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Comment by banachtarski | Hacker News Reader

Serious question. Suppose we have this. I suppose my expectation is that instead of seeing the same ad over and over again, now I'm seeing effectively a random one.

Why is this necessarily better? I guess personally, I've always thought that regulating the content of the ads, rather than the usage of sufficiently anonymized data for ad targeting.

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Getting a targeted advertising that is likely relevant to you is probably one of the few positives of tracking.

The issue people have with tracking is not 'what ad am I getting on a given website'. To get a targeted ad they need to maintain a database of privacy infringing information. 3rd parties having this data, and what they might do it with it (or who they might lose the data to) is what many people have an issue with.

Being served a targetted ad is just a strong signal that someone out there has this private data on you.

For example, chances are that google has a pretty rich database of your location history. If not you specifically, they do for most people. You can probably imagine a few different scenarios where someone else obtaining that data could be bad for someone. You're trusting google with it, but is that trust warranted?

Serious follow-up: I've always been fairly apathetic towards companies tracking me because I don't see too many plausible situations that would end up truly affecting me negatively. Do you have any examples (preferably that have happened in the past, but hypothetical are okay too) of what can go wrong if the tracking information falls in the wrong hands? Sure, street addresses, SSN's, credit card numbers would be bad, but why should I care if someone finds out that I'm a male aged 24 interested in backpacking, Apple products, and programming?

Hypothetical: individual pricing based on how likely you are to pay more for an item, or how badly they think you need it. Sharing of data across domains could place you in a "bubble" where you see the same price no matter where you look.

That's exactly what a lot of airline websites do. If you're an active user of one try firing up a clean instance of different browser and it's very likely you'll see a different price.

For products that can benefit from information asymmetry[1] fingerprints are an amazing tool.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry

I think you have to break it down a little. There is potential harm to you individually, further broken down by "legitimate" parties with access to the information, and then problems where that big pile of data tempts hackers to steal it. For the latter, think of the time and location history of your children gleaned from photo location data (or the location data of their cell phones). Or just patterns that indicate when you're on vacation.

For the former, I agree it's a little hard to find realistic examples that don't involve having something to hide (but if you do, those are easy: porn history, extramarital affairs, time spent goofing off on various websites, surprise gifts, pregnancy, financial problems, stalkers, ...) Still, do you close the door when you take a shower? Do you sing in public? Do you disclose your salary in casual conversation? Those might seem silly, since the discomfort there mostly hinges on fully public disclosure, but the data are getting shared so widely now that it's getting easier and easier for the data to escape to places where they can be pulled up by someone who is bothered by your NextDoor post.

The other main category is the problems with massive numbers of other people's data being available to these companies. Those are more societal effects, like segmenting the population, radicalizing us, and setting us against each other. Outrage culture. Hyperpartisanship. Phishing. Vulnerability to external trolls/griefers/fake news publishers. Functionality being lost because it's overloaded by targeted spam. Harassment of minority groups (heck, you only need preferred language for some of that, though purchase history would reveal a lot more.)

You like Apple products and therefore you are a premium category customer. Dynamic pricing shown to you on websites will reflect that. Depending on the A/B rules in place you are paying a decent premium over someone with cheapo Android phone and looking for jobs in custodian services.

If you think that is fair then I have a lovely Harbour Bridge in Sydney that I think I get you a great deal on.

oh, you mean like people with internet explorer 7 paying more because their browser is crap?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18440979

I'll give the example I usually give in this debate:

In Netherlands, prior to World War 2, they made a "comprehensive population registration system for administrative and statistical purposes", which included the ethnicity. As a result, the Netherlands had one of the highest death rates among Jews. (I can't find a good source for this though, unfortunately)

I would like to see legislation that prevents storing data in a way that identifying information could be derived from a legitimate hacker. I think this is far more practical than a blanket hammer banning all forms of tracking, as we're stuck with advertising for better or worse. Might as well actually make things saner.

You go to hotel.com and you don't get a good offer because they know exactly how much you are willing and able to pay.

Sounds good?

now do this for every other thing you buy online.

Good enough?

I would classify that as "not sufficiently anonymized." I'm asking a serious question and don't really subscribe to dogma as being particularly convincing.

Thanks for the facetious argument and hand-waving though.

This is literally why the data is being collected. Granted, i do not work at Google, but i have experience in exactly this area.

Apps and websites want to sell you things. Well many of them. They then need to know for how much. If they know, they can extract more profit. Which is why they try to find out. Really. No dogma.

What do you think I do with your fingerprint as you engage with my sales website?

"Improve my service?" I hope you never buy a used car.

I'm trying to suggest that there is a middle ground between outright banning all tracking, and the current state of affairs. Not that the situation I described is where we are today.

Ads that are not targeted don't have such huge impact on you as the targeted ones and therefor they don't trick you to buy something you don't need as easily which is good for you and the environment.

In addition to the many privacy problems, advertising is rarely about passing timely information on things you need. Ads are mostly used to fabricate desires for things you don't need. While being good at critical media literacy helps, none of us are immune to this kind of manipulation and even less so when the ads are carefully targeted.

One case is targetting very precisely at people that could sway their vote.

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