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Comment by iso1631 | Hacker News Reader

HN has an advert on the front page right now --

  PhotoRoom Is Hiring a Fullstack API Developer (OpenAPI, Python, React) in Paris (lever.co)

Perfectly GDPR compliant

(Many people on HN are fully invested in an industry built around personal informaiton theft so hate things like GDPR as it stop them extracting money from people hence the immediate downvotes)

View on HN

In case folks don’t know, one of the benefits of being accepted to Ycombinator is that you can place hiring notices directly on the front page of HN. Notice how there is not a voting arrow next to the Photoroom post. It is basically an ad.

HN has a clear commercial tie-in: the audience has a lot of people who are looking for highly compensated software engineering jobs. The issue is all the other sites.

Say I'm Der Spiegel. How does this model help me?

Der Spiegal can sell advertisers ad spots like these, without targeting to specific audiences (but targeting them to specific sections on your site, e.g. different ads next to sports news and fashion news), and without tracking who exactly views them, rather relying on general audience statistics (e.g. Nielsen-like surveys of what percentage of German consumers read Der Spiegel online).

Perfectly GDPR-compliant, simple, and worked in practice for decades. Of course it's less lucrative than ads based on invasive surveillance, but if those get prohibited, that's a reasonable alternative.

I discuss this in the post: Nielsen like surveys work when there are a small number of things people can be watching/readings/listening to. Der Spiegel may or may not be big enough for this, depending on how many people are in your panel, but a panel big enough to get good coverage across smaller sights is not practical.

Der Spiegel has been selling adverts in its publications since 1947. I'm fairly sure in 1947 they couldn't track individuals reading them. They couldn't even measure how many people read them.

I do wish we didn’t have to keep retreading the same arguments answered in the piece in this discussion.

I don't understand.

HN is simply rendering a link. This is different than many online ads, which make a call to some remote server which returns the ad content (and presumably tracks you without consent).

There is not a third party serving the content for the HN portfolio company hiring link, so no GDPR violation, right?

Help me understand the problem.

Even in cases where every part of ad serving happens in house, as it does, ex, with ads on Google Search or Facebook, the GDPR still applies.

The reason that HN ads aren't a problem under the GDPR is that they don't (as far as I know) collect or use any personal data in their ad system. But that's something that works much better for HN than for most sites.

That's the point - it's an advert with no GDPR violation, thus the answer to the question is "Yes"

Wow, thanks. I just realized, I misinterpreted your comment as a sarcastic criticism of HN, when it was not.

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