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Re:Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement by ben_w on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @12:09PM (#34248273)
Mostly people don't know, and literally can't imagine, how much data there is about them. I accidentally freaked out a friend when they posted a photo on FB and challenged their friends to guess where it was taken, by responding 30 minutes later with a link to the Google street view photo of the same spot.

That said: The personalisation of the adverts is, at least in my case, pretty terrible — FB and Twitter categorised me as being interested in sports I've never watched, languages I've not learned, and politics of countries I've never lived in.

As someone else replied to me here, it's good that they're bad, because bad ads are easier to ignore.

Re:Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement by Nextgrid on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @12:21PM (#34248476)
> The personalisation of the adverts is, at least in my case, pretty terrible — FB and Twitter categorised me as being interested in sports I've never watched, languages I've not learned, and politics of countries I've never lived in.

Part of the reason for the push for opaquely-personalised ads could also be because advertising platforms can effectively defraud their advertisers by serving their ads to people who have no interest in them, which would be impossible in a world where people explicitly choose which types/categories of ads they're interested in.

Re:Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement by charcircuit on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @12:29PM (#34248575)
>advertising platforms can effectively defraud their advertisers by serving their ads to people who have no interest in them

Why would a platform ever do this intentionally? This will just result in lower CPM and advertisers pulling out.

>which would be impossible in a world where people explicitly choose which types/categories of ads they're interested in.

It's possible. You can still make an ad model to give people the worst ads and ignore their preferences.