Norway to fine Meta $98,500 a day over user privacy breach from 14 August
theguardian.com
Norway to fine Meta $98,500 a day over user privacy breach from 14 August::Country’s data protection regulator said firm cannot harvest user information such as physical locations for showing targeted ads
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They're trying, I'll give em that, but we're seeing more and more that tech regulators can't keep up with changing tech. We're just starting to tackle data privacy and now we've got the whole new problem space of generative AI. There needs to be actual investment in fast, informed regulation.
And honestly, "turn off targeted advertising" isn't a reasonable demand for most countries, because, as much as everyone hates on it here, small business rely on targeted advertising and "go compete with Walmart for the same ad space" would suck for most economies.
I wholeheartedly agree with your first point. The second however does baffle me slightly. I'm not from Norway but I would not bet their small businesses are that reliant on targeted ad. But I could very much be wrong.
Actually I'm not sur I understand why targeted ads, in the way Facebook is implementing them anyway, is that beneficial to small businesses. Bigger outfits have the means to litterally crush the small ones in this arena too.
I'm Canadian, but our small businesses are definitely very reliant on targeted advertising. Anecdotally, I know a few people with their own businesses that will only use Google or Facebook targeted advertising, because it's cheap and they get a better return on ad spend since they can target a local subpopulation.
It doesn't actually work that way, at least not entirely. Platforms don't necessarily show the ad with the highest bid, they also take into account relevance to the user, so Walmart can't just swoop in and take all the ad spots. Even if they could, platforms don't charge unless the ad was shown (or clicked in some cases), so worst case scenario small businesses just wouldn't have their account's ad dollars spent. This definitely isn't the case though, because 70% of small businesses advertiser on social media.
There are additional studies that show this as well. I'll try to find some that aren't funded by Facebook or Google, so far this one is pretty interesting:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09035
I stand corrected then, thank you very much for the time and effort this post took. This is clearly an outlook I lacked.