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by mgraczyk 730 days ago
What is the motivation to prefer untargeted ads over targeted ones?
6 comments

My bank telling Facebook that I'm their customer is a breach of privacy. If you care about ethics not law, it's none of Facebook's business to know who I bank with. If you don't care about ethics, only law as written, it's a breach of the law for the bank to share this information with Facebook.

And at least one European Neo-bank no longer does this. I don't think I was the only/first one to report them, and unfortunately I don't think they were fined for doing it, but I sure did report them.

Targeted ads are the ones that are the most likely to make you change your mind, and buy/consume something you didn't need in the first place.
Targeted ads can basically gangstalk you and it's psychologically uncomfortable
And you are using the term "gangstalk", which refers to a specific symptom of mental illness, ironically?
No, I mean the action of gangstalking

If a bunch of people analyze your psychology and then coordinate to use what they find to scare you, that's gangstalking

When an AI does it.... it's expected advertising behavior?

I don't like that double standard. Gangstalking is gangstalking.

"A study from Australia and the United Kingdom by Lorraine Sheridan and David James[13] compared 128 self-defined victims of 'gang stalking' with a randomly selected group of 128 self-declared victims of stalking by an individual. All 128 'victims' of gang stalking were judged to be delusional, compared with only 5 victims of individual stalking."
Yeah but in this case it’s Facebook that is delusional.
Ah, you want to cite hair-splitting

Okay

Give me your identity

Email, phone number, address, family members, etc.

I can show you how gangstalking works with that information

Is that something you'd be willing to share here?

& feeling paranoia is a garantee of having mental disease?
No, but the phrase "gangstalk" refers to a specific kind of persecutory delusion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_stalking

In the words of Kurt Cobain, "Just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not after you."

But I take your point. Using clinical terms in another context creates an unnecessary/unwanted association for readers.

> Gang stalking or group-stalking is a set of persecutory beliefs in which those affected believe they are being followed, stalked, and harassed by a large number of people.

That is literally true though. Have you ever read one of those cookie banners to see the list of organizations stalking you at all times on the web? It's often in the high hundreds. Nearly every electronic device manufactured in the last 10 years is stalking you at all times. If you don't have an active ad blocker, they also harass you constantly in a personalized way using the information they gather by stalking you.

I'm not personally being persecuted or harassed by any companies.
It's definitely not a sign of mental health...
more or less
Privacy.

Though, if you're into privacy, you're probably not on Facebook.

But a good number of people find the kind of hyper-targeted advertising enabled by the tech industry very creepy.

Anything more granular than a billboard gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Interesting, I guess most people are unaware that running these scripts does not stop the data from being collected, because Facebook is not the one collecting most of it.
Yes, this script disrupts the non-Facebook actors collecting most of the data

It cuts off a refinement step

Untargeted ads are presumably less profitable and thus the preference for untargeted ads is also a preference for fewer ads.
It's the opposite. If untargeted ads generate less revenue per impression, they'll need to show you more ads to make the same amount of revenue.
They’re already trying to maximize revenue and have maximized saturation of ads until their network becomes less sticky by people getting annoyed and not using it.

So you’re getting the same number of ads either way, even if Facebook can’t make more money off you.

That doesn’t really make sense. Publishers will already show you an ad every time doing so is profitable. They won’t show you an ad when it isn’t profitable.

Whatever opportunity you’re imagining where a publisher would a new ad once ads become less profitable, why wouldn’t they be showing a (more profitable) ad right now?

Targeted ads require the collection of personal data that I don't want to be collected. Untargeted ads don't.