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Comment by Meekro | Hacker News Reader

As a small business owner, I love the fact that I can advertise to people who are searching for a particular thing, or have a particular demographic, or whatever. I never could have launched my company without it. Clearly those people got some value out of it as well: they were told about a company that they didn't know existed, and wound up signing up for an account with that company. Win-win.

Everyone has known for years that Facebook tracks everything they do. Facebook hasn't really tried to hide that fact. The silent majority chose to use it anyway because whatever benefits they get outweigh the loss in privacy. I am in that majority, and the last thing I need is some vocal minority second-guessing my choice.

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I absolutely believe that you should be able to advertise to someone looking for your service, but that doesn't mean if I'm offering advice in a forum that you as an advertiser should get my name, IP, email, browsing habits etc. shared with you just because I mentioned your product category.

I don't think the organization hosting the forum, should be parsing my content submission and inserting your ad while sharing my info.

I've bought ads on Google and Facebook, and they never shared anyone's personal details with me. I just told them the keywords and demographics I was interested in, and I uploaded my ad, and they showed it to people. There was never a button labeled "Download spreadsheet of your ad targets' personal data" or anything like that. If there was such a button, I would agree with you that it's going too far.

Okay, but google and Facebook have that sort of information on your audience and guess what, they can wittingly or unwittingly share it with others, which is a huge problem.

And it’d be pure naïveté to think the government wouldn’t take advantage of such systems to monitor and target activists and dissidents. The mere existence of such finely targeted ads is a threat.

I work a a major advertiser in a domain that gives me fairly in-depth understanding of ad-tech.

In general most big advertisers don't really really care about your name, address, email, phone, IP etc and generally take pains to see such data doesn't enter analytics datasets.

They do care about demographics and interests in an anonymized manner because face it, showing a sanitary napkin ad to a guy is typically neither going to be liked by the guy, nor is it a good use of the advertisers money which belongs to its shareholders.

In general outside the walled gardens tech stacks are setup in a way that you cannot ever be personally identified.

Not trying to compete with your concerns because I don't like advertisers having any of my info either since I don't want spam, telemarketing or junk mail sent to my house...but the biggest fears that I have about companies like Google and Facebook is that I'm convinced that either they're fronts for intelligence agencies or at the very least, the agencies have deep access to their systems for use in black ops such as domestic propaganda.

Having read about things like Operation Mockingbird [1], I can't imagine that these agencies have stopped behaving as such. Google and FB alone have got to be a treasure trove for them.

It seems like there's not much I can do about either one of these concerns, so on most days I just try not to let them suck my time up by worrying about them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

I agree. The only place I see ads online is on Instagram, and they are so relevant to me that I find actual value in them. I’m excited to discover new brands or services that enhance my life through ads. I also agree that companies should have a legal responsibility to safeguard data (just like they are required to do or credit card data). And I also think that the data that companies have on me should not be accessible by the government (I don’t want my browsing history to ever be used against me). But do I generally care if some algorithm somewhere sifts though my data to figure out what I might buy? Nope. It’s a computer analyzing 1s and 0s, not a human being looking through my life. In my opinion that’s not an invasion of my privacy.

The silent majority, really? They don't use it because the benefits outweigh the loss in privacy - they don't understand the impact of the loss in privacy.

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