Hacker News Reader

Comment by MulliMulli | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for it. Remember that days when a fishing website hat a ad banner for a fishing related website - that's still targetet enough on my watch.

View on HN

Yeah our societies functioned for centuries without targeted ads, and we can do it again. It's only the past decade or two that we've had targeted ads. I think you could compare targeted ads to selling drugs: there's clearly a market for it and it will sustain many peoples' livelihoods, but as a society we've seen the ill effects of letting them run rampant and decided we're better off highly regulating them. It's time to reign in this massively detrimental business model. The businesses will adapt just fine.

We've had targeting for at least as long as we've had publications with different subscriber bases. Do you think there are the same ads in Wired magazine, Sports Illustrated, and the Wall Street Journal?

And even just traditional local newspapers targeted based on locale and readership. The New York Post is going to have different advertising than The New York Times.

When people say "targeted ads" these days, that's not what they're talking about. Perhaps it's a poor term. "Targeted ads" means ads that are targeted to a specific user, as opposed to a publication.

Yes, the tools are different and (very much in theory) more precisely targeted. But, at the end of the day, you're still mostly targeting populations based on their propensity to spend money with you. So you now target me with sports gear ads not just because I subscribe to Sports Illustrated but because I've bought sports gear and I'm in the Male 18-25 demographic.

I agree that attempts to target at an individual level feels different than just targeting a magazine's subscription base, but it's still targeting. So if someone wants to ban "targeting" they need to be more precise about what they're proposing to ban.

let me make a point about why i see one type of targeting as benign and the other (which i suppose could be called 'collaborative targeted marketing', because it involves sharing or aggregating data from multiple sources) as dangerous.

if i subscribe to a magazine about fishing and it includes an advertisement about some new fishing lure, well... it's obvious why the fishing magazine might think i'm into fishing.

but if i just bought a pack of diapers at walmart and then start seeing mailers for baby monitors from jc penny, that's when i start to get nervous.

my fear is of a world where i call up a health insurance provider, ask for a quote, and they say "according to facebook market research, your hobbies include BASE jumping based on the videos you watch on youtube. therefore your premium rate will be [$xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.00].".

Do you think it should be legal for health insurers to ask you about your dangerous hobbies, and charge you more?

If so, are you really just upset about the idea of not being able to easily lie to them?

If not, why do you think other policyholders should pay more to cover your risky hobbies?

no, i'm worried about health insurance providers drawing incomplete conclusions and making inaccurate assumptions about my hobbies based on my internet browsing habits alone.

in reality, at least in the US, they wouldn't tell you the details of how they arrived at that quote. i only spelled it out in my comment to make my point (my example was also an extreme and oversimplified one). in reality, i would call, they would give me a number that got spit out from a black box, and then i would need to either accept it or keep shopping around with other black boxes.

it's not just about health insurance, of course. it's a more general concern about how my internet browsing habits are affecting or will affect other arenas of my life.

i should never have to say to myself "hmm. this webpage offers legal content with information that interests me, but maybe i shouldn't view it because it might negatively affect my shadow profiles which are used to gatekeep my access to certain elements of my society.". i'm not saying we're there now, but as others have said, this type of data collection and sharing at this scale is fairly new, and it has the potential to go in that direction. (and has already made steps in that direction.)

All readers of these print publications are seeing the same ads. I think what most people mean with targeted advertising is when every reader sees a different ad based on extensive data collection.

We also functioned for centuries without electricity, hot and cold running water, or good sanitation.

The fact that we functioned without something doesn't imply that we're better off without it.

We would be certainly better off without advertising. We don't need people to tell us to buy things to function in society.

The fact that we functioned without something doesn't imply that we're better off with it.

Agreed. The fact that we functioned without it before is of zero information content when deciding whether we should function without it again.

No, the fact that we functioned without it is a fact that we can function without it.

And literally billions of people do function without targeted advertising, right now.

Nobody is saying we can't function without advertising!

But we can function without lots of things. The fact that we can function without something isn't a strong argument in favour of getting rid of it.

I don't even like advertising. I'm not trying to support advertising. I'm just addressing the logical fallacy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com