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.
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.