HACKER Q&A
📣 cm2012

What's the Harm of Targeted Ads?


I work in advertising and I'm looking for a discussion here.

Besides encouraging people to buy things you might think they don't need, what's an actual harm people experience from targeted ads as opposed to non targeted ads?

  👤 detaro Accepted Answer ✓
Targeted advertising (in the way people object to it usually) comes with tracking and data collection. Data collection leads to databases with details about people that can be hacked or sold - not just to private parties, it is known that law enforcement and military buy such databases. And the military generally does not collect data about people to do nice things to them.

Targeted ads are used to target people at their weakpoints: pushing people into addiction, spending money on questionable health remedies, ... - and from what I hear from people in publishing industry, basically nobody is effective at policing this kind of thing, but rather takes a "oh to bad, if you tell us the exact example we'll ban them maybe".

Data collection also creates additional resource usage which makes user experience worse.

👤 btown
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/women-affected-by-mis...

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/4/9/21204425/targeted-ads...

👤 verdverm
Coworkers seeing the highly personal ads for something you'd prefer to be private?

All you have to do is go to the wrong page and a day later you have ads for things you have no interest in. It happens with HN, where I click a post and then see ads I'd rather not.

And then consider what needs to happen in order to target someone so personally or individually.

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Question to someone in ad tech, do your customers lose greater than or less than 50% of their ad spend to targeting the wrong person, malicious bot nets used to syphon from the system, and / or other sources of loss?

👤 bluGill
Anything can be used against you later. Courts of law have standards. If you run for political office you can bet your opponent doesn't when looking for dirt to take our of context. You don't know where life will take you, what do you care about your next boss finding out?
👤 thesuperbigfrog
"Please post all of your personal information here in HN.

We will email you and call you with ads and offers based on what we think you will like.

We promise not to do anything bad with your personal information."

👤 jjgreen
Targeting requires surveillance, and I don't want money-grubbing little shits nosing around in my life.