U.S. Proposal to Ban Ad Targeting Would Change Facebook and Google's Ad Model

[engine]

A proposal called the "Banning Surveillance Advertising Act" could change big tech advertising models entirely, affecting the ad business of companies such as Facebook and Google. This could be huge as there's a whole online adverting industry built on using online ad targeting.

“The ‘surveillance advertising’ business model is premised on the unseemly collection and hoarding of personal data to enable ad targeting,” Eshoo, the bill’s lead sponsor, said in a Tuesday statement. “This pernicious practice allows online platforms to chase user engagement at great cost to our society, and it fuels disinformation, discrimination, voter suppression, privacy abuses, and so many other harms. The surveillance advertising business model is broken.”

[theverge.com...]

[Dimitri]

I hope it passes and then be adopted world wide.

Questions remain:

- could it end for good cookies and trackers ? And these awful banners, we, in Europe, have to put.

- could it reward quality content and sites ? Actually, no matter the quality of a site, what matters is the profile of users. If tomorrow, we get back to contextual advertising, then this could shake up things beyond imagination.

[ronin]

Limiting surveillance would be a huge step forward.

I started using Facebook in March 2007.

I abandoned Facebook in Dec 2019. (The end of the decade felt like a good time to walk away.)

As long as being continually surveiled on more datapoints than I can imagine remains a condition of access, I'll not be returning to it.

Also, my free time and cognitive clarity since walking away from Facebook have expanded and improved immeasurably.

[engine]

This is only at the stage of a Bill, and is likely to get watered down.

There's no question that big tech will fight this very hard, just as they've done in every other attack on their services.
For example; giving users' control over their data and privacy; it's either buried deep in terms and conditions. or on links that are very difficult to find. A user then forgets about it, and then can't find options at a later date.

The premise of an ad-supported model will be devalued by these proposals.

[HarvardJoe]

Hi, I agree with engine plus on this. It will be bogged down in red tape of some sort. I don't think that big tech will be greatly effected by this. They'll find a way around it. Just as the net neutrality debate doesn't phase big, high-end web tech. This is because the internet is designed to be complex, and some of the brightest minds are out there in tech. They'll find a way, and with the internet there is always a way at some point. Especially, ever since broad band came out around 2000 or a bit before.

[ember]

Bills get introduced all the time. It is a long, winding process from introduction to passage and signature. And this is an election year, which means little legislative work will get done (not that much gets done anyway). So it could be years before this or any other tech bill gets passed. And then there will be a slow phase in, giving businesses time to get ready. So anything that is going to happen is a ways off.

[tangor]

@ember's timeline is pretty accurate, nothing will happen for quite some time. However, these companies have other methods of tracking and collecting data so I suspect that whack-a-mole legislation will be around for decades to come if these one gets passed.

Meanwhile, I wonder what kind of monitoring (and who!) would be necessary to see if the companies (g ain't the only one!) are in compliance.

[ronin]

[...] for decades to come [...]

So, the only practical strategy for most people will remain to vote with one's feet until next-gen platforms emerge (*) which reproduce the functionality of 2010s social networking, but are distributed rather than centralised and aspire to be agnostic communications infrastructure (like email / sms etc.) rather than the engines behind profit-maximising billion-dollar offshore corporations.

* Not that examples of these don't already exist and there aren't more all the time

Quite a while back I came across a pair of articles by André Staltz which throw up some interesting ideas and are well worth reading:

1) The Web began dying in 2014, here's how
[staltz.com...]

2) A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet
[staltz.com...]

[RhinoFish]

Self-regulation has been a joke, too bad, the middle ground (between unchecked abuse now and the FULL ban just proposed, where we each can control what info we share with whom) never came.

So the many data over-users and abusers will very likely cause this ban to eventually happen.

[EditorialGuy]

Where were these guys when targeted direct-mail lists were invented? (And when government agencies such as DMVs began selling names, addresses, etc. to marketers?)

To borrow a phrase from Casey Stengel, "It's deja vu all over again."

[EditorialGuy]

what matters is the profile of users. If tomorrow, we get back to contextual advertising, then this could shake up things beyond imagination.

I see no reason why contextual couldn't work as well for display ads as for text ads. Of course, the problem is that contextual misses large swaths of potential buyers. Take something like cruising in the Antarctic (to pick a topic at random): For every hardcore cruiser who's a prospect for an Antarctic cruise, there must be scores of other people who like the idea of new travel experiences and might be open to the idea. Contextual ads wouldn't reach them, and scattershot mass-market ads that ignore age, income, education, and other demographic attributes would waste huge amounts of money for the advertiser.

[DenisMatsko]

Well if it happens in US it will happen everywhere

[DenisMatsko]

But to say true it's great initiative because Facebook and Instagram are awful in 2021...People leave them.

[mosxu]

Wait does it mean that big tech will not be allowed to display ads according to the size of my wallet and how many ads I click until I pull my credit card out?

[Dimitri]

I see no reason why contextual couldn't work as well for display ads as for text ads.

I didn't say it right. I meant for publishers. For example, all these web sites which are attracting visitors with clickbait content. They can make a good living, because ads they are serving are based on the profile of their visitors, not their dumb content. if tomorrow, things go back to contextual advertising, they'll have a hard time monetizing their BS.