Awful to see our personal privacy and social lives being ransomed like this. €10 seems like a price gouge for a social media site, and I’m even seeing a price tag of 150SEK (~€15) In Sweden.
Traditional advertising has worked perfectly fine for centuries. In the last 10 years technology has advanced to the point where dragnet surveillance is cheap, and suddenly all the advertisers are chomping at the bit to overpay for “targeted” advertising. Most ads are still only sold based on geographic region, and “demographic data” is proving to be completely useless. Your average social media user will see ads that are completely unrelated to their actual interests.
At best, maybe a “targeted” ad is worth twice as much as a normal ad, but is that worth the hundreds of billions of dollars spent developing that technology, and the loss of privacy for billions of people?
My point I suppose is that traditional advertising hasn’t operated with out a context on which to show ads. There has always been some context, some manner to target an advert at consumers to whom it might be most relevant. The idea that advertisers should see value in an untargetted ad because that’s historically what they bought is wrong, because that’s not something they ever historically bought. So my point boils down to the idea that some sort of targeting has to occur for there to be value in the advertising; and given these are adrev funded platforms, they’ll need that value to exist - however that the scope and scale of data collection is wildly disproportionate to the needs of creating audiences.
The processes by which a user can guard themselves is simply too opaque; the average user can control what they show a platform intentionally (through likes, interactions etc.) but has no concept of how to protect themselves against some cookie farm bullshit selling Facebook the contents of their last three trips to Asda.com. We have three viable options;
- Leave Facebook et al unchecked.
- Ban the concept of targeting advertisements entirely, thus shutting down Facebook, Google, and most free services that the world depends on (because people are very unlikely to pay for these services in enough quantity to keep them running).
- Regulate the concept of targeting advertisements to be fair and equitable for both parties.
