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Comment by glaucon | Hacker News Reader

> Banning personalised ads

I'm in favour of anything that tries to address the appaling effects of social media, but as long as there is advertising that will, surely, be some sort of personalisation. In the past you bought a magazine about, say, gardening, and all the ads were about gardening. The advertisers were betting that most people reading a gardening magazine were interested in gardening products, the ads were, to some degree, personalised.

If online 'personalised' ads were banned how would personalised be defined ?

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If the goal is simply to make social media unprofitable, you can just be really brutal and require that all users from a language region visiting a website (or using an App) must be delivered the exact same set of ads.

The fact that most advertisers would flock to promoting on smaller special websites/apps (equivalent to your gardening magazine), is exactly the side-effect we want. The shift in spending will hopefully lead to the current "massive social media platform" model will dying out, and boosting smaller independent platforms.

What’s the benefit of a smaller independent platform? They can be just as problematic…

I’m not sure if you’re just fantasizing about the “good old days” of phpbb or something.

Smaller platforms are worse at optimizing for engagement. It's one of those weird situations where it's a good idea precisely because it's economically inefficient.

> to some degree

This is the key part, isn't it? There's a large degree of difference between "these garden magazine readers might enjoy these gardening ads" and "based on our profile of you collected over 15 years and including every single bit of private data we can acquire about you, we think you might like..."

Personally I think any advertising targeted at children should be banned, but I guess that's probably too extreme.

Ads that could be interpreted as targeted towards children is banned in Norway. Unfortunately we have not managed to enforce this sensible law in the digital realm, where children are routinely and brutally pillaged for their habits an behaviors and shown ads based on their insecurities and fumbling step into the wider world. It is truly sickening to observe society's naïveté, and especially how big tech (and thus data harvesting) has become a mandatory part of schools now, where every child is provided with personal device at the age of 6.

> If online 'personalised' ads were banned how would personalised be defined ?

Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear. I'm not against contextually relevant ads. Ads related to gardening makes sense in a magazine about gardening. There is no need to aggregate enormous amounts of personal data in such a scenario because the topic of the magazine (or webpage) is enough to give an idea of the type of readers you get.

I was talking about the current prevailing practice of collecting massive amounts of personal data, fine grained enough to make a psychological profile more detailed than what your closest family and friends could produce. Just to show you ads!

Context can be deduced from the topic of a website, no need to collect, package and sell data so intimate that it could be used against you in horrific ways by the higest bider, be it a nation state or a company.

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