EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

Re:EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebo... by teachrdan on Thursday November 02, 2023 @11:57AM (#38115389)

I don't mean to sound flip, but I don't think identifying pathological psychological conditions via web browsing habits is all that difficult. I have a friend who went through a severe depressive episode. As soon as he started watching YouTube at 2am, he started getting ads for depression meds.

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Re:EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebo... by aaroninsf on Thursday November 02, 2023 @12:42PM (#38116256)

Worse yet, "web browsing habits" is just one neck of the hydra. What you buy (when, as mentioned) serves as strong signal for any number of factors; all your conventional demographics of course...

I'm not in the industry but I am very curious to know if we're already in the conditional-execution phase of surveillance/ad-serving/profile-updating: is there an idea [yet] of serving a challenge, and then both recording how/if it is engaged, with automated graph traversal to "look closer"... all offered stochastically...

The simple way to put that in part is, are we now getting A/B tests run on us explicitly, rather than merely implicitly?

(Personally, I'm 100% off Meta products and TikTok—but am leaking through LinkedIn and, regrettably, Google...)

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Re:EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebo... by PaulHoule on Thursday November 02, 2023 @12:08PM (#38115605)

It's not difficult at all. That's the point. A system like that collects a lot of data and very few people are going to feel that they need to dissimulate.

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