Latent good trends

Destry · 2022-02-05 11:15:02

You’ve undoubtedly read that Facebook/Meta stocks took a big plunge, loosing 232 billion. That’s not small. I’m sure investors are thrilled. Apple seems to be impacting the former’s ability to profit off advertising. Something.

Aljazeera also reported that Facebook saw a decline in annual user-base (2021) for the first time. Presumably it has reached saturation point geographically / demographically. Those are trends I would like to see repeated.

The same report also said Twitter and Instagram may also be hitting saturation points. The only direction from there is down.

And this bit of good GDPR news…

enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful

EU data protection authorities find that the consent popups that plagued Europeans for years are illegal. All data collected through them must be deleted. This decision impacts Google’s, Amazon’s and Microsoft’s online advertising businesses.

. . .

All data collected through the TCF must now be deleted by the more than 1,000 companies that pay IAB Europe to use the TCF.

. . .

The decision was made by the Belgian Data Protection Authority in agreement with 27 other EU data protection authorities, and is immediately binding and enforceable across the European Union under the GDPR’ “one stop shop” mechanism.

I guess that means we in Europe won’t be seeing as many cookie pop-ups, though so far no noticeable change.

Good news sure comes rare.

Last edited by Destry (2022-02-05 11:17:35)

Bloke · 2022-02-05 18:15:14

This is why I don’t play the stock market because it’s too easy to manipulate.

Thing is, when a product reaches saturation point – in this case when everyone who wants an account has an account – why did investors get twitchy and dump stock? It’s impossible to have exponential growth forever. It had to plateau and/or begin to shrink at some point, but it doesn’t necessarily stop the revenue stream or diminish growth.

They’re still selling data to anyone who holds out their hand, and ads to the existing user base in ever more divisive and despicable ways. Every one of the N billion people on the platform is still a commodity ripe for exploitation. They rebranded to Meta for a reason: because they need a way to grow the data mining side of the business in a legit form, separate from the look at me me me platforms they own, to offset the attrition they knew was coming.

jakob · 2022-02-05 18:31:52

Destry wrote #332657:

And this bit of good GDPR news…

enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful

That news item is so laden with acronyms that I can barely make sense of it so forgive me if I’ve not understood the implications…

The report is no doubt an important victory for data protection advocates but it seems to me, the only good news is that the trade body’s consent request mechanism has been found to be at best deficient and at worst wilfully negligent in its declared function. And that a data protection authority has bared its teeth so that there’s a glimmer of hope for better data protection practices in future.

How the authorities are going to police the deletion of illegally obtained data in sub-companies when this has long been amalgamated into a myriad of user profiling systems I don’t know.

Far worse is the ‘revelation’ that bad practices with user data have been going on the whole time and it seems hard to believe that the commissioning companies were unaware, after all they have been receiving and using ‘data that shouldn’t have come their way’.

And the big tech companies in the background also have a “fall guy” in the IAB. I wonder how much it will really impact the driving forces in the level above.

I guess that means we in Europe won’t be seeing as many cookie pop-ups

I’m not sure. There may be less “consent spam” (as they describe this particular variant in the article) but presumably withholding consent is still the primary mechanism that users have to being tracked. The big corporations are hardly going to decide to give up tracking and profiling. So either they tweak it to ostensibly conform with the GDRP (until caught again), or replace it with something similar, or they withhold access to their services to those with user accounts where usage is conditional on submitting to surveillance…

jakob · 2022-02-05 18:59:08

Aside: I am reading Dave Egger’s “The Every” at the moment, a spinning-forward of his earlier book “The Circle”. The company of his last book has recast itself as “The Every” to reflect its wider remit, and the parallels with Alphabet and Meta are unmistakable. The book came out just a couple of weeks after Facebook rebranded as Meta, neatly underlining his point. The protagonist of this book is someone aiming to infiltrate and bring down the system by feeding it with new, ever wackier and abhorrent ideas that sound just about plausible enough to make it through the distorted reality of the corporation but that, she hopes, the users will revolt against…

It’s a highly entertaining read, brilliantly witty in its word and concept creations. Aside from the obvious implications it spins out, it contains some beautifully absurd scenes that explore larger issues such as correctness and conformity, (the post-rewriting of) history and identity. There’s a lovely riff on what makes good literature and a little meta-cameo on the reception of his own earlier book. I’ve not finished it yet, so can’t report on the end.

jakob · 2022-02-05 19:05:49

Another aside: Are there any AdGuard users here who have got it to work well with the cookie consent pages?

On Pete’s recommendation (👍) I purchased a discounted licence a while back and it is more effective at removing ads than anything I had tried before. It’s particularly nice not to have adverts interrupt YT videos. But the one thing it stumbles over all the time is the cookie consent pages. The consent bar is removed but often not the background overlay and scroll-disabling of the page, leaving you with a “frozen” page. You can disable it once to decline consent and then reload again and from then on its okay. Is there a better workaround?

Bloke · 2022-02-05 19:17:32

jakob wrote #332659:

The big corporations are hardly going to decide to give up tracking and profiling.

Exactly. Look what happened in the wake of GDPR. They invented new terminology “Legitimate Interest”, hid that behind a subtab in the Manage Consent popup, and (many) opt-out systems don’t have an “Object all” button for that set of data, meaning you need to wade through up to 100 specially chosen partners and disable them one by one. Only the hardcore are going to do that.

wet · 2022-02-06 06:13:50

jakob wrote #332660:

Aside: I am reading Dave Egger’s “The Every” at the moment, a spinning-forward of his earlier book “The Circle”.

Thanks for the hint. Will add this as a new layer on my »Read this next« book stack ;-)

gaekwad · 2022-02-06 16:48:14

wet wrote #332665:

[…] my » Read this next« book stack ;-)

OK, I’ll bite…what’s currently on the stack, wet?

gaekwad · 2022-02-06 17:34:36

jakob wrote #332662:

Another aside: Are there any AdGuard users here who have got it to work well with the cookie consent pages?

[…]

But the one thing it stumbles over all the time is the cookie consent pages.

The best route I’ve found is to submit the popup as an annoyance, which opens a GitHub issue. See:

github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/labels/T%3A%20Annoyance

Note: there are often undesirable and / or NSFW domains in the issues queues, and potentially imagery along the same lines (though they should be spoiler’d), so tread carefully.

wet · 2022-02-06 18:50:48

gaekwad wrote #332668:

OK, I’ll bite…what’s currently on the stack, wet?

It’s a massive stack. <3

A quick look reveals some glimspes of Stephen Fry’s “Moab Is My Washpot”, Natascha Strobl’s “Radikalisierter Konservatismus” (“Radicalised Conservatism”), David Sedaris’ “Das Leben ist kein Streichelzoo” (“Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk”) and Matt Haig’s “Mitternachtsbibliothek” (“The Midnight Library”). I don’t think that’s all, and that thought makes me happy…

Bloke · 2022-02-06 19:12:42

My wife raved about The Midnight Library. I have it on my Kindle but not read it yet.

jakob · 2022-02-06 20:55:46

gaekwad wrote #332669:

The best route I’ve found is to submit the popup as an annoyance, which opens a GitHub issue…

Thanks for the tip. I’ll have to watch. It seems to happen with a lot of regular sites. The popup is removed but the overlay and scroll lock isn’t. It could be I have an interplay between “Better” and “AdGuard”…

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2022-02-05 11:15:02