[Letmesleep69]

Seems impossible without outlawing all advertising. Advertising in the nytimes over some other paper or advertising on fox over cnn are all examples of targeted advertising. You'd have to make people randomly choose advertising spots from all of media. Doesn't seem feasible.

[pdkl95]

> Advertising in the nytimes over some other paper or advertising on fox over cnn are all examples of targeted advertising.

"Targeted" advertising generally refers to the tracking-based targeting of individual people. Re-defining the term to include all types of advertising makes the term mostly useless.

> Doesn't seem feasible.

Banning targeted advertising would be easy with legislation that bans tracking and showing ads to individuals.

> You'd have to make people randomly choose advertising spots from all of media.

Traditional advertising methods worked fine for centuries. Nobody[1] places ads randomly; you advertise where your product's audience will see it.

[1] Advertising intended to build general brand awareness instead of selling a specific product or service might buy ads somewhat randomly, because the goal is simply getting the brand name seen widely and often.

[Letmesleep69]

Well I understood targeted advertising as advertising with a target in mind. So advertising on msnbc to target liberals and fox for conservatives. In terms of tracking people and using their data to precisely target them then I agree with Richard Stallmann's article here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/03/facebo...

[zrobotics]

That's too broad of a definition, it effectively reduces the term 'targeted advertising' to just 'advertising'. For example, even if my advertisement isn't trying to target broad categories of people (roadside billboard, etc) any ad will have a target in mind: consumers of my product.

So no, targeted advertising is not any ad with a target in mind, that is just advertising. Targeted ads are distinguished from regular ads based on targeting a specific individual. An ad in the WSJ may be aimed at a broad category of people interested in business news, but if I know for a fact that 'Letmesleep69' happens to be a reader of that paper and I take out an ad that specifically refers to that user name, then it would be a targeted ad.

edit: formatting

[18pfsmt]

I don't think the word 'targeted' has as narrow a definition as you are proposing (at least in the common vernacular). In writing laws, as in code, one has to be very specific and define things properly, but not in frank discussion.

Disclosure: I believe in the eventual success of the fediverse.

[amelius]

Yes. Perhaps "personalized advertising" would be a better term?

[Lionsion]

>> A lot would be solved by outlawing targeted advertising.

> Seems impossible without outlawing all advertising. Advertising in the nytimes over some other paper or advertising on fox over cnn are all examples of targeted advertising. You'd have to make people randomly choose advertising spots from all of media. Doesn't seem feasible.

Not the OP, but I think he has a good idea stated over-broadly. Let me fix it:

A lot would be solved by outlawing profile-based targeted advertising.

If Facebook can't use you profile to individually target you, the advertisers are left to target the mass of "Facebook users" like they target the mass of "NY Times readers."

[dreamfactored]

Yes, and this also nicely self-regulates the media marketplace to balance monopolies like FB. Want to target a narrow niche, advertise in specialist media to a smaller audience at higher rates. Want to carpet bomb, advertise in mass media at bulk rates. Mass media being able to segment their audience has killed specialist titles income stream and created monopolies. Without that regulation FB has been allowed to have their cake and eat everybody elses.

[amelius]

Yeah, you'd have to define it precisely, and make a few broad exceptions to make it practical.

I should have added "by default" to my sentence.

[vinceguidry]

It's a common misconception that you have to define law precisely in order for it to be useful. States of affairs are rarely fixed with one law, many times it's useful to proceed with the poor law that you can get passed as opposed to no law at all, and spend another season building up political will to pass a better one. The countless piracy acts that keep getting thrown at us every few years get slightly weaker as the content industry just tries to wedge a foot in the door.

Obamacare was intended to be like this. Legislators knew it was going to get attacked the second the ink was dry, so they built in a bunch of clauses making it extremely difficult to 'simply repeal'. New health care legislation almost certainly has to build on top of Obamacare, enough political capital can't possibly be raised to do anything else.

[cmrdporcupine]

I'm sure there's a technical solution at the browser level -- a way to break cookie matchers. At least when I worked in retargeting, cookie matching was the secret sauce.

Preventing third party sources (images, scripts, "share buttons" etc.) from issuing or checking browser cookies might break a whole pile of useful things, but it'd make the world of retargeted ads dry up quickly.

[dreamfactored]

The freely available non-cookie fingerprinting libraries are incredibly effective now.