7 ms·

I don't know why you use a big word such as "fraud" when you mean "we want to be able to know which accounts are owned by the same person".

by eznzt 6y ago

jefftk 6y ago
That isn't what "fraud" means in this context. Ad fraud is when you have something other than a real user loading or clicking on ads. For example, I could stand up a headless browser to click on the ads on my site. This would get me more of a payout from my advertisers, but would also be fraud. A stable identifier makes identifying this sort of behavior much easier. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
- rndgermandude 6y ago
  Ad fraud... How exactly is this my problem as a consumer? This sounds pretty much like a "you" (ad networks and advertisers) problem... So why should you be allowed to spy on me - who never defrauded any advertisers - to fix your problem?
  - jforman 6y ago
    Because it makes advertising more expensive, which in turn makes the products and services you use more expensive.
    - alisonkisk 6y ago
      How is that my problem? I have no interest in advertising more assaulting me with lies.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - coldpie 6y ago
      I would be thrilled if online advertising became unviable as a business model. Most of what makes the web suck today (megabytes of javascript on every page; clickbait articles; outrage-driven social media; warehouses of PII waiting to be bought/sold/stolen) is because of advertising. Yes, I do want to pay for the services I use.
      - fumar 6y ago
        How would you pay for the services and content you consume?
        coldpie 6y ago
        With money.
        rndgermandude 6y ago
        It could be microtransactions/in-app purchases-as-a-microtransaction, it could be subscription based models, it could be "media flat rates" (cross publication subscriptions), or something else entirely. A lot of content, especially newspaper/magazine articles, at least here in Germany, already are paid-only, either through subscriptions or both subscriptions and alternatively microtransactions (mostly more in-depth reporting). The UK Guardian and the German taz employ voluntary payments/subscriptions with some success last I heard. US media seems to be pushing a lot more for subscriptions now ("you got free 3 articles this month") Creators on patreon and on OnlyFans (NSFW) seem to be making good money off of subscriptions, on a smaller scale (and if they sell a product that has some demand, of course). Relatedly the greater independence of creators from advertising would in turn mean fewer ads, which in turn means potentially more competition for the available ad space again and thus potentially higher prices.
        briandear 6y ago
        But there there are people that intentionally bypass paywalls. Almost every article posted on HN behind a paywall has a user “neonate” who posts a paywall circumventing link. Then we collectively complain about advertising and paywalls. There is a large number of people that seem to think that all content should be free and that the people creating it are somehow a charity. I am ok with paywalls, but I don’t like to subsidize free riders. Apple News+ as a concept is a pretty good one, hopefully we can see more innovation in that sort of model.
    - pydry 6y ago
      If consumers are desensitized to targeted advertising it could make products cheaper as they'd seek out other sources of information that don't require paying Google a hefty tax. I don't really think that the students are the ones being "helped" when google gets paid $90 a click on student loan refinancing queries. They end up paying that $$ in the end.
    - rndgermandude 6y ago
      I honestly want to see evidence for this claim. Sounds to me it makes running an ad network harder and therefore probably more expensive, but it is far from a certainty that this translates into advertisers' willingness to pay more (and pass it on to consumers). Personally, I use ads as a signal to avoid buying certain products. If the ads are too prominent and omnipresent, it's an indication for me that I would be paying quite a premium on their marketing. But that's just me.
      - jforman 6y ago
        Let's say you're a startup trying to advertise on Google, and somebody has paid a bot network to fraudulently click on your ads. Now Google can't detect that those clicks are fraudulent, so you're billed for them. Your channel efficiency unavoidably goes down, which increases your cost of customer acquisition because your other channels cannot pick up all of the slack. Increasing the cost of customer acquisition is going to be bad for your business. You will either need to reduce costs (by hiring less, for example), or increase your prices.
        mhb 6y ago
        This is a pretty status quo biased view. Maybe stronger privacy protection enables a startup search engine (or whatever) with a more privacy oriented funding method which wasn't thought viable before.
        jforman 6y ago
        It's certainly possible new channels emerge to restore equilibrium, but I don't see Neeva (or whoever) replacing Google as a customer acquisition channel any time soon. I think people are misconstruing me here. I'm not saying Google advertising is somehow fundamentally necessary to the economy. I'm just saying that it is straight up incorrect to think that there aren't legitimate downsides to removing their ability to police fraud.
        mhb 6y ago
    - gord288 6y ago
      Products/services are typically priced according to what the market can bear. If advertising costs become cheaper for a given company, for whatever reason, who's to say this decreased expense is going to be passed down to consumers in the form of lower prices? Living in an advertising-saturated and/or privacy-deprived world is also a "cost" borne by members of society.
      - briandear 6y ago
        > who's to say this decreased expense is going to be passed down to consumers in the form of lower prices? Because economics. I know this intimately. I have a product we manufacture and sell on Amazon along with other channels. And if I am saving $1 on a customer acquisition, I am lowering my price one dollar because that would mean I can sell more at the same profit. Because if I try to keep that extra dollar, my competition will lower their price. Basically the cost of keeping that saved dollar is more than the gain from lowering the price a dollar. That’s how competition is supposed to work. I know my cost of goods sold and my cost of sales down to the penny and have a pretty good idea of the elasticity curve for my product: if I lower my price by $1, I would sell x more bottles. However if I lower my price by $1 right now, I would decrease in profitability unless my costs also decreased by $1. There is a point on the curve that represents the optimal price. It would seem that fundamental microeconomics is something not taught in many schools and that’s tragic because you get statements like “who’s to say this decreased expense is going to be passed down to consumers.” Because competition is what makes this statement silly in principle.
    - 0x53 6y ago
      I think most places have a somewhat fixed advertising budget. Hopefully the outcome would be less advertising!
  - pydry 6y ago
    Turning the ad business into a market for lemons actually sounds kind of like a feature to me.
  - jefftk 6y ago
    > How exactly is this my problem as a consumer? When you use a service that is funded by advertising, the service only gets that funding because the advertisers trust that they are getting their ads in front of real users. Some advertisers are able to precisely measure the quality of their traffic, for example by seeing whether the traffic they get buys things, but most are in businesses where that's not possible (no one clicks on an ad for Coca-Cola and then places an order for Coke). Ad fraud means that advertisers are less willing to pay to be shown on the service, so the service's funding decreases. Very likely, less funding for the service hurts you as a consumer: they are probably spending their funding in support of the site. For example, I believe that the ads here fund the moderators. > why should you be allowed to spy on me - who never defrauded any advertisers - to fix your problem? See my response to wil421: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25430453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25430453 I think that fix here is some thing like https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-supports-privacy-pass/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-supports-privacy-pass... or https://web.dev/trust-tokens/ https://web.dev/trust-tokens/ that allows detecting and preventing fraud in a privacy preserving manner.
    - rndgermandude 6y ago
      I like the second part of your answer. Indeed, if you wanted something like a way to id bad actors, you could do some scheme where the OS (or browser or even secondary service) could do some form of attestation that isn't trackable and has even stronger guarantees than some unauthenticated unique id has. If Apple and Google can make their Corona Tracking APIs untrackable by third parties, then untrackable "valid device" APIs should be possible and feasible as well. But you cannot make this my problem by saying "let me spy on you. or your shit gets more expensive, or sites have to close". That sounds too much like "an offer you cannot refuse". I will not surrender my privacy for failed business models.
      - Nextgrid 6y ago
        The coronavirus exposure notifications are only "safe" because we assume no single actor can put Bluetooth receivers every square meter, thus rotating the IDs every so often is an effective defense against potential tracking. The same couldn't work with the internet because essentially every ID would be known to potential bad actors, as they'd be tracking every single one of them (among other data points) and can easily defeat the rotation of those IDs based on other data points which don't change.
- kop316 6y ago
  This reads like how it would make the police jobs easier to solve crime just to install an always on GPS on everybody. Ad fraud really isn't my problem. So why should I be mercilessly tracked by everyone just to make your job easier?
- maximente 6y ago
  hopefully the top tier talent at these companies can figure something out
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ABCLAW 6y ago
Ad fraud is a morally loaded term. What's considered ad fraud is not fraud, but labeling it as such lets advertisers point to individuals running bots and scripts as malicious internet abusers. If I used the term fraud like the ad industry uses ad fraud, I'd probably lose my law license or just get buried under unfavourable costs orders in court. So why are they deploying the term? Because it's a great way to deflect thinking about a core failing of their business logic. We've known since the day of banner ads that 'views' are a tremendously flawed metric, so blaming online agents for WHY they're flawed lets them deflect blame. The fact that we're in this thread trying to parse semantics when consumers don't even have a seat at the table when deciding where we should fall on the tracking/privacy spectrum should tell you all you need to know about how the industry operates.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  Don't know why this is downvoted. It is on topic and contains substantial information.

I don't know why you use a big word such as "fraud" when you mean "we want to be able to know which accounts are owned by the same person".

by eznzt 6y ago

I don't know why you use a big word such as "fraud" when you mean "we want to be able to know which accounts are owned by the same person".

jefftk 6y ago

That isn't what "fraud" means in this context. Ad fraud is when you have something other than a real user loading or clicking on ads. For example, I could stand up a headless browser to click on the ads on my site. This would get me more of a payout from my advertisers, but would also be fraud. A stable identifier makes identifying this sort of behavior much easier. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

rndgermandude 6y ago
Ad fraud... How exactly is this my problem as a consumer? This sounds pretty much like a "you" (ad networks and advertisers) problem... So why should you be allowed to spy on me - who never defrauded any advertisers - to fix your problem?
- jforman 6y ago
  Because it makes advertising more expensive, which in turn makes the products and services you use more expensive.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    How is that my problem? I have no interest in advertising more assaulting me with lies.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - coldpie 6y ago
    I would be thrilled if online advertising became unviable as a business model. Most of what makes the web suck today (megabytes of javascript on every page; clickbait articles; outrage-driven social media; warehouses of PII waiting to be bought/sold/stolen) is because of advertising. Yes, I do want to pay for the services I use.
    - fumar 6y ago
      How would you pay for the services and content you consume?
      - coldpie 6y ago
        With money.
      - rndgermandude 6y ago
        It could be microtransactions/in-app purchases-as-a-microtransaction, it could be subscription based models, it could be "media flat rates" (cross publication subscriptions), or something else entirely. A lot of content, especially newspaper/magazine articles, at least here in Germany, already are paid-only, either through subscriptions or both subscriptions and alternatively microtransactions (mostly more in-depth reporting). The UK Guardian and the German taz employ voluntary payments/subscriptions with some success last I heard. US media seems to be pushing a lot more for subscriptions now ("you got free 3 articles this month") Creators on patreon and on OnlyFans (NSFW) seem to be making good money off of subscriptions, on a smaller scale (and if they sell a product that has some demand, of course). Relatedly the greater independence of creators from advertising would in turn mean fewer ads, which in turn means potentially more competition for the available ad space again and thus potentially higher prices.
        briandear 6y ago
        But there there are people that intentionally bypass paywalls. Almost every article posted on HN behind a paywall has a user “neonate” who posts a paywall circumventing link. Then we collectively complain about advertising and paywalls. There is a large number of people that seem to think that all content should be free and that the people creating it are somehow a charity. I am ok with paywalls, but I don’t like to subsidize free riders. Apple News+ as a concept is a pretty good one, hopefully we can see more innovation in that sort of model.
  - pydry 6y ago
    If consumers are desensitized to targeted advertising it could make products cheaper as they'd seek out other sources of information that don't require paying Google a hefty tax. I don't really think that the students are the ones being "helped" when google gets paid $90 a click on student loan refinancing queries. They end up paying that $$ in the end.
  - rndgermandude 6y ago
    I honestly want to see evidence for this claim. Sounds to me it makes running an ad network harder and therefore probably more expensive, but it is far from a certainty that this translates into advertisers' willingness to pay more (and pass it on to consumers). Personally, I use ads as a signal to avoid buying certain products. If the ads are too prominent and omnipresent, it's an indication for me that I would be paying quite a premium on their marketing. But that's just me.
    - jforman 6y ago
      Let's say you're a startup trying to advertise on Google, and somebody has paid a bot network to fraudulently click on your ads. Now Google can't detect that those clicks are fraudulent, so you're billed for them. Your channel efficiency unavoidably goes down, which increases your cost of customer acquisition because your other channels cannot pick up all of the slack. Increasing the cost of customer acquisition is going to be bad for your business. You will either need to reduce costs (by hiring less, for example), or increase your prices.
      - mhb 6y ago
        This is a pretty status quo biased view. Maybe stronger privacy protection enables a startup search engine (or whatever) with a more privacy oriented funding method which wasn't thought viable before.
        jforman 6y ago
        It's certainly possible new channels emerge to restore equilibrium, but I don't see Neeva (or whoever) replacing Google as a customer acquisition channel any time soon. I think people are misconstruing me here. I'm not saying Google advertising is somehow fundamentally necessary to the economy. I'm just saying that it is straight up incorrect to think that there aren't legitimate downsides to removing their ability to police fraud.
        mhb 6y ago
  - gord288 6y ago
    Products/services are typically priced according to what the market can bear. If advertising costs become cheaper for a given company, for whatever reason, who's to say this decreased expense is going to be passed down to consumers in the form of lower prices? Living in an advertising-saturated and/or privacy-deprived world is also a "cost" borne by members of society.
    - briandear 6y ago
      > who's to say this decreased expense is going to be passed down to consumers in the form of lower prices? Because economics. I know this intimately. I have a product we manufacture and sell on Amazon along with other channels. And if I am saving $1 on a customer acquisition, I am lowering my price one dollar because that would mean I can sell more at the same profit. Because if I try to keep that extra dollar, my competition will lower their price. Basically the cost of keeping that saved dollar is more than the gain from lowering the price a dollar. That’s how competition is supposed to work. I know my cost of goods sold and my cost of sales down to the penny and have a pretty good idea of the elasticity curve for my product: if I lower my price by $1, I would sell x more bottles. However if I lower my price by $1 right now, I would decrease in profitability unless my costs also decreased by $1. There is a point on the curve that represents the optimal price. It would seem that fundamental microeconomics is something not taught in many schools and that’s tragic because you get statements like “who’s to say this decreased expense is going to be passed down to consumers.” Because competition is what makes this statement silly in principle.
  - 0x53 6y ago
    I think most places have a somewhat fixed advertising budget. Hopefully the outcome would be less advertising!
- pydry 6y ago
  Turning the ad business into a market for lemons actually sounds kind of like a feature to me.
- jefftk 6y ago
  > How exactly is this my problem as a consumer? When you use a service that is funded by advertising, the service only gets that funding because the advertisers trust that they are getting their ads in front of real users. Some advertisers are able to precisely measure the quality of their traffic, for example by seeing whether the traffic they get buys things, but most are in businesses where that's not possible (no one clicks on an ad for Coca-Cola and then places an order for Coke). Ad fraud means that advertisers are less willing to pay to be shown on the service, so the service's funding decreases. Very likely, less funding for the service hurts you as a consumer: they are probably spending their funding in support of the site. For example, I believe that the ads here fund the moderators. > why should you be allowed to spy on me - who never defrauded any advertisers - to fix your problem? See my response to wil421: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25430453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25430453 I think that fix here is some thing like https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-supports-privacy-pass/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-supports-privacy-pass... or https://web.dev/trust-tokens/ https://web.dev/trust-tokens/ that allows detecting and preventing fraud in a privacy preserving manner.
  - rndgermandude 6y ago
    I like the second part of your answer. Indeed, if you wanted something like a way to id bad actors, you could do some scheme where the OS (or browser or even secondary service) could do some form of attestation that isn't trackable and has even stronger guarantees than some unauthenticated unique id has. If Apple and Google can make their Corona Tracking APIs untrackable by third parties, then untrackable "valid device" APIs should be possible and feasible as well. But you cannot make this my problem by saying "let me spy on you. or your shit gets more expensive, or sites have to close". That sounds too much like "an offer you cannot refuse". I will not surrender my privacy for failed business models.
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      The coronavirus exposure notifications are only "safe" because we assume no single actor can put Bluetooth receivers every square meter, thus rotating the IDs every so often is an effective defense against potential tracking. The same couldn't work with the internet because essentially every ID would be known to potential bad actors, as they'd be tracking every single one of them (among other data points) and can easily defeat the rotation of those IDs based on other data points which don't change.
kop316 6y ago
This reads like how it would make the police jobs easier to solve crime just to install an always on GPS on everybody. Ad fraud really isn't my problem. So why should I be mercilessly tracked by everyone just to make your job easier?
maximente 6y ago
hopefully the top tier talent at these companies can figure something out

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ABCLAW 6y ago

Ad fraud is a morally loaded term. What's considered ad fraud is not fraud, but labeling it as such lets advertisers point to individuals running bots and scripts as malicious internet abusers. If I used the term fraud like the ad industry uses ad fraud, I'd probably lose my law license or just get buried under unfavourable costs orders in court. So why are they deploying the term? Because it's a great way to deflect thinking about a core failing of their business logic. We've known since the day of banner ads that 'views' are a tremendously flawed metric, so blaming online agents for WHY they're flawed lets them deflect blame. The fact that we're in this thread trying to parse semantics when consumers don't even have a seat at the table when deciding where we should fall on the tracking/privacy spectrum should tell you all you need to know about how the industry operates.

raxxorrax 6y ago
Don't know why this is downvoted. It is on topic and contains substantial information.