In other news today...
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Nevertheless, Facebook is threatening it will simply pull out of Europe altogether if it is no longer able to share data about European users with its US operations, applications, and data centres.
My take:
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
Facebook is threatening it will simply pull out of Europe altogether
And nothing of value was lost.
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@cvi they'll readily throw away half a billion users - that's hundreds of millions of ad consumers - if they cannot ignore their privacy anymore. That shows you how much the online ad market is worth without involuntary personal data collection.
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@Gąska The entire ad industry seems built on this brainworm that targeted ads are better, even though research has shown that it isn't. So if the data is useless for advertising, then the ad industry has no legitimate reason to collect it and it is time to slap them for the maximum GDPR fine every year until they stop being.
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@Atazhaia I'm starting to think targeted ads are just a cover for darknet sales.
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@Gąska To be fair, that assumes that Meta/Facebook is prepared to go through with this threat. I have some doubts about that (unfortunately).
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@Gąska said in In other news today...:
@Atazhaia I'm starting to think targeted ads are just a cover for darknet sales.
Why darknet? I'm pretty sure there are pefrectly
legitimatelegal markets for user data in the US and elsewhere.It's not like nobody has any use for buttloads of aggregated personal data, is it?
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@Gąska said in In other news today...:
@cvi they'll readily throw away half a billion users - that's hundreds of millions of ad consumers - if they cannot ignore their privacy anymore. That shows you how much the online ad market is worth without involuntary personal data collection.
It's never going to happen.
First off, this is an empty threat by Facebook, even though I'd applaud it if they pulled through.
Second, the last 1.5 decades show that while the EU can pass laws that basically make half of what Facebook, Google, and the rest of the ad-surveillance industry do illegal, there's no enforcement other than making life impossibly hard for would-be European competitors. The US juggernauts just get a pass on their obvious privacy invasions because they've always been doing it and you can't prove it happens. Or they just alter the deal (what happened to the Facebook not absorbing WhatsApp user data?), pray yada yada. They can just weasel around saying "oh no, we're not doing that (we're doing it differently )" or "it all happends in AI with perfect privacy".
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@topspin don't forget largely toothless fines that they can earn in less than a few hours operation.
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@Atazhaia Advertisers are more willing to buy targeted ads. It's marketing to advertisers for imagined effect. Even if statistically the difference is small, common sense says that it's a better use for the allocated money than non-targeted ads.
Common sense (and fallacies thereof) is key. For example, you can probably imagine how much more valuable a "Remember to Vote on XX/YY/ZZZZ !" ad will be if you can choose to only show it to people leaning towards your own political party.
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@DogsB GDPR outlines fines in the % of global revenue for maximum offenders - and Facebook and Google have physical presences in the EU in Ireland.
Whether they’d ever actually follow through on it - since that’s a non trivial economic hit to Ireland - is another matter entirely, and it won’t come down to what the regulator wants to do.
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
Advertisers are more willing to buy targeted ads. It's marketing to advertisers for imagined effect. Even if statistically the difference is small, common sense says that it's a better use for the allocated money than non-targeted ads.
Actually we had a link somewhere around some time ago to an article that said that non-targeted ads actually work better. The reason was that if the ad is shown next to higher quality content (and thus presumably costed more), the viewers will (subconsciously) interpret that as the company believing more in the success of their product, and therefore higher chance the product will indeed be worth the money.
… which does not say it can't be targeted at all, but targeting by showing the ad next to content that is relevant is enough.
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
… which does not say it can't be targeted at all, but targeting by showing the ad next to content that is relevant is enough.
Targeting to region of country is a good start: I'm really not very interested in adverts for carpet installation firms in Montevideo, for example.
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
@DogsB GDPR outlines fines in the % of global revenue for maximum offenders - and Facebook and Google have physical presences in the EU in Ireland.
Whether they’d ever actually follow through on it - since that’s a non trivial economic hit to Ireland - is another matter entirely, and it won’t come down to what the regulator wants to do.
There doesn't appear to be much appetite for that at the moment. Mostly because it would probably take half a decade to prove it. We're seeing record fines for the likes of google at the moment that are making them take notice but nothing to act as a disincentive yet.
As for Ireland being hit, not too likely to notice. They don't have much of a development presence here and any taxes they're on the hook for probably fall into loopholes. If we strengthen our privacy laws then we'll see google and facebook leave. Amazon and Microsoft will probably stay. You can't shift datacentres easily.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
… which does not say it can't be targeted at all, but targeting by showing the ad next to content that is relevant is enough.
Targeting to region of country is a good start: I'm really not very interested in adverts for carpet installation firms in Montevideo, for example.
I'm having doubts about how good google is these days. I use to get Irish ads regardless of where I was in the world or pretending to be. At the moment my android vpn is set to Spain and I'm getting Spanish ads everywhere even while logged in. I'd be worried but their search is still okayish.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
… which does not say it can't be targeted at all, but targeting by showing the ad next to content that is relevant is enough.
Targeting to region of country is a good start: I'm really not very interested in adverts for carpet installation firms in Montevideo, for example.
Sure, but you don't need to track individual users for that, just the site you are advertising on and geoip when advertising on sites with wider audience than the company (a carpet installation firm in Montevideo will get best results by advertising on local sites anyway).
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Amazon and Microsoft will probably stay. You can't shift datacentres easily.
Amazon has quite a few customers specifically because they have the datacentres in all the countries – some privacy laws already require it. I mean, our company has a customer who has test environments at Microsoft, because it's cheaper, and production environments at Amazon, because they have datacentres in all the countries where the laws mandate that sensitive data stay within the jurisdiction.
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Amazon and Microsoft will probably stay. You can't shift datacentres easily.
Amazon has quite a few customers specifically because they have the datacentres in all the countries – some privacy laws already require it. I mean, our company has a customer who has test environments at Microsoft, because it's cheaper, and production environments at Amazon, because they have datacentres in all the countries where the laws mandate that sensitive data stay within the jurisdiction.
Not in Switzerland though... at least not until "second half of 2022" when the new region will be added.
Which is a good thing, because it's actually quite common for Swiss companies (especially banks ) to require hosting in Switzerland.
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Just another day on Normal Island.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in In other news today...:
He's missing the makeup.
so .. he already got the shoes?
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@Boner the fact that some of his allies came out last week to insist No 10 was “now run by grown-ups” shows you where we’re at.
But BoJo the clown has been a cultivated look for some time - he knows the UK loves itself a self-effacing persona, and has ridden that hard for a while, whether it’s the zip line drama or turning out for ritual mockery on Have I Got News For You.
He isn’t stupid, but he thinks everyone else is.
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@Luhmann said in In other news today...:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in In other news today...:
He's missing the makeup.
so .. he already got the shoes?
Good question! Did we ever see his shoes on TV?
Now, in all seriousness: I know a guy employed as a lawyer at a tabloid publisher. He met (more than once) the "controversial politician X" in person at court and each time he wore quite high-heeled shoes (and still was the smaller person present).
Legal Disclaimer: I do not, in any way, insinuate that Boris Johnson might have any issues with his height of 175cm. It is, after all, still more than the height of Napoleon Bonaparte (as estimated by mainstream historians).
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in In other news today...:
@Boner said in In other news today...:
Just another day on Normal Island.
He's missing the makeup.
Oh dear, he's good.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in In other news today...:
Now, in all seriousness: I know a guy employed as a lawyer at a tabloid publisher. He met (more than once) the "controversial politician X" in person at court and each time he wore quite high-heeled shoes (and still was the smaller person present).
Legal Disclaimer: I do not, in any way, insinuate that Boris Johnson might have any issues with his height of 175cm. It is, after all, still more than the height of Napoleon Bonaparte (as estimated by mainstream historians).
FWIW, Boris is more of a wine-in-a-suitcase guy than a money-in-a-wine-box guy.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
money-in-a-wine-box guy
Is that a meme among the bribers? I mean some (10) years ago we had a corruption case where a politician was caught literally carrying bribe in a wine box (on the way from his accomplices where they split the money), but I seriously doubt that case is world-infamous.
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@Bulb It refers to recent events, not so much in terms of bribes as in terms of holding substantial parties during the strict lockdown period in 2020 (said parties being catered for using “suitcases full of wine”). The one thing that people seem to hate even more than corruption is outright “one rule for you and no rules for us” basic disrespect. And it isn't exactly difficult for anyone to predict that shitting on everyone's sacrifices is going to upset a great many, which is why they've been desperately trying to cover it up and making everyone even more upset in the process.
It's a total shitshow.
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@dkf The wine-in-a-suitcase part refers to that. But what does money-in-a-wine-box refer to (assuming you never heard of David Rath¹)?
¹ The English wiki page about him does not even mention the money in a wine box though it is one of the more memorable moments of that case.
Update: Oh, but @Kamil-Podlesak probably did hear of David Rath, so …
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
outright “one rule for you and no rules for us” basic disrespect
… also Czechia probably has primacy in that too: our then minister of health was seen having a meeting a supposedly closed pub literally one day after he ordered pubs to be closed in the fall of 2020 (to the credit of the then prime minister, he was dismissed for it).
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
The one thing that people seem to hate even more than corruption is outright “one rule for you and no rules for us” basic disrespect.
Especially fun considering The Queen herself respected the restrictions on Prince Philip's funeral, even when offered an exemption. You'd expect that if there's anyone to which "rules for thee" would not apply, it's the monarchy. Her PM apparently thinks these things of less importance.
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@Dragoon I think we're missing a lot of context. What did the blue whale do to anger the orcas like that?
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@djls45 Be tasty, I guess?
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@cvi said in In other news today...:
Facebook is threatening it will simply pull out of Europe altogether
And nothing of value was lost.
Well, I'll miss seeing some amusing farm stories from France. I have a friend who has border collies and a sheep farm...
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
@djls45 Be tasty, I guess?
Yeah, that's what I was figuring. It makes a lot of things mad.
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Oh noes! Wait! How has that Pirate Bay block been going?
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Oh noes! Wait! How has that Pirate Bay block been going?
No paywall: https://archive.is/hObaS
(INB4 disable Javascript, yes, we know but that's not always possible)
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
It proposed that anyone visiting a porn site from a British IP address would be asked for proof that they were aged 18 or over, provided either from ID such as driving licences or from age verification cards bought in shops.
Be a real shame if VPNs were something that basically anyone using the Internet underage knew about at this point due to them sponsoring most of Youtube and being advertised specifically to avoid regional restrictions.
I wonder what the master plan is for sites like Reddit which aren't porn sites but do have a significant amount of porn on there.
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Though if it’s going to take until 2025 to implement, maybe the government will have been defenestrated by then?
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@loopback0 This was my favorite line.
More than half (51 per cent) of 11 to 13-year-olds have encountered pornography online
I can't vouch for the rest of ye but I don't typically encounter porn online. You usually have to seek it out.
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@loopback0 said in In other news today...:
I wonder what the master plan is for sites like Reddit which aren't porn sites but do have a significant amount of porn on there.
The master plan is likely to require the use of official government-issued digital identities. Simplifies the automatic age checking. With just the teeny tiny cost of zero anonymity anywhere ever again. But that's just what governments dream of.
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
The master plan is likely to require the use of official government-issued digital identities. Simplifies the automatic age checking. With just the teeny tiny cost of zero anonymity anywhere ever again. But that's just what governments dream of.
We're talking about the UK, where proving your identity involves bringing your latest water or electricity bill along. Not sure how that scales to the internet -- like, what pornhub is going to ask you to hold up your water bill to the webcam?
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
@loopback0 This was my favorite line.
More than half (51 per cent) of 11 to 13-year-olds have encountered pornography online
I can't vouch for the rest of ye but I don't typically encounter porn online. You usually have to seek it out.
You don't read sites aimed for <18yos. Targeted advertising.
...As if that was even necessary. Every 12yo learns at school that there is porn online. Youthful curiosity will then do the rest.
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
@loopback0 This was my favorite line.
More than half (51 per cent) of 11 to 13-year-olds have encountered pornography online
I can't vouch for the rest of ye but I don't typically encounter porn online. You usually have to seek it out.
It's easier to find it by accident on sites like Reddit - if you're signed in, and have it set to display NSFW posts then it'll show on
/r/all
.
Plus tumblr etc, and their mates will send it to them.
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@loopback0 said in In other news today...:
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
@loopback0 This was my favorite line.
More than half (51 per cent) of 11 to 13-year-olds have encountered pornography online
I can't vouch for the rest of ye but I don't typically encounter porn online. You usually have to seek it out.
It's easier to find it by accident on sites like Reddit - if you're signed in, and have it set to display NSFW posts then it'll show on
/r/all
.
Plus tumblr etc, and their mates will send it to them.I keep forgetting about social media. I'm so out of touch with the youth of today.
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@loopback0 Tumblr is actually fairly aggressive about “thou shalt not porn” these days, but their filtering isn’t perfect.
It’s why they were sold to Automattic for $3 million after they were bought out by Yahoo for One Billlllllion Dollars (couldn’t find a better Dr Evil emoji) because all that NSFW content isn’t advertiser friendly.
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@Arantor Oh I forgot about that. We even discussed it here
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
Every 12yo learns at school that there is porn online.
I'm torn between making a joke about the weird curriculum you have over there and sharing that my first exposure to porn was in primary school, I must have been 8 or 9.