5 ms·

The company I work for is going to pivot towards re-targeting (we're making recommendation engines, now). So, I've come to explore a bit this new industry, and

by Fiahil 11y ago

The company I work for is going to pivot towards re-targeting (we're making recommendation engines, now). So, I've come to explore a bit this new industry, and I am under the impression that it's completely rotten to the core. The reason? I have been in meetings where no one would blinked an eye (even, sometimes, applaud the idea) when people would ask if we could turn on a laptop's webcam, and read if a visitor have seen ads or not. If internet needs tighter regulatory control, please, let's begin with advertisers. I don't think I can withstand working with that kind of people in the long term, this is really soul-destroying.

organsnyder 11y ago
Ugh—sounds miserable. Sorry to hear that you're going through that. Of course it's easy for me to say from here, but I'd suggest getting out as quickly as you can.
- Fiahil 11y ago
  Thanks, given how things worsen I might be gone before christmas :)
mtbcoder 11y ago
Just out of curiosity, how would turning on a web cam determine if a visitor saw an ad or not? I'm missing the logic.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  There probably wasn't any logic to it. It was probably the equivilant of when a PM or not technical person asks a developer, "Can't we just put in an IF statement?"
  - chii 11y ago
    this skit is very apropos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  You can very easily implement eye tracking to determine where they are looking.
  - mtbcoder 11y ago
    Possibly, but that doesn't seem like it would produce very reliable data though.
    - juretriglav 11y ago
      It wouldn't, but one can sense some logic behind that question in this context. Additionally, advertisers are very familiar with dealing with heaps of unreliable information.
    - Phlarp 11y ago
      The last thing advertisers want is reliable data-- that would just prove how useless the advertising was!
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Just out of curiosity, how would turning on a web cam determine if a visitor saw an ad or not? I'm missing the logic. Well, at a rough cut, it could verify that there was a client system with a person in front of it. With more work you could maybe use eye-tracking, reflections, etc., to get a more reliable indication of whether the ad was visible to the user.
seiji 11y ago
adtech is a modern example of the banality of evil: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality.... It's not secret Machiavellian billionaires running around shoving ad tracking upon us, it's ourselves just trying to get a tiny glint of social approval for out thinking everybody else without regard for consequences at scale.
- vidarh 11y ago
  And it's so easy. At a past company we once decided we'd test some assumptions about one of our forms by capturing keyboard events. As in, we added a handler for keypresses that'd call back to the server, so we could capture and play back exactly how users interacted with the form. It provided some useful insights (one thing that surprised me was how bad people were at recognising and operating drop downs), but we very quickly (we got the idea, pushed it out, started looking at data, decided to stop doing it within a day) recognised that we'd been too quick to jump at the "cool, we can do this" factor and that even though it was beneficial, it was way too invasive. E.g. while we might think that "it doesn't matter, it's a form on our page so we'll see the data anyway", of course that wasn't true when we actually thought about it: The keyboard events meant that e.g. if a user cut and pasted something by accident, we'd see it, and that might include things like passwords from other sites. Or they might write something, change their mind and enter something else; explicitly withholding the original information from us. We didn't capture anything particularly private in the short amount of time it was live, but we saw enough changes (e.g. people changing contact phone numbers) that we thankfully recognised the problem before it became a real problem.
  - seiji 11y ago
    Or they might write something, change their mind and enter something else Facebook explicitly does that (log every field input even if never "submitted") and uses unsubmitted thoughts to build more detailed models of you. The "trace-per-character" behavior terrified me when Google Suggest first launched. It's a neat tech example, but there's no way people can understand "everything I type, live, as I type, will be recorded forever." Then they made it default Chrome bar and default google search behavior. Average users (heck, even technical users) have little idea how much data internet services capture about them though non-explicit interactions.
copsarebastards 11y ago
> I don't think I can withstand working with that kind of people in the long term, this is really soul-destroying. Why are you working with them now? I realized before I was even in industry that I didn't ever want to work for a company that received their income from advertising, and I haven't worked for one in my entire career. It hasn't always been easy to find jobs, but the jobs I did find actually tended to be a bit higher-paying. Ads are sucking up a lot of the intelligence in our society and the only people who can stop them from doing that are intelligent people. If we refuse to work with advertisers they will suffer from the incompetence of the people they do hire.

by Fiahil 11y ago

organsnyder 11y ago

Ugh—sounds miserable. Sorry to hear that you're going through that. Of course it's easy for me to say from here, but I'd suggest getting out as quickly as you can.

Fiahil 11y ago
Thanks, given how things worsen I might be gone before christmas :)

mtbcoder 11y ago

Just out of curiosity, how would turning on a web cam determine if a visitor saw an ad or not? I'm missing the logic.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
There probably wasn't any logic to it. It was probably the equivilant of when a PM or not technical person asks a developer, "Can't we just put in an IF statement?"
- chii 11y ago
  this skit is very apropos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
AndrewKemendo 11y ago
You can very easily implement eye tracking to determine where they are looking.
- mtbcoder 11y ago
  Possibly, but that doesn't seem like it would produce very reliable data though.
  - juretriglav 11y ago
    It wouldn't, but one can sense some logic behind that question in this context. Additionally, advertisers are very familiar with dealing with heaps of unreliable information.
  - Phlarp 11y ago
    The last thing advertisers want is reliable data-- that would just prove how useless the advertising was!
dragonwriter 11y ago
> Just out of curiosity, how would turning on a web cam determine if a visitor saw an ad or not? I'm missing the logic. Well, at a rough cut, it could verify that there was a client system with a person in front of it. With more work you could maybe use eye-tracking, reflections, etc., to get a more reliable indication of whether the ad was visible to the user.

seiji 11y ago

adtech is a modern example of the banality of evil: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality.... It's not secret Machiavellian billionaires running around shoving ad tracking upon us, it's ourselves just trying to get a tiny glint of social approval for out thinking everybody else without regard for consequences at scale.

vidarh 11y ago
And it's so easy. At a past company we once decided we'd test some assumptions about one of our forms by capturing keyboard events. As in, we added a handler for keypresses that'd call back to the server, so we could capture and play back exactly how users interacted with the form. It provided some useful insights (one thing that surprised me was how bad people were at recognising and operating drop downs), but we very quickly (we got the idea, pushed it out, started looking at data, decided to stop doing it within a day) recognised that we'd been too quick to jump at the "cool, we can do this" factor and that even though it was beneficial, it was way too invasive. E.g. while we might think that "it doesn't matter, it's a form on our page so we'll see the data anyway", of course that wasn't true when we actually thought about it: The keyboard events meant that e.g. if a user cut and pasted something by accident, we'd see it, and that might include things like passwords from other sites. Or they might write something, change their mind and enter something else; explicitly withholding the original information from us. We didn't capture anything particularly private in the short amount of time it was live, but we saw enough changes (e.g. people changing contact phone numbers) that we thankfully recognised the problem before it became a real problem.
- seiji 11y ago
  Or they might write something, change their mind and enter something else Facebook explicitly does that (log every field input even if never "submitted") and uses unsubmitted thoughts to build more detailed models of you. The "trace-per-character" behavior terrified me when Google Suggest first launched. It's a neat tech example, but there's no way people can understand "everything I type, live, as I type, will be recorded forever." Then they made it default Chrome bar and default google search behavior. Average users (heck, even technical users) have little idea how much data internet services capture about them though non-explicit interactions.

copsarebastards 11y ago

> I don't think I can withstand working with that kind of people in the long term, this is really soul-destroying. Why are you working with them now? I realized before I was even in industry that I didn't ever want to work for a company that received their income from advertising, and I haven't worked for one in my entire career. It hasn't always been easy to find jobs, but the jobs I did find actually tended to be a bit higher-paying. Ads are sucking up a lot of the intelligence in our society and the only people who can stop them from doing that are intelligent people. If we refuse to work with advertisers they will suffer from the incompetence of the people they do hire.