[yeppie]

It's a shame an otherwise interesting article is plastered with the author repeatedly trying to promote and self-congratulate himself, and take credit for something which has undoubtedly been reported by hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Anyhow, I sincerely hope Google gets slapped with a huge fine, and that one day individual-user-targeted-ads will become illegal.

[kmlx]

> and that one day individual-user-targeted-ads will become illegal

i don't understand this. why would anyone prefer generic ads over targeted?

[janpot]

I want no ads, but apparently it's impossible to build a business these days without also trying to manipulate me into buying random other stuff. If I can't go around them, I'd still prefer to ignore generic ads rather than targeted ones. It's easier to do and less creepy from their side.

[kmlx]

the industry hasn't managed to solve this situation for decades now. the best solution has been ads. otherwise there's the subscription model, which reduces access to information.

[psandersen]

The problem is people who would pay to avoid ads are those worth targeting... I'd love if a single service could let me opt out of all tracking and ads internet wide for a fixed fee, say $50-$100 a month.

[drusepth]

Google actually provided exactly this service (for all Google-based ads, which is a high %) for a little over a year before it was discontinued, supposedly because nobody actually used it.

See: https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

[gwenzek]

How much are they keeping for themselves? I'd really like to see this business model arise, but if means giving 30% to Google I'm not so sure.

[drusepth]

I don't have the exact number (I had only just signed up as a publisher about a month before they closed it -- maybe someone else can pop in with exact numbers) but I remember it being really low, around 5-7%.

It was low enough that it wasn't really a factor when determining what to price your ad-free pages at (most people went with 1-2 cents per load) -- most people just priced at whatever average your ads were pulling in currently without worrying about the cut, since it was a fraction of a cent.

[josefx]

One requires a network that tracks your every step and analyzes your behavior in a way that makes most totalitarian regimes green with envy. The other knows nothing about you except that the site you are browsing right now is about computer hardware and there might be a slight chance that you want to buy computer hardware right now.

[kmlx]

agree, but they're there to pay the bills. and most "computer hardware" websites i visit already offer "computer hardware" targeted ads. nothing special about this.

[Svip]

Generic ads are more useful to me anyway. When the ads are targeted, it's usually for products I already have an opinion about, and about which I have therefore already made up my mind.

Generic ads, on the other hand, can be about topics/products I usually would never consider or have a strong opinion about, when I realise it might be helpful to a problem I've been neglecting or something like that.

Put another way: Targeted ads are never useful to me, generic ads are sometimes useful to me.

[jolfdb]

That's because when a targeted ad is general enough to be useful, you misclassify it as a nontargeted ad. Nontargeted ads are pretty much only punch-the-monkey mortgage an dcar insurance scams.

[jdmichal]

There are two ad campaigns which caused me to try a new product. Neither time was I actually looking for a new product. (The products were Old Spice and Dos Equis. I figured they earned a try just for entertaining me. And I ended up liking both of them.)

[raxxorrax]

Because targeted apps need information about you that some people do not want to provide. And don't care about ads..

[kmlx]

as long as that information is anonymised (and impossible to de-anonymise), i don't see the problem...

[raxxorrax]

I don't think ad-networks would mind much that much if you shared your info with them.

[jolfdb]

It's impossible to anonymize; that's the point.

[hawaiian]

I see generic ads as a signal that a company strongly backs its product. I see targeted ads a way for companies hocking cheap products to squeeze value out of their impressions.

The billboards on highway 80/101 in SF are usually rented by big brands with large corporate backing, but their products are usually solid, whereas AdSense ads usually show me what I assume must be dropshipped goods with little quality control (but usually have some sort of novelty value).

[tobr]

I’m not against targeted advertisement, I’m against being spied on. You can target advertisement by picking which media you advertise in.

[kmlx]

then i'm sorry to say, but ads are the least of your problems. in my country my ISP checks and stores all the urls i visit. and pro-actively blocks urls. and what about governments and their spy agencies? shouldn't they be the focus of your discontent?

[tobr]

What about whataboutism?

It’s not the least of my problems. A to me unknown but large number of companies try to track as much as possible of what I do online, and buy and sell this intensely personal data, causing a very concrete risk that private information about me becomes public. I’m not consulted about this, and I get nothing of value out of it, only risk of disaster.

Yes, there are other big privacy problems. They are all, to varying degrees, the focus of my discontent, and they have barely anything to do with this discussion.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

“Targeted” ads almost never show me anything of interest and insist on compromising my privacy. “Generic” ads are more likely to be interesting to me and don't attack my privacy.

I think these terms are misleading though. Traditional advertising is targeted: at the audience of some particular media which takes advertising. And that kind of advertising is actually very effective, and still is. What do viewers of a technology YouTube channel perhaps have an interest in? Technology! What might readers of a gardening magazine want to buy? Gardening tools!

And traditional advertising also advertises to people things at the time they are most receptive to it: when am I thinking most about buying video games? Perhaps when I'm watching others playing them.

[Mirioron]

Would generic ads really be more interesting for you? Don't forget, the United States is not the only country in the world nor is English the only language. I hope you're ready for ads in Chinese, Russian, German, French etc.

[pdkl95]

> I hope you're ready for ads in Chinese, Russian, German, French etc.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-14.4

      Accept-Language: da, en-gb;q=0.8, en;q=0.7

    would mean: "I prefer Danish, but will accept
    British English and other types of English."

[TazeTSchnitzel]

I don't live in the United States and I speak more than just English :)

But it is strange to imagine I would get ads in a different language to the website I'm reading.

[swebs]

You're fine with political campaign ads targeting you? Only showing their support of wedge issues you agree with, while hiding their support of issues you disagree with? Sorry, but that's just too manipulative.

[danarmak]

The problem is less with me seeing personalized ads, and more with the ad-server and/or the website getting my PII, and anyone who sees my screen or sniffs my traffic acquiring PII by observing which ads I get.

[anoncake]

Because generic ads are less likely to work.

[UweSchmidt]

Targeted (i.e. better) ads mean you are manipulated harder, and have less chance to notice it or defend against it.

Ads work.

[Tade0]

Apart from obvious privacy concerns, I started getting much more interesting ads on sites that respect my settings. One time I found an ad for a poem this way.

Targeted ads simply show me what I bought or was interested in recently(there's always a delay).

[yulaow]

Because targeted ads need profilation while generics not.

[okmokmz]

Generic ads don't require surveillance

[SmellyGeekBoy]

You're joking, right? I'd be far more likely to buy something from an ad based on the content of the page I'm currently looking at as it's something I'm obviously interested in. The targeted ads I've seen tend to be for things I've already bought (how many mattresses does one man need!?)

[gdhbcc]

Id that were the case targeted das wouldnt be a thing.

[kmlx]

we're passed this. generic ads don't work in all situations, that's why we needed targeting in the first place.

[robin_reala]

“Needed”. Nothing here was needed, it’s just more profitable at the expense of user privacy.

[otabdeveloper2]

I've worked in advertising for 15 years, in different parts of the industry and in different roles.

The thing is: ad tech doesn't want your personal data. Ad tech doesn't even want 'individually-targeted' ads. Advertising is applied sociology and works with statistics and its laws of large numbers.

What ad tech really wants is to assign you to broad classes of sociological groups. ('Gamer', 'parent', 'hobbyist', 'instagram user', etc.)

The insane spree of personal data collection by Google and Facebook isn't driven by advertising needs. It's a deeper and more insidious strategy for things in the future that aren't advertising-related. (I think the strategy bosses in these FAANG companies imagine a future with something like China's social credit system, except on steroids. But this is just my hunch.)

[krageon]

I think it needs to be considered that you are an outlier within the advertising business. To wit, every advertiser I have worked with (especially ones that are high up in a company) believes that they need as much data on their customers as they can get their hands on.

[Tade0]

There's a huge incentive for both EU and Google to have the latter just pay a fine every now and then and remain in business.

I see this as an indirect way to solve the problem of tax havens, because little known fact: the money that goes to pay the fines effectively reduces the pool of EU member contributions, because it's distributed using the same method.

[craigsmansion]

You're implying this huge incentive is money.

The EU is not short on money, and its existence and effectiveness do not hinge on how much money it "makes".

Google is pretty big, but not that big if compared to 27 sovereign countries and their combined GDPs.

The biggest problem the EU has is credibility with its populations. Taking on online privacy for their citizens was a huge win. It made a lot of people aware that the EU can be more than boring fish-quota and agricultural subsidies.

The chance of Google getting away with paying a fine every now and then is pretty much non-existent.

[anoncake]

To illustrate: Google has a yearly revenue of ~90 Billion Euros. The maximum penalty for violating the GDPR is 4% of that = 3.6 Billion Euros. The EU has ~450 Million citizens without the UK.

If the EU fined Google for the maximum amount (which is rare) every year, it would raise 8 Euros per citizen.

Our politicians have better things to do.

[jolfdb]

That seems wrong. For only 4% revenue tax a company could just completely ignore the laws and just pay the fine as a cost of business.

[jeltz]

There is no cap of 4% per year. If you just continue your violations the EU can continue levying fines and go past the 4% until you comply with the lawful order. I am not sure what the cap is in practice, because as far as I know no company has continued to just ignore EU for more than a few months.

[anoncake]

I think the only cap is that at some point, a company has no property left in the EU that can be confiscated and all their managers the EU can get hold of are imprisoned for contempt of court. There is no way that the EU just gives up saying "oh well, we tried".

[anoncake]

It doesn't just get fined, it also gets ordered to stop. If it refuses, I guess the usual mechanism the state uses to make them comply apply.

[duality]

The EU copyright directive won't help its image once enacted. They may come to wish it remained more about boring fish quotas.

[anoncake]

I don't think not passing the GDPR or not trying to improve the EU's image would have prevented the copyright directive.

[anoncake]

> There's a huge incentive for both EU and Google to have the latter just pay a fine every now and then and remain in business.

For the EU, making a decision frequently means getting the consensus of 28 governments with sometimes very different ideologies. I don't think it's capable of plotting.

[Tade0]

Individual governments on the other hand are, and in this case their interests align.

[anoncake]

Sure. You have twenty-eight governments, each with multiple ministers. A mix of socialists, liberals, christian democrats and fascists. None of them value markets and low taxes (the difference between liberals and socialists is that the latter like red). They somehow trust each other to keep their conspiracy secret. Oh, and half the European Parliament is part of the plot as well.

At the same time, they have serious problems agreeing on tax reform. Because somehow, their interests are only aligned when it comes to secretly taxing Google.

Please take off your tinfoil hat. When the EU properly taxes Google, it will do so openly.

[Tade0]

They somehow trust each other to keep their conspiracy secret.

That's not what I said. What I said was that each government individually decided that it was in their interest to fine Google.

No EU-level plotting - just incentives.

[anoncake]

The heads of government and ministers don't get to keep the fines for themselves. It's in their self-interest to get themselves bribed by Google, not to fine them.

Secretly taxing Google by making a privacy law, giving businesses years to prepare for it and hoping Google violates it anyway doesn't even make sense. Taxing them using, well, taxes is easier, quicker and more likely to work.

[jplayer01]

Huh? There are two places where he talks about himself. One spot in the beginning where he mentions how the investigation was triggered.

> The probe was triggered by a formal complaint from Dr Johnny Ryan, Chief Policy Officer at Brave, the private web browser.

Which seems fair to me. And another where he's mentioned amongst others who've put in complaints.

> Duplicate complaints were also submitted to the UK Information Commissioner by Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group and Dr Michael Veale of University College London. Dr Ryan, Dr Veale and Mr Kilock are represented by Mr Ravi Naik of ITN Solicitors in London.

[fastball]

In total, he mentions himself in the 3rd person five times in the article.

And at one point, he even quotes himself:

> “Surveillance capitalism is about to become obsolete,” said Dr Ryan of Brave.