I agree with that. If profiling-based ads were allowed, minors would no longer receive ads for booze and porn. They'd have to ask their older brother about the real internet, which is embarrassing.
Meta profiled for vulnerable, low self-esteem minors (eg by monitoring added and quickly removed photos). It was used by advisers to push ads for beauty & lifestyle products feeding on depressed teenagers. Booze is non issue compared to that.
Ah, no, that's why Discord did the sudden mass-push to verify everyone they could as an adult, because "Real Money Gaming" is now an advertising category they welcome with open arms.
how will the age of the browsing person be evaluated without checking for IDs? or do kids still get profiled, but if they get profiled and determined to be a kid you can't serve them ads?
i'm all for it if we expand it to banning ads in all virtual and physical spaces of Switzerland :D (or at least inside of public transport, i hate how distracting and useless these freaking ad-panels in buses, trains, trams etc. are).
Can't wait for every website to show you "before you can view this ad, verify your age by logging in" banners!
Realistically, lawmakers know that ad companies know which age cohort a user is in. For companies like Google/Facebook/etc. this shouldn't be too much of an issue, they already know your age when you make an account.
And if they cannot determine what vulnerable groups they're not allowed to show profiled ads, maybe they should disable profiled ads by default until you sign in. Everybody wins!
You can keep your kids off the internet. Mine will have access to all torrents, shadow librarys, and local LLMs, ( and if I can afford it as many real life engineering tools as they can use) Let's see who is better prepared for life at 18?
As a parent my job is to install restrictions to filter ads, the "TikToks", and other assorted corporate brainrot, same restrictions as for myself, but also explain to them why.
once/if they can work around my tech, I think they can handle it all.
Or they just go to their friends who's parents don't give a shit and fill up on brainrot there. Or probably even at school.
You can't raise your kids in isolation. Society raises them, if society says it is OK to feed kids Tiktok brainrot before they are 14/16/whatever age it will happen. To your kids as well.
This is exactly what government is for. Solving problems like this universally.
> You can keep your kids off the internet. Mine will have access to all torrents, shadow librarys, and local LLMs, ( and if I can afford it as many real life engineering tools as they can use) Let's see who is better prepared for life at 18?
Do you think real life engineering tools and local LLMs are on the internet?
There's been a lot of recent swiss efforts to curtail advertising. Off the top of my head:
- Zurich's parliament voted 58–57 last year to place limits on outdoor advertising (have 2027 to come up with implementation)
- Bern fully instituted the ban but reversed course over revenue concerns
- Vernier & Lancy have banned billboards
They certainly seem to have the appetite to reduce the size of the industrial advertising complex... but there's clearly some successful industry pushback (like in the case of Bern). Curious to see how this profiling shakes out. Hard to make a revenue loss argument so I'm guessing it'll pass.
Hamburg in Germany had a city referendum to ban all public animated/screen ads in 2025, but they didn't get enough people signing it (got 50k votes, needed 65k).
This kind of ballot issue is a great filter. It's so obviously correct, the reason of any normal person will be "why was it legal at all?", so anyone arguing against the ban is quite probably paid to do so and should be ignored.
Why allow profiling at all? This way everyone gets a bit more privacy, second it doesn't create another situation where you got to prove that you're an adult.
There's no way to implement this without (1) usage-based profiling (what's being banned in the first place) or (2) ID verification.
I'm against both of those.
For me, the only acceptable solutions are: (1) ban all profiling-based ads (2) require respecting DO_NOT_TRACK (so that people/minors/their parents can individually decide what to do, but websites are then legally forced to respect that)
A best effort implementation should be fine. Advertisers already have suspected age fields available (derived from behavioral patterns, linked information across devices, etc). When you develop a reasonable suspicion that it's a minor then stop fleshing out the profile and targeting them. That's what the big players already do (maybe not Meta, but certainly at least Google). That doesn't quite fall into your (1) point since it's not profiling that's being banned, but profiling-based ads.
It seems like a roundabout way of banning profiling of non-ID’d users in general which seems… good? Like, if overlapping regulations have the practical effect of banning tracking, then that’s a win for society, right?
If you ban profiling-based ads to minors, and it's not possible to reliably detect when a user is a minor, then you have de facto banned all profiling-based ads. Since you deem that solution acceptable (as do I!) I don't see what the problem is.
Here in Sweden it's illegal to make ads directed at children. Consequently the TV channels that do so transmit from abroad.
This would of course have been easy to ban anyway-- it's not like we can't have rules on foreign internet firms, for example, but historically the politicians were unwilling to make a useful law.
I think the Swiss could take one step further and add a general ban on ads targeting young children in addition to this; and then we Swedes should imitate the package.
It is also banned in Iceland, but sometimes in the 2000s they stopped enforcing it, probably as people were getting more and more of their broadcasts from abroad. Curiously the milk monopoly (Mjólkursamsalan) was allowed to target children in their ads throughout this period.
The US has (had? I haven't checked in 40 years) rules like that for TV. It killed most of the TV programs for kids that were populate. The programs my parents remember fondly - not possible anymore because they need ads. I remember only public broadcasting kids programs.
TV cannot be paid for. You might be thinking of Cable TV which can be paid for, but regular TV is just public radio waves, which everybody gets. (remember we are talking about the 1960s - things have changed)
Ah. Here in Sweden basically all TV is now cable-based. We apparently still have some wireless stuff, but I haven't seen it in years, so I've basically forgotten how TV used to work, and still works in some parts of the country.
I wonder if it would be simpler for the digital advertisement to ban companies to block adblockers solutions. Yes we might kill a certain business area, which lead to let companies find other income sources.
Removing targeted advertisement on minor should be no brainer but just harder to implement (everyone is curious and say they are 18).
But how would you actually do it? Ban the exchange of money for delivering specific messages? I guess it could work. It would require judgement calls, but we have other laws that require even more subtle judgement calls.
how would you want to keep having free journalism without advertising? (and we all know where any democracy goes to die). historically nothing else worked at scale minus a few exceptions.
i think the sentiment against ads from the educated bubble really completely takes a working democracy for granted. spoiler: its not and look whats happening in the US... and the budget shift from openweb/newspapers towards video (mainly google) in the advertising industry is massive...
disclaimer: i work in adtech but we do not profile users and do not track them.
I don't know, but is "free journalism" actually good? If the incentives of free journalism (thanks to being ad funded) are to increase engagement and avoid criticizing their advertisers is the product actually journalism at all?
The weak point of journalism has always been the larger-tier patrons. Can't report negative things if money-man says "no".
The advertising industry at large is at fault for our degradation in journalism.
Advertising needs clicks and eyes, the providers produce highly targeted profile algorithms to ensure maximum clicks and eyes, which degrades the information conveyed into the smallest, most enraging snippets possible. Those rise to the top as the most profitable ways to convey information, and continues the cycle, further destroying news that doesn't profit in this ecosystem.
Killing most forms of advertising across the board would of course basically destroy these large tech companies that rely on them. But the same companies have completely derailed society with their "services". We'd be better off without them.
Of course this would likely hurt "GDP" and "The Economy", but that would just mean we have an unproductive economy primarily inflated by a pointless circle of advertisement.
not sure if the ad industry per se can be blamed for the degradation of journalism. at least not in the way you imply. Newspapers used to have even more ads. i also don't see much higher quality in outlets that are financed by oligarchs etc...
what degraded the journalism in my view is consumer shift towards UGC and social media (which in turn is ad funded and drew away advertiser budgets, leaving the Journalistic outlets with low(er) quality ads).
but its a rather complex topic and possibly all views here are too simplistic
The press has largely depended on ads since the 17th century. The revenue from subscriptions and individual paper sales typically only covered about 20% of the costs.
The idea of banning all ads sounds great, but legitimate content is paid for with ads. Ban tracking and targeted ads. It’s not a far stretch into cyberstalking, wiretapping, and other privacy laws.
There was 75 or more years of media ads that had no feedback except when very explicitly asking (Nielsen). Everyone was making money and doing just fine.
If content is truly legitimate, people will pay a fair price for it. If your business model collapses without ads, maybe you didn't deserve one to begin with
101 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 34.1 ms ] threadi'm all for it if we expand it to banning ads in all virtual and physical spaces of Switzerland :D (or at least inside of public transport, i hate how distracting and useless these freaking ad-panels in buses, trains, trams etc. are).
You can also not build marketing campaigns based on profiling technologies.
So an advertiser would not be able to advertise a toy with a marketing strategy based on bidding on users that watch MrBeast and Minecraft videos
Realistically, lawmakers know that ad companies know which age cohort a user is in. For companies like Google/Facebook/etc. this shouldn't be too much of an issue, they already know your age when you make an account.
And if they cannot determine what vulnerable groups they're not allowed to show profiled ads, maybe they should disable profiled ads by default until you sign in. Everybody wins!
As a parent my job is to install restrictions to filter ads, the "TikToks", and other assorted corporate brainrot, same restrictions as for myself, but also explain to them why. once/if they can work around my tech, I think they can handle it all.
You can't raise your kids in isolation. Society raises them, if society says it is OK to feed kids Tiktok brainrot before they are 14/16/whatever age it will happen. To your kids as well.
This is exactly what government is for. Solving problems like this universally.
Do you think real life engineering tools and local LLMs are on the internet?
- Zurich's parliament voted 58–57 last year to place limits on outdoor advertising (have 2027 to come up with implementation)
- Bern fully instituted the ban but reversed course over revenue concerns
- Vernier & Lancy have banned billboards
They certainly seem to have the appetite to reduce the size of the industrial advertising complex... but there's clearly some successful industry pushback (like in the case of Bern). Curious to see how this profiling shakes out. Hard to make a revenue loss argument so I'm guessing it'll pass.
What happens when the billboard company also makes cars, sells fuel, maps and so on
There's no way to implement this without (1) usage-based profiling (what's being banned in the first place) or (2) ID verification.
I'm against both of those.
For me, the only acceptable solutions are: (1) ban all profiling-based ads (2) require respecting DO_NOT_TRACK (so that people/minors/their parents can individually decide what to do, but websites are then legally forced to respect that)
If there's no profile already, then they can serve the ad, since it's not a profiling-based ad and they don't need to know if the viewer is a minor.
If there is a profile then they have the knowledge to avoid advertising based on that if it's a minor.
I don't see why ID verification needs to come into play?
I would love to see a ban on _all_ profiling-based ads, but this seems like a step in the right direction to me.
An ad is a business proposal and minors cannot do business without the consent of their parents.
why limit only to them? why not to ban it altogether?
This would of course have been easy to ban anyway-- it's not like we can't have rules on foreign internet firms, for example, but historically the politicians were unwilling to make a useful law.
I think the Swiss could take one step further and add a general ban on ads targeting young children in addition to this; and then we Swedes should imitate the package.
But how would you actually do it? Ban the exchange of money for delivering specific messages? I guess it could work. It would require judgement calls, but we have other laws that require even more subtle judgement calls.
i think the sentiment against ads from the educated bubble really completely takes a working democracy for granted. spoiler: its not and look whats happening in the US... and the budget shift from openweb/newspapers towards video (mainly google) in the advertising industry is massive...
disclaimer: i work in adtech but we do not profile users and do not track them.
The advertising industry at large is at fault for our degradation in journalism.
Advertising needs clicks and eyes, the providers produce highly targeted profile algorithms to ensure maximum clicks and eyes, which degrades the information conveyed into the smallest, most enraging snippets possible. Those rise to the top as the most profitable ways to convey information, and continues the cycle, further destroying news that doesn't profit in this ecosystem.
Killing most forms of advertising across the board would of course basically destroy these large tech companies that rely on them. But the same companies have completely derailed society with their "services". We'd be better off without them.
Of course this would likely hurt "GDP" and "The Economy", but that would just mean we have an unproductive economy primarily inflated by a pointless circle of advertisement.
what degraded the journalism in my view is consumer shift towards UGC and social media (which in turn is ad funded and drew away advertiser budgets, leaving the Journalistic outlets with low(er) quality ads).
but its a rather complex topic and possibly all views here are too simplistic
The press has largely depended on ads since the 17th century. The revenue from subscriptions and individual paper sales typically only covered about 20% of the costs.
I'd love a world without advertising, but it's never going to happen. But a world without profile-targeted advertising could.
There was 75 or more years of media ads that had no feedback except when very explicitly asking (Nielsen). Everyone was making money and doing just fine.
Here’s a simple solution: the ad industry is welcome to not profile its users.
Don’t get distracted though:
> Furthermore, the reporting procedure is to be extended to include all content suspected of being unlawful.
Operating keyword here: “suspected”
What happened to due process?