This is effectively a) putting everyone’s approximate search histories on the internet, or b) outlawing google search’s buisiness model.
The consequences of trying option a and failing even once are so great, I argue if that’s your goal you should ban logged out personalization before anyone deludes themselves into thinking they can do it without leaking everyone’s info publically. I also think that’s going to harm consumers more than it actually helps them but I am obviously biased as an ex google search engineer.
What about the legal risk for Google if you opted out of the tracking a month ago but now google thinks you are a different person and is tracking you?
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78k8pz/how-you-mo...
They're also googles problems to solve, not societies. We're not required to provide solutions for them.
If google can't solve them, maybe that means google's business model is illegal.
This is not personal, it's the contextual targeting everyone wants. These blog posts never understand adtech.
There's also no personal identity, it's just a cookie if available, used mostly to frequency cap.
Most ironical thing here -- IAB categories applied not to user profiles but to URL's.
So, their goal is to facilitate ads targeting not to user profile, but to page content. This is the use case which is often discussed on HN as ethical and "right" way of showing ads -- you get the bid request with "Nature, travel" IAB categories and you show ad about outdoor gear. You don't need to crunch user data to make this simple decision.
However, I have to admit this complaint has it's own merit. Bid request usually contains not just page URL and IAB categories, but user cookie as well. So, by data-mining bidstream, you can theoretically find people (well, at least their unique cookies) who are looking for a cure for impotence, and this is against GDPR, for sure.
> Lack of transparency makes it impossible for users to exercise their rights under GDPR. There is no way to verify, correct or delete marketing categories that have been assigned to us, even though we are talking about our personal data.
and
> Under GDPR, processing special category [medical information; political affiliation; religious or philosophical views; sexuality; and information revealing racial or ethnic origin] data generally requires explicit consent from users — with only very narrow exceptions, such as for protecting the vital interests of the data subjects
The last quote is particularly troublesome, as Article 9 GDPR [1] is explicit about this: processing this data is prohibited by default, and none of the exemptions seem to apply even by a stretch of imagination.
Assigning such labels may be the norm from the Ad industry's point of view, but that is simply no longer possible under the GDPR.
Looking at the data selection to export, I am not even sure this is included somewhere.
However I am sure I got an interest profile, at least being used with the Discover feed on Android.
The problem with that being, of course, that any company participating in the bidding process can decide to store that information and build a profile that does have this information.
That correlation tends to take weeks worth of data to do with any accuracy, and by that time, all the opportunity to actually use the knowledge to place bids has gone.
The bidders can re-correlate if they actually make a bid, and use a creative to inspect their own cookies, and then resell that ad-spot, but typically that isn't worth it for small bidders (there's just too many devices on the internet - you'd need a huge ad budget), and large bidders are bound by privacy laws that stop them doing it (no investor wants the company the wrong side of an EU fine).
A few bidders used to do that on iOS devices, since the ads there are sufficiently valuable to make it worth it, but I haven't seen it for a few years.
Advertising atheism and I wouldn't be entirely surprised if in the future people will be prosecuted for it.
I'm jealous that at least Europeans can complain legally.
In the U.S., we believe that the free market knows best and that's freedom and such. Meanwhile, we're being profiled by these vile companies (FB, Google) and our data resold. Aside from individual rights being violated (hint, individual rights aren't just rights against government intervention), there's a huge societal threat here: what happens when this data is used to pit us against one another? Are we still free, then?
In the U.S. it will take a cataclysmic event to reach a GDPR-like desire by the population. The sad reality is that the EU has its citizens' interests generally in mind (consumer protections, GDPR), while in the U.S. Big Brother has the interests of large corporations at heart (namely by allowing them to run roughshod over our rights).
Note that this doesn't disallow websites with first party data and user consent to add user related information to the bid requests to increase their value, it just doesn't allow to correlate the information with a person after the RTB process ends. Of course it totally changes the role of data providers in the current ecosystem, but that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
Why would users actually provide meaningful consent to having a tracking profile? You need to actually offer something to users. The law essentially says you cannot just start profiling them without their permission.
You could offer users a subscription based ad free browsing experience. User pays 50 euro a year, you take a 10% margin, leaving 45 euro behind to provide the ad free experience. At 164 impressions per day (stretched inference from the article) you bid 0.075 cents per ad space. If an ordinary advertiser bids less then this to show you an ad, then no ad would be shown instead and the content publisher would still get paid. At any time you could cancel your subscription and demand that the profile be deleted. This is just one idea on how you could collect meaningful consent for an ad profile.
More evidence there is zero moral compass in SV and given enough money people are willing to do whatever away from public view and posture and pretend to care about niceties like ethics in public. And these are educated folks who are not starving and desperate.
Discussions should move from a default human base ethical position to any discussion about ethics is posturing and empty, its only by actions that any sense of ethics can be gleaned.
But people who behave unethically cannot then expect an ethical society or ethical behavior from others. These others too have a right to exchange their values for money and attempt to normalize, redefine or hand wave away their actions.
