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At least someone in this thread gets it. Ad tracking really is about attribution, personalized ads are secondary nice-to-have. This is how small businesses fig

At least someone in this thread gets it. Ad tracking really is about attribution, personalized ads are secondary nice-to-have. This is how small businesses figure out their advertising budget. Where are our customers coming from, or more importantly, where are they not coming from, so we know where to spend or not spend our limited resources? But I’m not surprised this isn’t pointed out more often. The hardcore privacy zealots really blow up when you try to explain that it’s mostly innocuous.

bordercases 6y ago
The tracking technology itself has a much wider scope of application than "small businesses focusing their development budget". Ads are used as a commercial justification for broadening the larger ability to surveil.
josephg 6y ago
It can be mostly innocuous. And I feel no sympathy for facebook’s business model here. I don’t want my attention to be bought and sold like a horse between faceless companies. I’d much rather pay $1/year to WhatsApp than have the content of my personal life analysed by the world’s marketing teams. I want to be the customer, not the product. I want the software I use to be primarily designed around my needs - not the needs of advertisers.
danShumway 6y ago
Because (all other concerns and objections aside) the intent doesn't matter. Apologies for the crude analogy, but if I install a camera in your bathroom and say, "okay, technically I could watch you poop, but the only reason I'm actually doing this is to figure out when you're out of toilet paper", that explanation won't leave you satisfied. Similarly, if someone is tracking me across the web and trying to link my identity across multiple sites/devices, I don't really care whether or not they're worried about attribution. The concerns about attribution are secondary to the fact that they're still watching everything I do online.
- fingerlocks 6y ago
  Filming me defecating in the privacy of my home is not comparable to a quasi-anonymous unique value traveling from my computer to another. Also, please remember that this conversation is very specifically about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA, not about general web tracking or other data vacuuming issues. The fact that these two separate issues get conflated is part of the problem.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    > about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA Which is used to uniquely identify me across apps, a totally equivalent level of tracking as identifying me across websites. It is the same result, just on a different platform. And all of this data gets combined and utilized with the "other data vacuuming issues" you're talking about. You can't treat those like isolated issues, the unique identifiers across websites/apps enable the data vacuuming. You're arguing that these identifiers aren't primarily being used to build profiles, that they're mostly innocuous, and then you're saying that the fact that profiles are being built and data vacuuming is happening is a separate issue that's not relevant to the current conversation? No, the data vacuuming wouldn't be possible to nearly the same degree without persistent identifiers. That makes it relevant. > is not comparable to a quasi-anonymous unique value traveling from my computer to another. You're arguing about a matter of degree. The point I'm making is that violating my privacy doesn't become automatically OK just because the advertising industry promises me they won't look at the extra data they're getting. And I think the reasoning behind why it's not OK is the same in both scenarios -- because in both scenarios, it's not reasonable to trust the person gathering that data to keep it secure or to never misuse it. People bring up "quasi-anonymous" as if it's some kind of perfect defense that puts these identifiers into a separate category of information, but it's not. If it was actually anonymous, you wouldn't need to put the "quasi" in front of it. But if it makes you feel better, I'll put a camera in your bathroom and then disassociate the video stream from your home address or name, and then I'll blur your face with an AI. Then the video stream will be quasi-anonymous too. I promise I won't ever try to link it to a real identity, you can trust me. The point is, it is a violation of my privacy to track every website I visit and every app I use. The reason why a company is doing that doesn't matter.
Closi 6y ago
So you mean their REAL purpose is attribution, but they just chose to build giant databases covering peoples locations, friend groups, hobbies, desires, careers, sex, sexual preferences, relationship statuses, political alignment, voting probability, race and more in order to implement a 'secondary nice-to-have'? And that's better? As a side point, I don't see why attribution tracking requires any form of cross-site tracking or fingerprinting. It seems like it would be pretty trivial to implement this without all the privacy issues (i.e. just direct the ad to domain.com/ad123 and track the user on-site from there).
- fingerlocks 6y ago
  None of that has anything to do with this topic. This is about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA. There are no web URLs involved[0] when you click an ad on instagram and it launches another app on your phone. These are separate issues, and I don't entire disagree with the others you brought up. [0] Before someone comes in to correct me, I know I'm handwaving here. The point stands.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    The apps on your phone would not have the ability to suck up isolated pieces of data about your usage and combine them into a single profile with your age/gender/etc... if they didn't have a set of shared identifiers that they could use to associate that data across multiple sources. It seems very relevant to me. The larger privacy problems wouldn't be quite as bad if there was no way to tell what device an app was running on or who was using it. That seems like it would limit data collection in a pretty significant way.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > None of that has anything to do with this topic. This is about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA. You don't seem to understand what the implications of the IDFA are. Facebook uses the IDFA to tie your activities together. It is one of the fundamental ways they collect all this data. This is why they are fighting so hard to maintain it.
kergonath 6y ago
> hardcore privacy zealots Way to lose all credibility.

bordercases 6y ago

The tracking technology itself has a much wider scope of application than "small businesses focusing their development budget". Ads are used as a commercial justification for broadening the larger ability to surveil.

josephg 6y ago

It can be mostly innocuous. And I feel no sympathy for facebook’s business model here. I don’t want my attention to be bought and sold like a horse between faceless companies. I’d much rather pay $1/year to WhatsApp than have the content of my personal life analysed by the world’s marketing teams. I want to be the customer, not the product. I want the software I use to be primarily designed around my needs - not the needs of advertisers.

danShumway 6y ago

Because (all other concerns and objections aside) the intent doesn't matter. Apologies for the crude analogy, but if I install a camera in your bathroom and say, "okay, technically I could watch you poop, but the only reason I'm actually doing this is to figure out when you're out of toilet paper", that explanation won't leave you satisfied. Similarly, if someone is tracking me across the web and trying to link my identity across multiple sites/devices, I don't really care whether or not they're worried about attribution. The concerns about attribution are secondary to the fact that they're still watching everything I do online.

fingerlocks 6y ago
Filming me defecating in the privacy of my home is not comparable to a quasi-anonymous unique value traveling from my computer to another. Also, please remember that this conversation is very specifically about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA, not about general web tracking or other data vacuuming issues. The fact that these two separate issues get conflated is part of the problem.
- danShumway 6y ago
  > about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA Which is used to uniquely identify me across apps, a totally equivalent level of tracking as identifying me across websites. It is the same result, just on a different platform. And all of this data gets combined and utilized with the "other data vacuuming issues" you're talking about. You can't treat those like isolated issues, the unique identifiers across websites/apps enable the data vacuuming. You're arguing that these identifiers aren't primarily being used to build profiles, that they're mostly innocuous, and then you're saying that the fact that profiles are being built and data vacuuming is happening is a separate issue that's not relevant to the current conversation? No, the data vacuuming wouldn't be possible to nearly the same degree without persistent identifiers. That makes it relevant. > is not comparable to a quasi-anonymous unique value traveling from my computer to another. You're arguing about a matter of degree. The point I'm making is that violating my privacy doesn't become automatically OK just because the advertising industry promises me they won't look at the extra data they're getting. And I think the reasoning behind why it's not OK is the same in both scenarios -- because in both scenarios, it's not reasonable to trust the person gathering that data to keep it secure or to never misuse it. People bring up "quasi-anonymous" as if it's some kind of perfect defense that puts these identifiers into a separate category of information, but it's not. If it was actually anonymous, you wouldn't need to put the "quasi" in front of it. But if it makes you feel better, I'll put a camera in your bathroom and then disassociate the video stream from your home address or name, and then I'll blur your face with an AI. Then the video stream will be quasi-anonymous too. I promise I won't ever try to link it to a real identity, you can trust me. The point is, it is a violation of my privacy to track every website I visit and every app I use. The reason why a company is doing that doesn't matter.

Closi 6y ago

So you mean their REAL purpose is attribution, but they just chose to build giant databases covering peoples locations, friend groups, hobbies, desires, careers, sex, sexual preferences, relationship statuses, political alignment, voting probability, race and more in order to implement a 'secondary nice-to-have'? And that's better? As a side point, I don't see why attribution tracking requires any form of cross-site tracking or fingerprinting. It seems like it would be pretty trivial to implement this without all the privacy issues (i.e. just direct the ad to domain.com/ad123 and track the user on-site from there).

fingerlocks 6y ago
None of that has anything to do with this topic. This is about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA. There are no web URLs involved[0] when you click an ad on instagram and it launches another app on your phone. These are separate issues, and I don't entire disagree with the others you brought up. [0] Before someone comes in to correct me, I know I'm handwaving here. The point stands.
- danShumway 6y ago
  The apps on your phone would not have the ability to suck up isolated pieces of data about your usage and combine them into a single profile with your age/gender/etc... if they didn't have a set of shared identifiers that they could use to associate that data across multiple sources. It seems very relevant to me. The larger privacy problems wouldn't be quite as bad if there was no way to tell what device an app was running on or who was using it. That seems like it would limit data collection in a pretty significant way.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > None of that has anything to do with this topic. This is about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA. You don't seem to understand what the implications of the IDFA are. Facebook uses the IDFA to tie your activities together. It is one of the fundamental ways they collect all this data. This is why they are fighting so hard to maintain it.

kergonath 6y ago

> hardcore privacy zealots Way to lose all credibility.