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0 pointsthrow8383833jj2y ago0 comments

i get the having control of your data part (at least for address, name, social sec #, phone number and email - those are really important). but i could care less if an algorithm knows i like elvis presely or what my taste in food is, etc.

but i don't understand how personalized ads are harmful. if you don't like the product, just don't buy it? what am i missing?

personally, i only buy products that I really want or really need, so if an ad pops up that convinces me to buy, then it's done me a huge favor. but this almost never ever happens. usually, the ads are terribly targetted and don't show any clue of understanding who I am as a person. to me, it seems the problem is they're not targetted enough, rather than too targetted.

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gls2ro2y ago

personalized ads are harmful because they can target your deep (sometimes even unknown by you) fears or desires sometimes in the most vulnerable moment.

So the choice to act is not as free as you describe.

You seem to think only about cases where personalized ads are used for products but the most harm is when people use this to influence groups. the same way they personalize an ad for a product that seems to be the perfect fit in your current situation the same mechanism/algorithm can personalize a message in a way that will influence you just a bit. and then tomorrow another small bit and so you find yourself (a general self not you) hating groups of people you never encountered so far.

Intelligence or IQ or whatever rational high points you have will not protect you from this over a long period of exposure.

muffinman262y ago

Taste in food, the supplements you take, and things like whether you like Elvis Presely, can absolutely be used to out you in ways that you may not want.

The famous example I remember from growing up was a teen girl whose parents found out she was pregnant from a personalized (mailed) Target ad: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ... . There seem to be some skepticism in later articles that this is actually how her parents found out, but only because she told them first. They could have found out from the ad.

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/big.2017.0074 is a more detailed study of how Facebook likes can out people. It looks like the "cloaking" solution that the authors propose actually makes the model more accurate. From the article "false-positive inferences are significantly easier to cloak than true-positive inferences".

If you're the only one who knows what ads you see, that might still be okay, but if a platform can make these kinds of inferences to show you ads, they can use the same data in other ways. At the very least, they might leak this information to other users by recommending people you may know, etc. You might also reveal what kind of personal ads you get if you ever browse the web someplace where other people can glance at your screen.

throw8383833jjOP2y ago

but judging how awful the targetting is, I don't think anyone watching your screen as you browse should be able to make any kind of conclusions of you. if anything, the ads we receive are a reflection of human beings at large or at least what advertisers think of them.

you wouldn't believe how irrelevant to me, the ads i get are.

lapphi2y ago

Yes but that data never gets deleted really. So going forward you’ll have like profiles that are decades old and still available for analysis. For instance if you have depression they could show you ads for Prozac. Then if you get married and have kids, they know that your children are probably more prone to depression. Oh, and you live in a rural area and occasionally hunt. So your kid is now on some list. Or the other way, your kids phone gets sent ads from prager u. These are far fetched examples but 30 years from it’s absolutely within the realm of possibility. We only keep adding to the mountain with devices like the Apple Watch.

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