Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

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Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

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This is because you've never looked for the evidence. It is trivial to find with a 10 second search.

https://www.intomore.com/you/facebook-ads-outed-me/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2018/12/12/dear-tec...

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/4/9/21204425/targeted-ads...

https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers..., https://www.propublica.org/article/hud-sues-facebook-housing..., https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-disc...

https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/04/29/credit-card...

https://themarkup.org/news/2021/04/13/how-facebooks-ad-syste...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-27/ad-scamme...

etc. etc. etc.

The first link is not a credible worry. Ad targeting is not even close to 100% accurate, no ad can out you. You can just brush it off.

Links 2 and 3 are concerning. The FB and Google do have a way to stop that though - you can click an ad and say it doesn't interest you or you don't like it, that signal is insanely strong and the platforms will turn off the spigot.

The rest is not actual harm to people, its people concerned about the idea of targeting being harmful. Cambridge Analytica was a laughable scandal btw, absolutely no one was actually impacted by it.

Are you saying the Fair Housing Act is pointless? Violating it does not harm anyone and there's no reason to enforce it?

FB does enforce the fair housing act and other laws. The platform is actually quite strict nowadays and catches lots of innocent ads in their filters for protected categories. Ad platforms should follow the law, that's working as planned.

As a side note, it's funny how people say that ads are terrible, but also its terrible if certain groups of people don't get to see ads.

Same as saying that the draft is terrible, but having a gender-specific draft is even worse. We'd rather have no ads, but until that's possible, the least we can do is stop them from worsening social inequities.

I checked about of half of these out and I can't take any of the complaints seriously. The strongest argument against tracking remains the moral one.

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