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Comment by b800h | Hacker News Reader

The ban on advertising targeted at things like sexual preferences will be interesting to watch. As some people have pointed out, Netflix for example seems to be very good at targeting people who are "questioning", anecdotally before they begin to consciously do so; the suggestion being that this isn't intentional.

So if an AI decides that I'm likely to buy something LGBT if they offer it to me, despite using no label for the category, rather a token in the net, then does this break the rule? If so, can I ever responsibly use any form of AI-based targeting?

EDIT to add ref: [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66472938]

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>Legislation is put in place to ban behavioral advertising

>"how i can use Tech XYZ to do behavioral advertising now?"

you don't.

"the DSA bans targeted advertising based on a person’s sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or political beliefs and puts restrictions on targeting ads to children."

So I can still apparently, for example, target running shoes to people who like running, for example.

I wonder how will female hygiene products be advertised.

One way to do that would be to advertise to everyone, and.allow to opt out. Thus the advertisers would build up a database of users who don't mind such advertisements. It will be an overwhelmingly female audience, but it's not going to be targeting based on gender (gleaned somehow), it will be based on revealed preferences of users.

Is advertising based on things correlated with gender allowed? Since the opt-out would presumably be correlated with gender.

But then if that's allowed, you can claim the AI model is just correlated with gender or whatever and not using the field directly and thus also OK.

>But then if that's allowed, you can claim the AI model is just correlated with gender or whatever and not using the field directly and thus also OK.

That genererally doesn't work on protected classes even in the USA (a privacy laggard). Look up the history of redlining.

I imagine the best way would be good old context based advertising. Don't advertise to women, but book banner ads on women's health websites, run preroll ads on movie reviews of romcoms, sponsor true crime podcasts and fashion influencers, run ads on the websites of "women's health" or "cosmopolitan".

That's how basically all advertisement worked until just over a decade ago, and it's how a lot of advertisement is still done today.

But if you do this, then you can't say that your company uses AI to improve your customers' experience!

Gender/sex are still on the table tho?

with caveats. the biggest being that it’s just the EU.

Just 448 million people? That’s ahead of the US by over 100 million people but behind only China and India, and they have their own regulatory framework around social.

That is interesting, and kinda weird.

Where is the line I wonder?

If Netflix effectively says “you seem to like watching gay stuff, here’s more gay content”, is that wrong? Because it seems like that’s not Netflix targeting a user’s sexuality, just their viewing preferences.

OTOH it’s pretty harrowing to hear about people in (for instance) Uganda who are outed by an algorithm and (whether it is correct or not) find themselves ostracised or worse.

I've definitely had situations on Spotify where I've been listening to Abba and the Scissor Sisters, and started to be offered playlists aimed at LGBT people, but this is musical-choice targeting. It just happens that I like stuff that gay people like.

Spotify algorithms are complete trash.

There was a period when, for some reason, it would recommend playlists related to getting "tarted up", "makeup on", being a "powerful woman" etc and recommending lots of music it thinks is for women.

Though I do listen to a wide variety of music, there's nothing notable I'd say could encourage it to believe that.

Generally I play metal and rock, grime, rap, hip-hop; but also classical, some pop and indie, occasionally "UK Top 50", "Coding Mode" and "Jazz Vibes" playlists and lots of children's bath time songs.

I had to have a purge and its much better now but I still avoid the auto-playlists.

I bet you it's the children's bath-time songs that did it. Very mumsnet-on-the-razz.

It's a weird one, the playlists it was creating for me had a very "young woman" vibe, say 20s, aside from not being a woman I am not that young either, also, does Spotify think parenting is only for mums?

I wonder if it had something to do with my location; I was living in London and now live in the North.

I'd argue it is, and it should be so even in the US.

Even if Netflix's intentions had been perfectly benign - and even if they didn't specifically target this category but only did so emergently through some unsupervised algorithm - they now have a way to find out for all of their customers whether they are closetted gay.

Imagine someone like Trump or Desantis or even worse coming to power. People like those will certainly find such databases helpful, and they won't care at all whether the data is ostensibly about viewing preferences or directly about sexual orientation.

Yeah I absolutely agree that it’s chilling what could be done with that information and it won’t matter to such people whether it’s accurate.

I mentioned Uganda because I listened to a story earlier in the week about a man being thrown out of his mother’s home because she saw his Tik-Tok feed and it was full of very openly gay content. So we don’t necessarily have to imagine it - in some places this is already happening.

No need for a counterfactual, how do you think Trump used this data when he came to power?

No idea, what did he do?

Are Netflix recommendations advertising?

The people who see them have already bought the product (a Netflix subscription) so the recommendation isn't trying to convince them to buy something.

Of course they are.

If people don't see content they want to watch when they start Netflix they will eventually stop paying for it.

Netflix is not there for you to watch your favorite movies when you want. It is there to encourage you to watch as much Netflix as possible. So it makes sense for them to advertise as much content to you as possible.

A subscription is by definition something you have to keep paying, so it doesn't make sense to say that they've already bought it.

Briefly discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37106476

But Netflix isn’t one of the “very large platforms” identified.

Not sure when the DSA will impact smaller platforms but you won’t see it for some while.

i see a lot of pg18 ads on my workspace, i fell annoyed, who to blame?

may be you check your history, may be you have log in your personal account on system or may contact sys admins

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