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by Nextgrid 2114 days ago
Criminal gangs could also say that crime such as theft, robbery, blackmail, extortion, etc works for them and makes them money. It doesn't mean we should be legitimizing and encouraging this behavior that most of us agree is detrimental to society.
1 comments
threeseed 2114 days ago
I think you need to calm down with the rhetoric.

Criminal activities hurt people. Ads do not.

Especially in this case where PII data is not being provided to the advertising company.

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Nextgrid 2114 days ago
> Ads do not.

There are plenty of scams and malware being spread through ads. Furthermore ads are a parasite that wastes most people's time for no benefit with no official way for them to opt-out (a lot of services don't allow you to pay money to opt-out); it'a a cancer on society.

> Especially in this case where PII data is not being provided to the advertising company.

You are literally talking about capturing e-mail addresses so you can pass them to an advertising partner to target ads to these users. How is that not PII?

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icedchai 2114 days ago
The emails can be hashed, turning it into a pseudo-anonymous ID. It is debatable whether that is PII. It probably comes down to whoever can afford the better legal representation.
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dependenttypes 2114 days ago
Hashes are not a panacea. I see them being suggested as solution for anonymization of ip addresses/domain names/urls/file names/emails all the time but these people that make said suggestions are either clueless or are arguing in bad faith. It is extremely easy to brute-force the majority of said hashes. (in addition to that I doubt that anyone is passing hashed emails as it would make it slightly inconvenient to send emails to said accounts)
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Nextgrid 2113 days ago
It's indeed extremely easy to brute force these hashes when you have a database of the original (plaintext) data stolen from people's contacts which reduces your search space dramatically.
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dependenttypes 2113 days ago
It is extremely easy even if you don't.
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matheusmoreira 2114 days ago
> Ads do not.

They do. Advertising's whole purpose is to manipulate people into doing what companies want them to do. Not every company has your best interests in mind. Due to this inherent conflict of interest, ads should be viewed with healthy suspicion at best.

Banning tobacco ads helped reduce smoking in my country. We should ban a whole lot more.

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GoblinSlayer 2113 days ago
Ads kill brain cells and create the problem of spam filtering, which consumes a lot of resources.
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