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Who the hell was that ad targeted at? Creepy, especially at the 4 second mark with the big eyes. I suppose the young woman was supposed to be in awe of "new ideas", but it looked to me like someone just hijacked her brain.

I still use FB, but aside from a couple of user groups that have strict policies about keeping on topic, I don't star long. I'm in, check for birthdays, check the user groups, and then I'm out. I simply will not click any advertisement, regardless of how interesting it looks.
 
I remember when Facebook found me a good idea in the shape of glowing artificial testicles I could pin onto a bike that I don’t own. Or the time the good idea was an anal douche hose.
dint buy any of them. They didn’t seen that great an idea to me. But hey, Facebook.
 
Honestly, this is how it should be. Personalised tracking does enable a lot of good things. You get the right info when you need it, have systems that are smarter because of all the data they can rely on.

The important point is that tracking has tradeoffs, and companies should allow users the choice to say no. Since they can't be trusted to do this, it has to come from the platform they're running on.

If I were on Facebook's evil board of , I'd buy a mobile manufacturer, make the best possible phones (Facebook is not lacking talent), sell them cheap, load them up with trackers and profit. No one to hold their hand back there.

You mean like Amazon? That’s essentially been their business model for years. Their devices are mainly meant to get you to use their services.
 
The world if social media didn’t exist...

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Yes, it is that if you assume that the “baby” in this case is a demonic entity. And I’m all for that :)

Bad analogy time! I feel it’s like child labor. For a growing family it’s the “most effective way of enhancing the total earning capacity of the family unit, but we reject that effectiveness because of the likelihood that families/children could be exploited.
🤣 Hahaha, nice!

Here's the deal, you are still doing what I was calling out. You are saying there is NO WAY to do personalized advertising where it isn't a bad thing. Just because the current implementation is bad, doesn't make any potential implementation bad.

Let me give you an example. One proposal a few years back was that each company wanting to sell something would create ads for different environments (banners, insta, YouTube, etc...). They would provide them in a "library" with keywords, metadata, etc... Then someone like Apple would allow app developers to interface with those ads but in a localized way. So essentially YOUR encrypted ecosystem would know what you bought and where you went, and it would reach out and anonymously grab advertising from the "library" to show you. This is a form of personalized advertising. It adapts to your behavior but is done without giving up on your privacy.

Did that become mainstream? Ummm, no. Why? Everyone would probably have their own reasons to give. Personally I believe it has a lot to do with the lack of resistance you mentioned earlier. I think all of this is a good thing, including personalized advertising, it just needs to progress and mature and have a privacy core to it.
 
Here's the deal, you are still doing what I was calling out. You are saying there is NO WAY to do personalized advertising where it isn't a bad thing. Just because the current implementation is bad, doesn't make any potential implementation bad.
Any implementation makes poor implementation possible, though. For example, I’m sure that there are some parents(grandparents?) that remember having jobs as minors, how much responsibility that provided them, how much job experience they received, how they had the opportunity to learn about saving or investing or consuming on a small scale for YEARS before getting their first job as an adult. And, there were companies that hired youngsters responsibly, didn’t overwork or underpay or coerce or exploit the kids and for THOSE folks, it could have been a well controlled and constructive experience. However, ANY rules, no matter how well constructed, that allow for minors in a workplace opens the door for bad actors to operate and flourish.

The societal response was generally, “OK, this has a number of positives, but even one kid being exploited in this way is TOO many, so we’re throwing the baby out with the bath water because there’s no way to prevent bad actors from gaming the system.”

Personalized advertising currently requires a system where an advertiser has personal information about users. That personal information is valuable not only for the advertiser, but as a set of data they can sell to others. There may be a “good” way to implement personalized advertising, but the good way will never be the most efficient. And, the most efficient, as you say, is the only thing they’re focused on.
 
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Any implementation makes poor implementation possible, though. For example, I’m sure that there are some parents(grandparents?) that remember having jobs as minors, how much responsibility that provided them, how much job experience they received, how they had the opportunity to learn about saving or investing or consuming on a small scale for YEARS before getting their first job as an adult. And, there were companies that hired youngsters responsibly, didn’t overwork or underpay or coerce or exploit the kids and for THOSE folks, it could have been a well controlled and constructive experience. However, ANY rules, no matter how well constructed, that allow for minors in a workplace opens the door for bad actors to operate and flourish.

The societal response was generally, “OK, this has a number of positives, but even one kid being exploited in this way is TOO many, so we’re throwing the baby out with the bath water because there’s no way to prevent bad actors from gaming the system.”

Personalized advertising currently requires a system where an advertiser has personal information about users. That personal information is valuable not only for the advertiser, but as a set of data they can sell to others. There may be a “good” way to implement personalized advertising, but the good way will never be the most efficient. And, the most efficient, as you say, is the only thing they’re focused on.
I like 99.99% of all of that and it is great to be expanded to think about it that way. Also, I am a horrible optimist and so I will always look to the positive as the potential, knowing that anything in life brings potential downsides. My brain just won't let me focus on "least common denominator" as an approach, it just directs my thoughts to "how could it be" and so overall I think we are on the same page for most of it, just seeing some details slightly different. And that is what makes variety so necessary to us humans! It makes our ideas/life better, just wish more people embraced it.
 
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