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Thank you for sharing your perspective and authoring the article. Is there growing sentiment like yours amongst colleagues and peers in ad tech?

by dpflan 7y ago

tomlockwood 7y ago
I'm not sure since I've been out for a couple years, but at the time I'd often have conversations with marketers where I'd come away wondering how they could be so oblivious to the ethical concerns in what they were asking for. I do think as time goes on, more and more people are becoming aware of the issues, but I see that uniformly across society rather than in tech.
- criddell 7y ago
  > I'd come away wondering how they could be so oblivious to the ethical concerns in what they were asking for Like Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
  - chibg10 7y ago
    I'm not sure that's what's at play here. Marketers could easily be aware of the ethical concerns and simply disregard them. Their salary doesn't depend at all on their ignorance of the ethical issues involved. More likely, at the risk of overgeneralizing, I suspect a lot of the people going into adtech aren't really the philosophical-type (I think those probably tend to avoid marketing in general), a lot of them are young, and probably excited just to get a job offer in such a well-paying, high-profile industry.
    - tomlockwood 7y ago
      I think criddell is right. I think the amount of money makes people gloss over some of the ethics, as cynical as that probably sounds. I didn't say it in the article specifically because of it sounding so cynical (even though the article is very cynical). I think you're right, that a lot of the people going into AdTech, and just marketing in general, aren't philosophical. But, you saying that made me chuckle, because I have a BA in Philosophy, and no computing qualification.
      - theshadowknows 7y ago
        A lot of the people I work with are looking for cheap wins. So they bend the rules and ignore ethics. Many retailers for example are data rich on the aggregate level. And could very likely achieve great results without trying to spearfish customers further. But the analytics insights required to do that take time and work. And marketers don’t like to do that. So they’d rather “enrich” crm data with Experian or some other service. When really they can’t handle they data they have and adding to it will just make it worse.
cattlefarmer 7y ago
One more datapoint here if you care. The industry is filled with hugely interesting technical challenges even if you're not at FAANG scale. Trivial things like building a cost efficient delivery infrastructure to reducing the number of steps between receiving that first page load to ad delivery and then on to analytics. A lot of it is just math and it's fun when you structure your challenges that way. It's like inverse Pinky and the Brain everyday. We're not scheming to erode everyone's privacy, we're just lab rats looking for the shortest route from one end of the maze to the other. I also left after a few years because all that maze running got boring eventually and I decided I'd like something with a little bit more meaning. Or, from another point of view, those years eroding everyone's privacy has enabled me to climb high enough up on Maslow's pyramid such that I now have the comfort to worry about self actualisation. edit: There were a few people that totally drank the kool aid, and believed that what we were doing was enabling people to gain a livelihood by running a popular website. Usually the really young ones or those at management level. Those from a developed country were mostly interested in the technical problems and improving their engineering skills. Those from developing countries were most definitely in it for the money.

Thank you for sharing your perspective and authoring the article. Is there growing sentiment like yours amongst colleagues and peers in ad tech?

by dpflan 7y ago

Thank you for sharing your perspective and authoring the article. Is there growing sentiment like yours amongst colleagues and peers in ad tech?

tomlockwood 7y ago

I'm not sure since I've been out for a couple years, but at the time I'd often have conversations with marketers where I'd come away wondering how they could be so oblivious to the ethical concerns in what they were asking for. I do think as time goes on, more and more people are becoming aware of the issues, but I see that uniformly across society rather than in tech.

criddell 7y ago
> I'd come away wondering how they could be so oblivious to the ethical concerns in what they were asking for Like Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
- chibg10 7y ago
  I'm not sure that's what's at play here. Marketers could easily be aware of the ethical concerns and simply disregard them. Their salary doesn't depend at all on their ignorance of the ethical issues involved. More likely, at the risk of overgeneralizing, I suspect a lot of the people going into adtech aren't really the philosophical-type (I think those probably tend to avoid marketing in general), a lot of them are young, and probably excited just to get a job offer in such a well-paying, high-profile industry.
  - tomlockwood 7y ago
    I think criddell is right. I think the amount of money makes people gloss over some of the ethics, as cynical as that probably sounds. I didn't say it in the article specifically because of it sounding so cynical (even though the article is very cynical). I think you're right, that a lot of the people going into AdTech, and just marketing in general, aren't philosophical. But, you saying that made me chuckle, because I have a BA in Philosophy, and no computing qualification.
    - theshadowknows 7y ago
      A lot of the people I work with are looking for cheap wins. So they bend the rules and ignore ethics. Many retailers for example are data rich on the aggregate level. And could very likely achieve great results without trying to spearfish customers further. But the analytics insights required to do that take time and work. And marketers don’t like to do that. So they’d rather “enrich” crm data with Experian or some other service. When really they can’t handle they data they have and adding to it will just make it worse.

cattlefarmer 7y ago

One more datapoint here if you care. The industry is filled with hugely interesting technical challenges even if you're not at FAANG scale. Trivial things like building a cost efficient delivery infrastructure to reducing the number of steps between receiving that first page load to ad delivery and then on to analytics. A lot of it is just math and it's fun when you structure your challenges that way. It's like inverse Pinky and the Brain everyday. We're not scheming to erode everyone's privacy, we're just lab rats looking for the shortest route from one end of the maze to the other. I also left after a few years because all that maze running got boring eventually and I decided I'd like something with a little bit more meaning. Or, from another point of view, those years eroding everyone's privacy has enabled me to climb high enough up on Maslow's pyramid such that I now have the comfort to worry about self actualisation. edit: There were a few people that totally drank the kool aid, and believed that what we were doing was enabling people to gain a livelihood by running a popular website. Usually the really young ones or those at management level. Those from a developed country were mostly interested in the technical problems and improving their engineering skills. Those from developing countries were most definitely in it for the money.