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I fear that your questions reduce the problem to the point where no answer is possible. Loading the Y Combinator logo in here is almost certainly not tracking,

I fear that your questions reduce the problem to the point where no answer is possible. Loading the Y Combinator logo in here is almost certainly not tracking, but loading an invisible, 1px-by-1px gif in an email almost certainly counts. It's missing the forest for the trees. The simplest definition of tracking I can come up with is "collect data about me that can (and often, is) used to build a profile of me and my behavior". The NGinx log could or could not be tracking, depending on whether you use it to diagnose issues ("we should optimize this picture, it's loading too slow for too many people") or to profile me ("ID 12345 uses a 56K modem, let's sell him a new one"). But no perfect definition exists because everyone has different thresholds of what they are okay with.

izacus 6y ago
If I understand FloC correctly though, it sends your profile/tags/interesting topics from your owned client software. So this basically means that if you have a browser like Firefox, it could send a preset cohort set to server that doesn't build your tracking profile and gives you things you're interested in. To me this seems like a win? It allows you as a person to control how your ad profile is built (and if it's sent at all) and doesn't send your data to servers anymore? (Please correct me if I misunderstood the technology.)
- sodality2 6y ago
  If this doesn't get taken advantage of by google, this would be awesome. I bet if a random open source project of the same kind were released, it would probably be pointed at as a reason why Google is evil ('see there are good alternatives!'). But because Google is doing it, people are (rightly) wary and (definitely not rightly) calling it evil without doing research.
  - bogwog 6y ago
    > But because Google is doing it, people are (rightly) wary and (definitely not rightly) calling it evil without doing research. That's what happens when no one trusts you. It's human nature, and logical arguments aren't going to change that. If anything, it's a good thing for society if Google burns despite trying to do something genuinely good (not that FLoC is good), because it shows others that there are real consequences to betraying the trust of your customers. We lose one untrustworthy company today, and gain many trustworthy companies in the future. That's a net positive for society!
- wpietri 6y ago
  Personally, what I'm interested in is not seeing ads. I think the notion that more relevant ads are somehow better for the user is mostly industry propaganda. Ad targeting is about finding people more susceptible to manipulation into spending money. User satisfaction is at best an epiphenomenon of the ad industry, and at worst is directly counter to their goals.
  - anchpop 6y ago
    If you don't want to see ads, why not run an adblocker or avoid visiting sites that show ads? There's no good option right now, if you have a paywall people will complain and almost no one will visit your site, and if you have any ads at all people will complain about that too. (I remember an HN article about a guy who had a banner advertising his own product on his personal blog, absolutely no tracking, that got added to uBlock adblocking lists.) If you want you can use duckduckgo with ads disabled in settings, visit HN and wikipedia and stackoverflow (although they have the #hireme thing), pay $10/month for youtube and spotify premium so you don't see ads there, etc. And then use ghostery to disable third-party cookies and things of that nature. What more do you want the industry to do?
    - wpietri 6y ago
      Personally, I want the advertising industry to not exist. Moral question of for-profit manipulation aside, I think if you look at net societal benefits versus total cost, it's pretty easy to see that we could find better things to do with the ~$1 trillion that it consumes. That day won't come any sooner just by me running an ad blocker.
      - dontblink 6y ago
        If this is truly what you want, then what is your suggestion for financing the existence of sites that wish to stay afloat? Paywalls don't work.
        mulmen 6y ago
- seanhunter 6y ago
  What I want is them not to know anything about my profile or what I want and them not to send anything about me to anyone unless I ask them to. Which I'm not going to. That would be an actual win. Not showing me ads at all would be an additional icing on the cake. I even don't want to see ads about things I'm interested in. Just nothing.
  - izacus 6y ago
    Seems like giving you control over what your client sends is a good way to achieve that. You're the one deciding what's being sent - as it should be.
  - goodhacker 6y ago
    I think we forget the hidden cost of not being able to run well targeted ads. If we remove the ability to advertise this way, it increases the barriers to entry for new business. Right now, due to highly effective targeting any small startup (and big firm) can go pretty niche and launch a product with a small amount of budget. If we rely on old pre digital tactics with no targeting, it's like going back 50 years and using a machine gun in the dark. Combine the Google cookie depreciation, Apple's recent changes in 14.5 and the general mood around 3rd party data sharing which makes effective outbound lead gen more difficult. I think we are witnessing death by a thousand cuts in terms of increasing the barriers to entry for smaller business.
    - nl 6y ago
      This, a million times. People hate ads, but the alternative is so much worse.
    - AshWolfy 6y ago
      Not having individually targeted ads doesnt mean no targeting it means less efficient targeting. There are also other avenues for promotion. There is no way to offset losing your privacy
    - rswail 6y ago
      Has anyone actually presented studies that show that targeting advertising using fingerprinting and other invasive and hidden identification works? Sure, google/FB and others sell that to advertisers as an advantage, but has anyone proven it works? Google's original use of Adwords was based on my current search, didn't use my history, and didn't use anything else to identify/classify me. Then they started adding geo location, using things like IP addresses and other out-of-band information, then cookies which allowed them to track me outside of their own site. I don't care whether outbound lead gen is more difficult. I have no incentive to care. I have no incentive to offer my details to anyone. Advertising has always been a manipulative business, by definition, its aim is to manipulate people into wanting to consume the product or service being advertised. But it was constrained by the inability to target more than large demographic groups and locations. That "pretty niche" product can still target its niche. What it can't do without the current dark patterns and tracking is target individuals. That would be a good thing. Pre-digital tactics is not going back 50 years, it's going back 20. It's pre-9/11, pre-government-general-surveillance. That government surveillance has given tacit permission to business to do the same thing. The "if you've got nothing to hide, why are you worried about the government?" argument is applied to business now. In short, fuck Google and FB and Amazon's need to sell targeted audiences. Their business model is flawed and has caused greater social disturbance than the overall reward.
- Veserv 6y ago
  If they will not send data to their servers anymore, then they can easily regain trust by just introducing a contractual obligation to pay out a reasonable sum if they are found to be doing so that would disincentive them from doing so. Say 1 year of revenue or ~$100B? Since they have control over their own actions and there is no reason to send data to their servers anymore, then that would be pure upside with no risk if they are being truthful. However, until they make promises where success and failure can be evaluated by non-technical individuals and there is actual downside when failing to fulfill those promises, I see no reason for anyone to believe their claims if they will not put their money where their mouth is.
  - izacus 6y ago
    Sounds like you're proposing GDPR. I supported it, it's s good step.
    - Veserv 6y ago
      Not really. GDPR establishes specific rules around data protection and retention, but what I am proposing is having them establish a contractual obligation to abide by their claims with pre-defined damages in the event of a breach of contract to demonstrate a commitment to their claims. GDPR is about data protection, this model is about honesty/fulfilling obligations which just so happens to be about data protection in this case. If they want to gobble up all the data and they are completely honest and forward about it such that the average impacted individual properly understands the scope and degree of what is occurring, then I do not care too much about it since at least everybody is going in with open-ish eyes. It is doing so while lying about it or appealing to people's wishful thinking then blaming them for not reading the fine print that is truly evil.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pas 6y ago
Where are the lines between market research, profile building, tracking, 1984? (Eg. our sites are viewed by these cohorts, we should put up these ads... versus oh this particular request seems to come from this particular cohort, let's send this ad, or this user is logged in, last time bought a boat, let's show it a keg of beer... etc.)
ehsankia 6y ago
> Loading the Y Combinator logo in here is almost certainly not tracking Except it does, it tracks how many times the image was loaded. That's tracking, even if you're not getting any user specific information. FLoC is the same, you're not getting any individual user information, but you're tracking cohorts.

izacus 6y ago

If I understand FloC correctly though, it sends your profile/tags/interesting topics from your owned client software. So this basically means that if you have a browser like Firefox, it could send a preset cohort set to server that doesn't build your tracking profile and gives you things you're interested in. To me this seems like a win? It allows you as a person to control how your ad profile is built (and if it's sent at all) and doesn't send your data to servers anymore? (Please correct me if I misunderstood the technology.)

sodality2 6y ago
If this doesn't get taken advantage of by google, this would be awesome. I bet if a random open source project of the same kind were released, it would probably be pointed at as a reason why Google is evil ('see there are good alternatives!'). But because Google is doing it, people are (rightly) wary and (definitely not rightly) calling it evil without doing research.
- bogwog 6y ago
  > But because Google is doing it, people are (rightly) wary and (definitely not rightly) calling it evil without doing research. That's what happens when no one trusts you. It's human nature, and logical arguments aren't going to change that. If anything, it's a good thing for society if Google burns despite trying to do something genuinely good (not that FLoC is good), because it shows others that there are real consequences to betraying the trust of your customers. We lose one untrustworthy company today, and gain many trustworthy companies in the future. That's a net positive for society!
wpietri 6y ago
Personally, what I'm interested in is not seeing ads. I think the notion that more relevant ads are somehow better for the user is mostly industry propaganda. Ad targeting is about finding people more susceptible to manipulation into spending money. User satisfaction is at best an epiphenomenon of the ad industry, and at worst is directly counter to their goals.
- anchpop 6y ago
  If you don't want to see ads, why not run an adblocker or avoid visiting sites that show ads? There's no good option right now, if you have a paywall people will complain and almost no one will visit your site, and if you have any ads at all people will complain about that too. (I remember an HN article about a guy who had a banner advertising his own product on his personal blog, absolutely no tracking, that got added to uBlock adblocking lists.) If you want you can use duckduckgo with ads disabled in settings, visit HN and wikipedia and stackoverflow (although they have the #hireme thing), pay $10/month for youtube and spotify premium so you don't see ads there, etc. And then use ghostery to disable third-party cookies and things of that nature. What more do you want the industry to do?
  - wpietri 6y ago
    Personally, I want the advertising industry to not exist. Moral question of for-profit manipulation aside, I think if you look at net societal benefits versus total cost, it's pretty easy to see that we could find better things to do with the ~$1 trillion that it consumes. That day won't come any sooner just by me running an ad blocker.
    - dontblink 6y ago
      If this is truly what you want, then what is your suggestion for financing the existence of sites that wish to stay afloat? Paywalls don't work.
      - mulmen 6y ago
seanhunter 6y ago
What I want is them not to know anything about my profile or what I want and them not to send anything about me to anyone unless I ask them to. Which I'm not going to. That would be an actual win. Not showing me ads at all would be an additional icing on the cake. I even don't want to see ads about things I'm interested in. Just nothing.
- izacus 6y ago
  Seems like giving you control over what your client sends is a good way to achieve that. You're the one deciding what's being sent - as it should be.
- goodhacker 6y ago
  I think we forget the hidden cost of not being able to run well targeted ads. If we remove the ability to advertise this way, it increases the barriers to entry for new business. Right now, due to highly effective targeting any small startup (and big firm) can go pretty niche and launch a product with a small amount of budget. If we rely on old pre digital tactics with no targeting, it's like going back 50 years and using a machine gun in the dark. Combine the Google cookie depreciation, Apple's recent changes in 14.5 and the general mood around 3rd party data sharing which makes effective outbound lead gen more difficult. I think we are witnessing death by a thousand cuts in terms of increasing the barriers to entry for smaller business.
  - nl 6y ago
    This, a million times. People hate ads, but the alternative is so much worse.
  - AshWolfy 6y ago
    Not having individually targeted ads doesnt mean no targeting it means less efficient targeting. There are also other avenues for promotion. There is no way to offset losing your privacy
  - rswail 6y ago
    Has anyone actually presented studies that show that targeting advertising using fingerprinting and other invasive and hidden identification works? Sure, google/FB and others sell that to advertisers as an advantage, but has anyone proven it works? Google's original use of Adwords was based on my current search, didn't use my history, and didn't use anything else to identify/classify me. Then they started adding geo location, using things like IP addresses and other out-of-band information, then cookies which allowed them to track me outside of their own site. I don't care whether outbound lead gen is more difficult. I have no incentive to care. I have no incentive to offer my details to anyone. Advertising has always been a manipulative business, by definition, its aim is to manipulate people into wanting to consume the product or service being advertised. But it was constrained by the inability to target more than large demographic groups and locations. That "pretty niche" product can still target its niche. What it can't do without the current dark patterns and tracking is target individuals. That would be a good thing. Pre-digital tactics is not going back 50 years, it's going back 20. It's pre-9/11, pre-government-general-surveillance. That government surveillance has given tacit permission to business to do the same thing. The "if you've got nothing to hide, why are you worried about the government?" argument is applied to business now. In short, fuck Google and FB and Amazon's need to sell targeted audiences. Their business model is flawed and has caused greater social disturbance than the overall reward.
Veserv 6y ago
If they will not send data to their servers anymore, then they can easily regain trust by just introducing a contractual obligation to pay out a reasonable sum if they are found to be doing so that would disincentive them from doing so. Say 1 year of revenue or ~$100B? Since they have control over their own actions and there is no reason to send data to their servers anymore, then that would be pure upside with no risk if they are being truthful. However, until they make promises where success and failure can be evaluated by non-technical individuals and there is actual downside when failing to fulfill those promises, I see no reason for anyone to believe their claims if they will not put their money where their mouth is.
- izacus 6y ago
  Sounds like you're proposing GDPR. I supported it, it's s good step.
  - Veserv 6y ago
    Not really. GDPR establishes specific rules around data protection and retention, but what I am proposing is having them establish a contractual obligation to abide by their claims with pre-defined damages in the event of a breach of contract to demonstrate a commitment to their claims. GDPR is about data protection, this model is about honesty/fulfilling obligations which just so happens to be about data protection in this case. If they want to gobble up all the data and they are completely honest and forward about it such that the average impacted individual properly understands the scope and degree of what is occurring, then I do not care too much about it since at least everybody is going in with open-ish eyes. It is doing so while lying about it or appealing to people's wishful thinking then blaming them for not reading the fine print that is truly evil.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pas 6y ago

Where are the lines between market research, profile building, tracking, 1984? (Eg. our sites are viewed by these cohorts, we should put up these ads... versus oh this particular request seems to come from this particular cohort, let's send this ad, or this user is logged in, last time bought a boat, let's show it a keg of beer... etc.)

ehsankia 6y ago

> Loading the Y Combinator logo in here is almost certainly not tracking Except it does, it tracks how many times the image was loaded. That's tracking, even if you're not getting any user specific information. FLoC is the same, you're not getting any individual user information, but you're tracking cohorts.