Reddit said Wednesday that the platform is revamping its privacy settings with an aim to make ad personalization and account visibility toggles consistent. Most notably though, it is removing the ability to opt out of ad personalization based on Reddit activity.
The company said that it will still have opt-out controls in “select countries” without specifying which ones. It mentioned in a blog post that users won’t see more ads but they will see better-targeted ads following this change.
“Reddit requires very little personal information, and we like it that way. Our advertisers instead rely on on-platform activity—what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals—to get an idea of what you might be interested in,” Reddit said.
The company is essentially removing the option to not track you based on whatever you do on Reddit.
Additionally, Reddit is consolidating two toggles on showing ads based on activity and information from partners into one toggle. So there is no way to separate those two settings now.
Reddit is seemingly removing toggles for getting post recommendations based on “general location” and activity on partner sites and apps. It’s not clear if this means those parameters will be used for post suggestions by default and there is no way to turn them off.
The social network said it will also roll out controls to limit certain advertising categories such as alcohol, weight loss, dating, gambling pregnancy, and parenting.
The company noted that ad-limiting controls will possibly show you fewer ads from mentioned categories if the toggles are turned off, but won’t possibly filter out all ads. Reddit justified this by saying it uses manual tagging and machine learning to label ads, so there is a chance that it is not 100% accurate.
Reddit is also simplifying its location customization setting under a single menu, which will be easily accessible through settings on apps and on the web.
The social platform has made several changes to increase monetization. It infamously made changes to its data API terms that led to many third-party clients shutting down and subreddits protesting in retaliation. Last week, it rolled out a new creator rewards program to incentivize people to post more and better content on the platform. But it also introduced a change that made it easier for users to purchase Gold rewards.
In an interview with The Verge in June, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman responded to IPO rumors and said “Getting to breakeven is a priority for us in any climate.”
I understand what you're saying, but at the same time that still means that your personal data is flowing to a third party. All that metadata and your activity signals are still in the hands of another data partner. We don't know how else that data is used. Display advertising is just one piece of digital marketing.
I use Google for search most of the time and also have a couple Google Home devices. I am disturbed whenever do see personalized ads but that is very rare since I have DNS based blocks at my house and use Ublock in my mobile browser. I understand that I'm going to get tracked and that I have a digital profile or two out there but I'm not really sure how valuable those profiles would be to anyone since I'm very rarely viewing ads and never interacting with them.
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And it's not just about getting hypertargeted ads. It comes down to behavior manipulation. Price and coverage discrimination. The ad engine is just the tip of an iceberg not even the people who created the algorithms can understand anymore.
Nevertheless, use/donate/contribute to/share uBlock Origin. The internet is legit unusable without it at this point.