“Select countries” will still have the choice to opt out, however.

Reddit will no longer let you opt out of personalized ads::Reddit is removing the ability for some users to opt out of ad personalization based on their activity on the platform, though some countries will be excluded from the change.

  • FUCKRedditMods@lemm.eeEnglish
    23·
    9 months ago

    I already got permabanned from reddit for saying “cunt” so fuck that cunt website. I used to lament how terrible it was becoming but, now that I’ve removed myself from it, I’m just watching it crash and burn and enjoying every bit of it.

    Soon the website will only be bots and shills and a few people who never say anything even slightly aggressive/controversial/opinionated/crass. A boring, sterile shell of its former self— just a safe space for advertisements.

    Eat shit and die reddit!

  • wagoner@infosec.pubEnglish
    11·
    9 months ago

    Mark my words, where one tech bro goes, the others always follow. This is not a good sign.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    6·
    9 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Reddit is removing the ability for some users to opt out of ad personalization based on their activity on the platform.

    Announced on Wednesday alongside several incoming updates to its privacy, advertising, and location settings, Reddit’s head of privacy, Jutta Williams, justified the change by saying that Reddit “requires very little personal information” from its users and that it would allow the company to “better predict which ad may be most relevant to you.”

    European countries might be exempt from the forced opt in as the change would likely bring Reddit into direct conflict with the EU’s GDPR rules, which require companies to get express permission to collect or process personal data for use in activities like advertising.

    Meta recently carved out similar exceptions for European Facebook and Instagram users earlier this year to bring it into compliance with EU privacy laws.

    The Reddit changes will also add the ability for users to see fewer ads from specific categories like gambling, alcohol, weight loss, and dating.

    The company says that its process of combining manual tagging with machine learning to classify the ads isn’t likely to be 100 percent successful at first but expects it to improve over time.

    The original article contains 305 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 35%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

    • picnicolas@slrpnk.netEnglish
      12·
      9 months ago

      Sharing and/or selling that data to third parties that do have personally identifiable information… now they know everything about your porn habits et al., that data is more easily leaked the wider it’s spread, you’re more easily doxxed/blackmailed, etc.

    • halcyondays@midwest.socialEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      In an ideal world opting out should minimize that data collection, although yeah I agree it probably doesn’t.

      That said, I’ve done plenty of advertising analytics work, and some of the services (no idea about Reddit, I’m thinking more b2b than b2c) do offer the ability to analyze targets that matched your lookalike audience by whether or not a impression was made - meaning if you have ads blocked and never saw an ad, you may still be included in campaign results given to a third party even if you never saw their ad. That’s where the data collection becomes extremely problematic, as long as they have that tracking data to be able to classify you, you’re being included in targeting and targeting results given to anyone willing to pay for it. And again, hopefully as an individual that’s somewhat anonymized (is it? who knows), but I can say in the business advertising world it absolutely is not, I could take a list of targeted companies and feed them into further campaigns, even on other platforms. And especially in the consumer world, many of those advertisers are data brokers themselves, compiling and selling those results to increasingly sketchy companies looking for lists of contacts for who knows what.

      Data has become this grotesque ouroboros in our economy, it continually feeds a never ending loop of advertising dollars thrown into the void, billions of dollars and who knows how much compute time, energy, emissions, with no real tangible output - but everybody is doing it, so everybody needs to do it to look like a competitive business.

    • Havald@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      You're working on the assumption that they collect that data anyways and if they do then I kind of agree. But in the EU for example it would be illegal for them to collect that data so I sincerely hope theyre not doing that. Well, actually I kind of hope they are doing that and someone finds out about it.

      Assuming that no one is breaking any laws here I'd rather get generic ads than targeted since I'm perfectly capable of making my own purchase decisions and don't want to be manipulated into buying some garbage I don't need. But more importantly, I don't want some random companies out there having a detailed profile of me, that's super dystopian to me. What if that falls into the wrong hands? Oh wait, it would already be in the wrong hands.