just trying to find more way of fining fangs as a means of selective taxation and punishment.
> 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.
What is the individual and/or collective harm done here?
Data privacy is one of the least important issues of our day. People (especially on HN) get very passionate about it but are unable to produce specific harms Google and Meta ad tracking creates.
Could there be an issue in the future? Possibly. Are privacy laws like GDPR worth the economic and other harms? Probably not. The amount of wasted programmer hours alone has far overcome the negative impacts of big tech ad tracking.
Neither real life or the internet are anonymous. We live with other people. But Google and Meta in particular have an amazing 15 year track record of basically never leaking user data. Various national governments have been much worse in this regard.
Government risk from Meta and Google is meaningless in any case. The ISPs have all the same data and regularly share it with the government in response to warrants.
Also all the data is out there on me and you in a million databases. Just like in the 80s with the yellow books. Did you know you can buy a list of most Americans with an estimated credit score and income and other details? This is 50 year old tech.
On the other side, digital ads have a huge impact on the economy (Google and FB being some of the biggest companies in the world) because they provide a service of matching businesses with consumers interested in products. Targeted ads means they are much more enjoyable and effective at matching consumers to products they like. I've worked with dozens of small businesses that used targeted ads to survive and thrive.
It's not a good trade-off for the EU to ban targeted ads, in short.
> 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.
My argument is - this data doesn't hurt anyone, is not likely to hurt anyone, and it is valuable enough that banning ad targeting is a mistake.
Per your specific harm:
Thank you for actually responding with a real potential harm, the first time ever in 10 years of posting similar comments on HN!
Weight loss ads (along with teeth whitening ads) are much more common with non-targeted ads, by the way. When ad targeting is bad, the only profitable ads are low hanging fruit that applies to as many people as possible.
That said, I would totally support regulating weight loss ads to only things that are proven to work though. I think other categories like gambling are also under regulated.
> My argument is - this data doesn't hurt anyone, is not likely to hurt anyone, and it is valuable enough that banning ad targeting is a mistake.
I see where you come from, but that data shouldn't be for sale.
Regardless of the fact that it may be valuable for some third party, if I have not given my consent, that should be enough to instantly ban any storage and processing of it. This should be the default. At the very least, we, the people being profiled, should be part of the conversation.
But we failed at forecasting what profiling and targeted ads would become, didn't properly regulated them, and now it seems that every marketer expects to get their hands on everyone's data, just because it is valuable for their businesses.
While there may not be current and widespread harm, although that is debatable, the default shouldn't be letting companies syphon data and build profiles about people without consent.
And quite honestly, I don't care if a business burns to the ground as the consequence of unethical behaviour. It should happen more often.
I don't get it. I don't mind the ads if they are not manipulative and attempt to actually inform about something I might enjoy. But this is already rare, and many (most?) online ads are for crap.
And beyond that, of course there is potential for harm if data is collected for targeted ads. It might be increasing the price of your flight because you've been looking at the target country several times in the past weeks. It might be canceling your insurance because you googled for headache medicine. Or it might be marking you as a person to be deported into a "reeducation camp" because of your heritage or religion thanks to data that was involuntarily collection about you (originally without evil intent, even). Most of these already happened in reality.
> But Google and Meta in particular have an amazing 15 year track record of basically never leaking user data.
I disagree with almost every sentence in your post, but want to point out this one as it is specifically very surprising to me. There are two ways Meta is a giant leak of user data. First, it just sells user data to third parties, and it was extremely lenient with this in the past. Maybe that was the worlds biggest leak of user data, which we now know was likely instrumental in winning certain elections. Talking about harm...
Second, there actually were cases where hackers got their hands on facebook data. My personal phone number is probably leaked by this. I made the mistake of using my phone number for 2fa. iirc sensitive data from about 500 million user accounts were leaked.
I'm not sure about google but Meta is a leaking like a sieve.
If I wanted to, right now, I could build a deep profile for every single user of HN, simply by downloading the public pages, and cross-referencing comments, upvoted/favorited stories, etc with usernames. I could then create a weighted index that tells me how likely a user is to be a libertarian, gay, wealthy, etc. Then I could e-mail those users and offer to sell them privacy-focused freedom-loving lgbtq+ products.
I can pretty much do whatever I want with this database, partly because you don't even know I have it, but also because it's all public information you've posted to the web voluntarily. Maybe the ToS will say I can't, but they have to catch me/stop me. I could just hire some Russians to do it for me and collect the data later.
I'm not saying this should be allowed, but it's probably going to be impossible to stop, and the implications (esp. for political concerns) are enough of a motivator that just making it illegal probably won't end the practice. We have to consider alternatives so that we aren't stuck in some information arms race that makes the problem worse.
For example, we could say that private data should remain private, and public should remain public. Data which everyone has a reasonable expectation to be private - like the private photos you upload to Google Drive - should never become public, and thus should never be aggregated into some product (trained for an AI, etc), used to sell you something, etc. But data which does have a reasonable expectation to become public - like comments on a public forum, likes on public posts on Facebook - should remain public, and thus be used the way any other public thing can be. We already have legal limitations on uses of some public things, but we can expand that if need be.
Then we can legally define what constitutes private and public, and construct tech so that it's very clear to people what's public and what's private, and then they can decide what they will post where, or what sites they will/won't use in what ways, etc. It's already clear what's private and public out in the real world. We just need to make that same distinction clearer for other cases, like when and how companies collect data and what they can use it for. It's going to require case-by-case analysis, but we can totally get there without having to ban everything or allow everything.
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.