Reddit's Changes in Ad Personalization and Privacy Settings: What It Means For You

• Reddit

Reddit, the popular social media platform known for its emphasis on community-based discussions, announced on Wednesday that it is making significant changes to its privacy settings and ad personalization. The most significant change is the removal of the ability for users to opt out of ad personalization based on their Reddit activity. Reddit, one of the most popular social media platforms, is altering its privacy settings and ad personalization. But what does it mean for the users?

The Changes and Their Implications

The company stated that it aims to make ad personalization and account visibility toggles consistent with these changes. Although the opt-out controls will still be available in some countries, Reddit did not specify which ones. The company also clarified that users wouldn't see more ads but will see better-targeted ads following this change.

Reddit prides itself on requiring very little personal information from its users. Instead, its advertisers rely on on-platform activity to gauge user interests. This includes the communities users join or leave, their upvotes and downvotes and other similar signals.

Removal of Certain Options

These changes mean that Reddit effectively removes the option not to track users' activities on the platform. The company is also consolidating two toggles related to showing ads based on training and information from partners into a single toggle. As a result, users will no longer be able to separate these two settings.

Reddit also removes the option for post recommendations based on general location and activity on partner sites and apps. It must be determined if these parameters will be used for post suggestions by default and if users can turn them off.

New Advertising Categories Control

Reddit has announced new controls that allow users to limit the appearance of specific advertising categories, such as alcohol, weight loss, dating, gambling, pregnancy, and parenting. Users can turn off these toggles to reduce the ads they see from these categories. However, Reddit cautions that this may only eliminate some ads from these categories, as the labeling process involves manual tagging and machine learning, which may only sometimes be entirely accurate.

Simplifying Location Customization

Furthermore, Reddit is simplifying its location customization setting under a single menu, which will be easily accessible through app and web settings. This change is part of Reddit's ongoing effort to increase monetization, which has also seen changes to its data API terms, causing some third-party clients to shut down and leading to protests from some subreddits.

Last week, Reddit rolled out a new creator rewards program to incentivize people to post more and better content on the platform. It also introduced a change that made it easier for users to purchase Gold rewards.

In a recent interview with The Verge, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman responded to IPO rumors, stating, "Getting to breakeven is a priority for us in any climate."