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> using IP is not good enough Define "not good enough"(for who is it not good enough? for advertisers?). I used to work on a project linking cookies together

> using IP is not good enough Define "not good enough"(for who is it not good enough? for advertisers?). I used to work on a project linking cookies together in anonymous profiles (for advertising), initially the plan was to separate household/individual profiles using different heuristics, but I think eventually it turned out that nobody cares that much - the advertisers just wanted a rough cross-device profile, not perfect accuracy. I mean sure, for marketing purposes (as well as engineering/ "performance" reasons) you needed figures to brag about accuracy and whatnot. But it's really really hard to get those figures right, and ultimately the thing that will convince advertisers is "using cross-device profile improved conversion rate by 10%"; everything else is a detail in comparison.

annoyingnoob 7y ago
The title and focus here is on user tracking, which is the goal I'm commenting about.
- virgilp 7y ago
  I have no idea what you mean by user tracking, can you explain?
  - annoyingnoob 7y ago
    A user is usually defined as a human being. I'm a human being and I did not come with a network connection. The world, generally, does not assign IP addresses to human beings - thus an IP address cannot track me as a human, a human computer user. The paper/study here used a combination of IP address and a UUID to track 'users' which are presumably but not necessarily individual humans. It was the use of this UUID that allowed the authors to draw conclusions about how often a given user is seen at the same IP address. The IP address by itself did not provide enough tracking to draw the conclusions in the paper. Is IP address identification 'good enough' for advertising, maybe. But IP is no where near definitive for identifying individual humans. The paper does not say how often they found multiple 'users' using the same IP address. The paper focuses on individual reuse of IPs. How often did they find different users using the same IP in their study? In internet advertising no one expects every ad to trigger a sale. Since there is some amount of acceptable waste in the system this paper has decided that IP is 'good enough' for targeting - because its okay if we are throwing away 20% or more of the ads (we didn't expect any traction from them anyway seems to be the thinking). And the authors admit that a larger or different dataset might show different results.
    - virgilp 7y ago
      I was replying to your claim: > Advertising that is relevant to my wife probably isn't relevant to me, using IP is not good enough. Advertisers do not care about what you as a human do in the same way that e.g. some government agencies might. Both the paper and you talked about "user tracking" in the context of advertising. My claim is that "IP address identification is actually 'good enough' for advertising" (for some kinds of advertising, at least, but the discussion here is complex and I really don't want to get into it - on short, the problem is not so much with the 'tracking'/building the profile, but with being confident enough that you're not targeting the wrong person/household member during the delivery of the more sensitive ads; and with not spooking/startling the user with "how the hell do they know this about me" - sometimes the user needs to be e.g. logged in so that he understands why he received an ad). In particular, there are large swaths of companies that don't care whether it's you, your wife or your child - Disney e.g. will happily serve you ads based on activity performed by your children or wife, and will make no effort to figure out if it was you or them because it doesn't matter.
      - annoyingnoob 7y ago
        Its only good enough when you expect some non-trivial number of the ads to be wasted. If you care about that waste then IP is not good enough. For some brands, like Disney in you example, spraying ads everywhere is good enough. For other brands that is not good enough, feminine hygiene products would be an example (both age and gender specific where IP alone would be a poor indicator).
        virgilp 7y ago
        How do you even define "non-wasted ads"? One ad = one buy? One ad = one interested person? Targeted ads, even imperfectly-targeted ones, are "less wasted" than other kinds of ads. They are not perfect, by far (thankfully, if I may add so!), but "not good enough?" Come on, what exactly is good enough, then?
        annoyingnoob 7y ago

annoyingnoob 7y ago

The title and focus here is on user tracking, which is the goal I'm commenting about.

virgilp 7y ago
I have no idea what you mean by user tracking, can you explain?
- annoyingnoob 7y ago
  A user is usually defined as a human being. I'm a human being and I did not come with a network connection. The world, generally, does not assign IP addresses to human beings - thus an IP address cannot track me as a human, a human computer user. The paper/study here used a combination of IP address and a UUID to track 'users' which are presumably but not necessarily individual humans. It was the use of this UUID that allowed the authors to draw conclusions about how often a given user is seen at the same IP address. The IP address by itself did not provide enough tracking to draw the conclusions in the paper. Is IP address identification 'good enough' for advertising, maybe. But IP is no where near definitive for identifying individual humans. The paper does not say how often they found multiple 'users' using the same IP address. The paper focuses on individual reuse of IPs. How often did they find different users using the same IP in their study? In internet advertising no one expects every ad to trigger a sale. Since there is some amount of acceptable waste in the system this paper has decided that IP is 'good enough' for targeting - because its okay if we are throwing away 20% or more of the ads (we didn't expect any traction from them anyway seems to be the thinking). And the authors admit that a larger or different dataset might show different results.
  - virgilp 7y ago
    I was replying to your claim: > Advertising that is relevant to my wife probably isn't relevant to me, using IP is not good enough. Advertisers do not care about what you as a human do in the same way that e.g. some government agencies might. Both the paper and you talked about "user tracking" in the context of advertising. My claim is that "IP address identification is actually 'good enough' for advertising" (for some kinds of advertising, at least, but the discussion here is complex and I really don't want to get into it - on short, the problem is not so much with the 'tracking'/building the profile, but with being confident enough that you're not targeting the wrong person/household member during the delivery of the more sensitive ads; and with not spooking/startling the user with "how the hell do they know this about me" - sometimes the user needs to be e.g. logged in so that he understands why he received an ad). In particular, there are large swaths of companies that don't care whether it's you, your wife or your child - Disney e.g. will happily serve you ads based on activity performed by your children or wife, and will make no effort to figure out if it was you or them because it doesn't matter.
    - annoyingnoob 7y ago
      Its only good enough when you expect some non-trivial number of the ads to be wasted. If you care about that waste then IP is not good enough. For some brands, like Disney in you example, spraying ads everywhere is good enough. For other brands that is not good enough, feminine hygiene products would be an example (both age and gender specific where IP alone would be a poor indicator).
      - virgilp 7y ago
        How do you even define "non-wasted ads"? One ad = one buy? One ad = one interested person? Targeted ads, even imperfectly-targeted ones, are "less wasted" than other kinds of ads. They are not perfect, by far (thankfully, if I may add so!), but "not good enough?" Come on, what exactly is good enough, then?
        annoyingnoob 7y ago