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It is actually fairly common, Gitlab puts hundreds of different ads to Facebook and it has to track which one of these ads actually work and cancel the ones tha

It is actually fairly common, Gitlab puts hundreds of different ads to Facebook and it has to track which one of these ads actually work and cancel the ones that don’t result in profit. Most noble thing to do would be using server-side tracking/analytics but because of additional coding and losing access to Facebook analytics, most web sites usually don’t bother.

MereInterest 5y ago
I'd go one step further, and say that the most noble thing would be to have a direct <a href="advertised-site">, and not track the user clicks at all. Even server-side tracking of <a href="local-redirect?where=advertised-site&id=user_id"> involves tracking beyond what is minimally necessary to provide a service.
- ta988 5y ago
  I guess the problem is that it could be faked? You just hire a botnet and make it hit those links to make your ad company look good.
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    True, though I'm undecided on whether that justifies tracking clicks. The fundamental problem is that neither that advertisers nor the websites trust each other. If the advertisers trusted the website, then the Referer header would be sufficient for the advertiser to know where clicks came from, and the website host could verify that those are correlated with their own server logs. However, this would require a cost, in terms of refusing to do business with untrustworthy websites. Rather than accepting that as a fact of the business, websites/advertisers instead push the cost off to users as an externality. This cost is paid by the user in time/bandwidth (larger page load times) and privacy (ad trackers), even though they were by no means the source of the problem.
    - ta988 5y ago
      IMHO it doesnt at all. Nothing justify that kind of user tracking. That whole ad business is broken by design. Unfortunately, we can't have access to many products for a reasonable amount of money that would match the ad/spying revenue by user. I would be happy to pay many products a few dollars a month rather than use adblockers.
      - MereInterest 5y ago
        The current level of tracking/spying, absolutely agreed that it is immoral and unjustified. What I am undecided on is whether the minimum possible tracking, that of having a single redirect on the href, is similarly unjustified.

MereInterest 5y ago

I'd go one step further, and say that the most noble thing would be to have a direct <a href="advertised-site">, and not track the user clicks at all. Even server-side tracking of <a href="local-redirect?where=advertised-site&id=user_id"> involves tracking beyond what is minimally necessary to provide a service.

ta988 5y ago
I guess the problem is that it could be faked? You just hire a botnet and make it hit those links to make your ad company look good.
- MereInterest 5y ago
  True, though I'm undecided on whether that justifies tracking clicks. The fundamental problem is that neither that advertisers nor the websites trust each other. If the advertisers trusted the website, then the Referer header would be sufficient for the advertiser to know where clicks came from, and the website host could verify that those are correlated with their own server logs. However, this would require a cost, in terms of refusing to do business with untrustworthy websites. Rather than accepting that as a fact of the business, websites/advertisers instead push the cost off to users as an externality. This cost is paid by the user in time/bandwidth (larger page load times) and privacy (ad trackers), even though they were by no means the source of the problem.
  - ta988 5y ago
    IMHO it doesnt at all. Nothing justify that kind of user tracking. That whole ad business is broken by design. Unfortunately, we can't have access to many products for a reasonable amount of money that would match the ad/spying revenue by user. I would be happy to pay many products a few dollars a month rather than use adblockers.
    - MereInterest 5y ago
      The current level of tracking/spying, absolutely agreed that it is immoral and unjustified. What I am undecided on is whether the minimum possible tracking, that of having a single redirect on the href, is similarly unjustified.