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1QAte4 t1_j6j0j97 wrote

Reply to comment by thought_first in Facebook seeks to block $3.7 billion UK mass action over market dominance by davetowers646

This is the business model of most social media companies and I don't know what the alternative would be except making people pay subscriptions to use sites.

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Borninthewagon t1_j6jqhya wrote

Not a business expert, but I don't believe you need to gather and sell people's personal data in order to sell advertising on your site.

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Aazadan t1_j6jydka wrote

You don’t, but to generate targeted ad’s as well as content feedback loops which in turn get you more targeted ad’s does require personal data.

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PsecretPseudonym t1_j6o1kds wrote

Nope. Content-based targeting (e.g., AdWords, originally) doesn’t need to know anything about the user.

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Aazadan t1_j6o97y0 wrote

Which is a completely different type of targeting. That’s targeting people based on a product they’re looking at not something like “show this ad, to men between 30 and 40, who have gotten a car repair within the past 60 days”.

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PsecretPseudonym t1_j6pcdam wrote

Yes, “different type of targeting” means you can still do targeting. Just not user-specific targeting. In many situations contextual targeting is actually far more effective (e.g., search ads have performed incredibly well even prior to much use of personal user info/history, because keywords searched at the time of search represent by far the most valuable piece of information to select the highest expected value ad).

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DeNoodle t1_j6jwv6h wrote

But to make money from selling advertising on your site you do.

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Detachabl_e t1_j6kgaw0 wrote

It's not the monetization, it's the abuse of it's dominant position. In other words, there should be 5 or 6 little facebooks all vying for our data.

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1QAte4 t1_j6kl3dl wrote

There are a bunch of different companies doing personalized ads. Google, Twitter, TikTok all use different data to personalize ads.

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