Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? Beyond Twitter, there is no shortage of school systems, police departments, and other small public interests that use their Facebook page as a sole means of announcements. They shouldn't be - but it doesn't change the fact that they are. The Ad industry needs strong and enforceable regulation, and quickly.
you really have to understand twitter as trump's personal marketing/branding channel, not a presidential communications platform. it's safe to ignore. anything of import will be released through a myriad of other media.
Ask your lawmakers to require public agencies and officials to run their own social media infrastructure based on implementations of open standards.
For example, the article mentions they knew about browsing habits but that wouldn't be the case if they couldn't see you.
I suppose it comes down to "we have the data, so let's use it"... we need to stop the mass-gathering in the first place then these "bugs" are meaningless.
The revenue model might be slightly different from platforms like AdSense, where instead of paying per 1M impressions you would maybe choose a newspaper like model where the advertiser pays a fixed price depending on the property that displays the ad.
And the cherry on top: All of this would be GDPR compliant right out of the box, so no hour-long fiddling with the ToS agreement.
Selling advertisements based on impressions incentivizes publishers to maximize impressions through various means such as click-bait titles, auto-refreshing ads while you're on the page, or implementing slideshows. All of these things degrade a website's experience in the long-term for the sake of ekeing out a few more dollars in the short term.
I don't use Twitter, and your reasoning is a complete non-sequitur.
I don't play golf, and the President plays lots of it. How is that possible? By... my not playing golf.
You can't even conflate the two. Twitter is his method of communicating to us. He doesn't use the media like previous president's.
We have these things called news outlets, newspapers, and so forth. Apparently these places take an interest in what the president does. weird, I know...
In fact, I would imagine sites like twitter have more control over the ads placed on them than many websites for local papers.
B) Whenever announcements or tweets or other newsworthy events are reported in the paper, I still like to go to the primary source to get the full context.
So, the solution you propose really is an incomplete solution that doesn't address the problem.
I hate this sort of pseudo-friendly weasel-wording that's getting increasingly popular these days.
"We are sorry to hear that you do not want FREE two day shipping."
It really agitates me. I wish it didn't bother me so much but it cuts pretty deep sometimes.
I mostly find it ridiculous. Reminds me of stock phrases used by grubby bureaucrats asking for a bribe. But then just about everything about Amazon (and related automate-everything customer service shops) reminds me of the worst sorts of governmental dysfunction. If what you want is what they want or they have some reason to care about you, things are great. Otherwise, you don't even get indifference; you're literally arguing with a machine.
Product Manager: And don't forget to add the word free into the copy
Marketer: Make sure you A/B test bold text on some part of the sentence
Copywriter: Preface it with "We are sorry to hear" instead of the simpler "Don't want?" to give it more emotional appeal
Jeff B: Take a deep breath and just imagine what won't change in the next 20 years... OK, f all that, just write whatever the f you need to write so we can sell more stuff
"We are committed to selling your data unless you tell us not to" (opt-out vs opt-in)
They then serve relevant ads for us all over the web depending on where they are being paid to display relevant ads.
Twitter is at it. We've experienced the same behavior from Google & God knows Facebook is at it too.
I've even had conversations where the only connection we had to the web was our locally running Alexa only to see ads relating to our specific conversation 10 minutes later on the web.
Can anybody think of a technological approach to flagging this behavior?
There was a study posted on hacker news that targeted ads have something like a 5% higher conversion rate than untargeted ones. The problem is that you end up paying 30% more compared to the commodity service. So unless the fees go down or the efficacy goes up, it’s not worth it.
Not only does this problem remain true despite the high amount of information that advertisers have, but it's compounded by the business model. They don't want you to buy just anything you'd like, they want to sell you some particular product or service which you may never like, no matter the information that's been gathered on you.
- Confirmation bias. You remember the irrelevant ads, because they made you do a double take, they stood out as unusual.
- The terrible ads are actually effective at getting clicks from people with similar interests, but less of an aversion to ads, less ad-blindness due to depression, more willing to buy online, ...
- Especially with retargeting (what you describe with the fridge), the CTR is higher than with non-retargeted ads. But it is also one of the most visible forms of advertisement (everyone has a story similar to you, where they get followed by ads after looking at cars or fridges).
The online ad industry fuels the likes of Google and Facebook. Tremendous engineering and research effort goes into making these systems more efficient. Personalization and tracking of preferences is at the state of the art for these companies. Though not the potential best, it is close to the best possible we can do with ML right now.
But if you believe alexa did that and you still haven't murdered it with fire, I guess you never will.
(Edit: as pointed out below, it was an alexa but not his own so my criticism is undeserved)
I have no reason to buy one. I made a list of benefits and it really wasn't strong enough!
As for the other thing, I am running this in firefox with containers active. Google gets their own, Facebook gets theirs, twitter gets theirs and mostly everything else gets a temporary container. There will be no connection between them to use my data on, and in a few minutes my records of their cookies will disappear.
Sheer nonsense.
That era is long gone. Internal-public is the default, but there are plenty of secret projects (private source/build artifacts)...
Or not? How many people have access to Alexa source code, let alone that part of Alexa source code, and are also willing to break their NDAs and get fired and/or sued?
I think this is likely correct, and a million times more sinister.
There has been several occasions where my conversation somehow turned into relevant web ads. I don't think I'm making a mistake here.
A friend of mine told me of his good friend who left Amazon recently as his job was to listen to what users say to Alexa and ensure Alexa responded correctly. FYI that's both when users say Alexa first and also when they do not. More on that here [1].
I would love some more clarity into what's going on here.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/05/tech/alexa-amazon-human-v...
Seems like all sides of the ad-industry is a giant cess pool, and no one's playing it fair.
After you do it enough Twitter will drastically reduce the volume of ads it shows you. I see one every day or two and it's usually Twitter's "you've been selected to fill out a survey" ad.
Maybe some regulations is not bad after all (at least for de facto monopolistic business like Google, Amazon & co)...? ;-)
Many companies like to believe that, however the GDPR is pretty strict in certain regards. And such companies continue to operate only because no data protection authority has targeted them yet.
There's also the matter that many US companies have ignored GDPR due to not having a legal entity in the EU, but unfortunately for them there are trade agreements in place between the US and the EU, which makes the GDPR enforceable for companies having EU users / customers, even without a legal entity in the EU.
Give it time. And send complaints to your local DPA about violations that you see, because it does help.
> We were starting to see a massive push to shift away from FAANG
In my experience we were/still are seeing ever-greater consolidation towards Google/Facebook services. As an example, authentication/login with Google and Facebook is becoming the default on many web services, excluding users who may have deleted or never acquired such an account.
> It suggests this leak of data has been happening since May 2018 — which is also the day when Europe’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, came into force. The regulation mandates disclosure of data breaches (which explains why you’re hearing about all these issues from Twitter)
So, at least according to the article, they did have an obligation to disclose this.
Can we have proper English at least in the HN submission titles? I know that this is a direct quotation of the original, but "confesses" is much clearer and more readable than the original slang term.
I can't speak for non-native English readers' difficulties but as an fyi... "confess" is not an exact replacement for "fess up" because both have different connotations.
Therefore, if the (USA) writer is deliberately using connotations to shade the text, then the more informal "fesses up" is also proper English. E.g. respectable publications such as The New York Times have had writers and editors using the the phrase "fess up" for decades: https://www.google.com/search?q="fesses+up"+site%3Anytimes.c...
"Disclosed" seems like a more sensible and less sensationalist word to describe an entity sharing new information. The writer knows this: "Twitter has disclosed" are the first words of the article.
Twitter also apologized, said they're taking steps to avoid making this mistake again, and provided a way to contact their Office of Data Protection for questions. That part didn't make it into the headline, though.
IOW I'm OK with this.
Sidenote: Wondering if anybody outside of Google offers an embedded browser component for Android like Mozilla and co. They might be able to provide a better experience.
unless you want to replace your comment with "stop using the web" you'd be way better off getting on the spectrum of defending yourself to an obviously hostile world, with things like uBlock Origin, pihole, $increasing_complexity, and so forth
