Link Harvest: Ban Targeted Adertising

[osewalrus]

David Dyan makes a strong case in this article for just banning targeted advertising altogether.
https://newrepublic.com/article/147887/ban-targeted-advertising-facebook-google ;

Comments

[dsrtao]

There's probably a very acceptable compromise available: allow certain broad categories of demographic information to be used by the intermediary (the one getting money for showing the ads) but not visible to the ad originator.

Categories might be:

State of residence
Birth decade
Gender if known
user-submitted and editable keyword list

So Proctor-and-Gamble can ask Facebook to show their new deodorant ad to women in 12 states who were born in the 1980s, 90s and 00s, but:

1. P&G doesn't get to see the list, just the number of people in that category and the number who eventually saw the ad
2. P&G can't ask for anything more specific and FB can't offer it.

One more restriction, I think: if the number in a selected group goes below 100, it's not valid. Men born in 200x who live in Maryland and list "Silver Spring" and "BaltiCon" and "filking" is probably just too small a list, and a simple minimum takes care of that.