11 ms·

Apple, FedEx and the cookie apocalypse

136 points by tmfi 5y ago

jamamp 5y ago
I'm confused as to what FedEx has to do with this article. It is in the article's title, but is only mentioned in passing in the concluding paragraph.
- samatman 5y ago
  Cheap trick to maintain interest. Done well, it's actually ok: you read the article looking for that last breadcrumb from the headline, and find it in the last paragraph with a sort of 'a-ha!' moment. Here it's done badly, with some vague handwaving about how ad spend might go to Fedex for free returns. As a consumer, if I were given a choice between intrusive cross-site tracking and free returns, the choice is completely obvious.
hermanradtke 5y ago
> ... one can lose sight of the fact that advertisers don’t care who you are Companies were literally using Facebook's ad targeting to discriminate against certain groups of people [1]. There is also the Cambridge Analytica scandal to concern ourselves with too. 1: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/28/707614254/hud-slaps-facebook-with-housing-discrimination-charge https://www.npr.org/2019/03/28/707614254/hud-slaps-facebook-...
- squeegmeister 5y ago
  I think the point is that advertisers care about groups, not individuals
  - jerf 5y ago
    I'd suggest it's not groups instead of individuals, but the other direction; particular attributes (fragments of individuals) instead of individuals. An advertiser, at the point where they want to advertise their baby wipes, don't care whether or not you're into fishing. They only care about whether or not their ad for baby wipes is going to someone who has the attribute "in the market for baby wipes". To the extent they care about groups, it's only because they aren't interested in an advertising campaign that targets one person, but they don't need anything more than "a bunch of people who are in the market for baby wipes". An advertiser may care about more than one of these things at a time ("interested in baby wipes" + "what culture do they identify with" so I can target things culturally, for instance), but even a very highly-targeted ad will be ignoring all sorts of attributes.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      You said "not groups" but then you wrote a bunch of words that describe "groups" so the distinction you're trying to draw doesn't make any sense.
      - teachingassist 5y ago
        I understand that the parent's point is "people who are into fishing and baby wipes" is not a coherent or meaningful group (in the sense of 'stratum' or 'cohort') of the population. Neither fishing nor baby wipe marketeers would typically care about this so-called group. If you are really applying attribute tags to individuals, you are not "grouping" them in the usually-understood meaning of stratifying. In truth, you are still building an individual profile for each person, but describing it in a disingenuous way.
      - jerf 5y ago
        My point is that advertisers aren't interested in groups of people as they are whole people, but just fragments of individuals that happen to match very specific characteristics they are advertising at. Under most circumstances this would be a distinction without a difference, but in this specific case it turns out to be important. If advertisers are interested in "groups" than they may still think of themselves as needing identity, and demographic breakdowns, and wanting addresses for those groups, etc... but if you conceive of all they care about as being "in the market for baby wipes" there is no reason to give advertisers anything more than "here is an advertising opportunity for baby wipes", and no other information. Not an aggregation of "individuals", with all the extraneous baggage that comes with, but aggregations of fine slices of attributes that they have no need to correlate to anything else. (Only residual desire because they're probably still used to thinking about "individuals".)
        bryan_w 5y ago
        I'm having trouble understanding your point. >there is no reason to give advertisers anything more than "here is an advertising opportunity for baby wipes", and no other information. That's exactly what advertisers are offered. Do you believe otherwise?
  - mdoms 5y ago
    Advertisers want to divide the population into smaller and smaller and more and more specific groups. Given the technology they absolutely would target individuals.
- wheelie_boy 5y ago
  I think what he was saying is that advertisers don't care about you as an individual, only what groups you fall into. That's true for advertisers that are discriminatory as well as ones that just want to advertise what they're selling to people most likely to buy it.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    For now but when the tech gets better why not target better will be heard from thr adtech companies.
- adolph 5y ago
  In context the point being made is different from that you argue against and probably agrees with you. The context is that of "privacy" and the assertion is that advertisers are not concerned with individual person who a person is; rather the advertisers are interested in relatively non-private broad characteristics of targeted clusters of people. The author paints a relatively rosy picture of advertising based on the interests of an ad's targets instead of the discriminatory interests of the target-er but the concept still stands that on the whole the particulars of an individual are not germane to the business as currently conducted. People say ‘privacy’ so often that one can lose sight of the fact that advertisers don’t care who you are - they just want to show ads to people that might be interested in them, and not to show ads to people who won’t be interested. They don’t want to ‘violate your privacy’ - they want to show diaper ads to parents, car ads to people who want a car and watch ads to rich people.
  - csunbird 5y ago
    > They don’t want to ‘violate your privacy’ - they want to show diaper ads to parents, car ads to people who want a car and watch ads to rich people. I find this to be untrue many times, as advertisers also want to convince people to buy stuff that they do not actually need or want as well.
    - ficklepickle 5y ago
      I agree! They are also very concerned about fraud. A great way to ensure a real user saw your ad is to... wait for it... invade your privacy! I have no sympathy for these parasites. Surveillance capitalism needs to die in a fire.
- legitster 5y ago
  All advertising is already targeted. A billboard is targeted to a geographic area - it's not randomly assigned. A commercial is on a station who's demographics are critically important. The HUD case was a bit unique because there are specific laws about how housing can be advertised. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is the real jarring one because they were given data normal Facebook advertisers couldn't even dream of getting a hold of.
  - Angostura 5y ago
    Traditional advertising directly targets the content - where it is, what it is - and indirectly targets the audience through that. Current online adverting targets the individual - irrespective of where they are (what site or app) or what they are looking at.
    - legitster 5y ago
      That's not always true - traditional marketing included things like direct mail, direct calling, door to door sales, etc. Also, unless you manage your own lead database, targeting to the individual level doesn't really happen in modern marketing systems. You build cohorts like "everyone who downloaded this app and put food as an interest". While it's certainly possible to de-anonymize people occasionally with the advertising data you work with, a) ad platforms never want to give it to you and b) there's an unbelievable amount of noise in the system so you just build programs with the assumption that ~50% of the data is going to be flat out wrong.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    So what you're saying is there's no need to track users and violate privacy. Great! We can agree. Stick to billboards and television commercials.
  - zpeti 5y ago
    Cambridge analytica got data from surveys on Facebook. You know who was “given” data by Facebook that others couldn’t even dream of? The Obama campaign. A fact that is very much forgotten by the NYT and every other Cambridge analytica hater.
jefftk 5y ago
you can target an Economist reader a week later on a different website. If FLoC works, you can still do that. https://github.com/WICG/floc https://github.com/WICG/floc won't really let advertisers do that, this is what https://github.com/WICG/turtledove https://github.com/WICG/turtledove is for (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  In case you happen to know... I keep getting logged out of all websites on Chrome, pretty much every day. That’s a recent development. Is this symptom of how flock FloC works?
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    FLoC should be unrelated to cookie settings (for now), unless maybe you're using some alpha version. Check if you've accidentally enabled some auto-delete?
- fumar 5y ago
  What about the rest of the browsers? Safari has over 30% market share in the US.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    Chrome's FLoC and TURTLEDOVE proposals are nascent web standards under the Web Incubator Community Group (https://wicg.io https://wicg.io). My understanding is that Chrome is hoping to come up with something that other browsers also like? Other browsers are working on this general project ("how do you do ads without cookies") too: Edge has https://github.com/WICG/privacy-preserving-ads/blob/main/Parakeet.md https://github.com/WICG/privacy-preserving-ads/blob/main/Par... and Safari has https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-attribution-for-the-web/ https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-att...
- XMPPwocky 5y ago
  "I work on ads at Google" why?
legitster 5y ago
As someone who works in marketing, I tend to think that traditional mediums like billboards or direct mail tend to be highly underrated specifically because the tracking is not as detailed. As we move to a world with less data for digital ads, I have to imagine the playing field will be levelled out. But really, the winners are Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn etc. Nearly all of our digital ad purchases have been directly on the big platforms. In-app or network ads have increasingly been absolute dogs for user acquisition anyway. Meanwhile, I can pay Facebook directly to access their users and they don't have to give up any of their valuable data to anyone to do it because it's all in a closed system.
- zerocrates 5y ago
  I've long assumed that the benefits of mega-targeting are overstated: we've all seen the ultra-targeted ads for say, TVs right after we bought a TV. Unobtrusive targeting based on the content of where the ad appears feels like it should capture much of the value without all the data collection. Maybe I'm wrong and the targeting really does work that well that it should displace practically all other forms of advertising, but it just feels like a situation where it's to nobody's benefit within the ad buying/selling system to really take a hard look at whether this is worth it.
  - danaris 5y ago
    I don't have a link right now, but I recall seeing at least one study within the past few months that showed just that: that despite the increased intrusiveness of data collection and ad tracking and targeting, conversion rates have not increased appreciably over simple context-based ad placements like we had a decade or so ago.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Those are two different datapoints. The assumption being if they went back to context ads we would have rates similiar to 2005. The consumer has changed and is smarter than the group of who joined aol and discovered the internet. Clickthrough rates have been falling since so it doesn't compare well. People will pay more to target fewer because it costs them less to get sales.
parhamn 5y ago
> When those publishers are in the news business, this is another trade-off - pay walls (and privacy!) conflict with reach and public purpose, and again they tend to work best for the strongest. I think the most interesting "ads are good" argument I've heard is being able to give free tools to people who don't have the discretionary budget to pay for things like premium news. A bit sad about information paywalls over this. At the same time, I'd still gamble that this 'apocalypse' will prove to be created because there wasn't pressure to perform better with a limited ad capabilities. My bet would still be that things will be fine even after the playing board is tamed -- the markets just need some time to react and correct.
- jen20 5y ago
  > free tools to people who don't have the discretionary budget to pay for things like premium news. Is there evidence that blasting even very targeted ads at people without discretionary income yields conversion?
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Presumably you wouldn't be blasting ads for luxury goods or premium products. You'd be blasting ads for payday loans, gambling, get-rich-quick schemes and other scams. Morally, ethically and potentially even legally wrong (technically the ad network should be held complicit if they're promoting a scam), but it does work. "No discretionary income" doesn't mean the mark won't spend money if they believe they have a high probability of making it back + more.
  - collaborative 5y ago
    Yes, this is true. We have run a company at a (small) profit using this method for 5 years But it also no longer is tge case. AdWords stopped working (at least for us) in April
- whakim 5y ago
  There are some other interesting ideas that aren't simply "invasive ads" or "subscriptions." Obviously, advertising was effective before the advent of the modern internet, so it seems like it should still be so if we rid ourselves of privacy-invasive hypertargeting and everyone has a level playing field (that being said, as the author and you yourself note, this does concentrate power in the hands of the best advertising "spots", e.g. Facebook or Google). There's stuff like BAT, which seems like it has a lot of potential but hasn't really taken off because most people just don't care enough about ads, and ads work well enough that there isn't sufficient motivation on the part of businesses to make it happen.
jamescun 5y ago
> Before the internet, that meant car ads in car magazines and watch ads in the Economist. Ads were based on context, and on inferring the audience from the context. You can still do this. Car ads on car websites. Watch ads on the Economist website. Has there been any research on the effectiveness of retargeting?
- dawnerd 5y ago
  Just using myself as data, I'm less likely to buy a product if it keeps getting shoved down my throat in ads.
- oakfr 5y ago
  There is a tremendous amount of research on the effectiveness of retargeting. This is dubbed "incrementality" in the field. Issues are: 1. Incrementality is extremely hard to measure due to noise and biases, in particular when trying to account for the multiple agents in the game. Attributed sales are easy to measure. For global, incremental sales, it is much harder. 2. Because of 1, this research needs large amounts of data, which only large ad tech companies have access to. 3. Because the topic is so hard to pin down and so sensitive business-wise, no private ad-tech company would publish ground-breaking material on the topic.
helloguillecl 5y ago
FTA: "One side-effect of this was relocation of value - you can target an Economist reader a week later on a different website." Don't this new tracking restrictions favor content creators at the expense of advertising networks? Let me explain better: If I understand well, now The Economist could sell exclusive access to their readers by selling advertising directly to the advertiser? I believe this gives media with a certain volume of visitors and engagement an entire new leverage over "legacy adtech"
- kfarr 5y ago
  Yes
- kornish 5y ago
  Correct. Previously, advertisers bought segments of 3P cookies, then targeted those IDs wherever they appeared. Cookiepocalypse means that advertisers will be unable to buy segments of domain-agnostic IDs (3P cookies), and so it will be up to the publisher to segment up its viewers and sell access to those segments to advertisers. There will be more layers of aggregation on top of that, such as SSPs (supply-side platforms, which aggregate access to publishers' inventory) or PMPs (private marketplaes, which are effectively funnels of select inventory per some critera for some client), but the general principle is that targeting capabilities are shifting from the demand side to the supply side, closer to the viewer. So instead of picking the right segment, effective advertising will be about picking the right publishers. That's good for Google and Facebook because their 1P data is so rich.
aNoob7000 5y ago
I think the article misses the point totally. I think the question is how much data is enough for advertisers and companies? The problem I see is that companies like Google/Facebook is that they have too much information gathered about users. I get that all this information is great for targeting me with better ads, but I think there should be a limit to what data is collected and for how long it is kept. Personally, I hope Congress (USA) creates some laws to allow consumers to opt out of all this tracking. If it is truly beneficial for users, then they will opt-in
- refulgentis 5y ago
  That's a tough conversation to have because if you're worried about data retention, then you start looking at Apple. It's a new regime, which is off-putting because it flips the tired hero/villains narratives in unexpected ways
  - cosmojg 5y ago
    What's the lowdown on Apple and data retention?
    - refulgentis 5y ago
      Unfortunately, in theory, _everything_: law enforcement stopped pushing for decryption because Apple became responsive to requests for icloud backups, which are _not_ encrypted, and no plans to. Word on the street is that was a negotiated understanding with gov't In practice, Apple says they use the following data for targeting: search queries, news articles you've read, any content bought through their various store fronts, App Store searches, and app usage data and using it for targeting. Some of this is un-differentiable for privacy/needs to be stored server side, the Apple docs neither mention this distinction nor differential privacy at all, and there's no public indication any of this is covered by differential privacy
legerdemain 5y ago
Advertisers may not want to "violate my privacy," but they also don't want to protect my privacy. They will be happy to collect rich information about me inadvertently, and then leak it with total impunity. I'm sure the bull in the china shop doesn't want to break any porcelain, either.
- toss1 5y ago
  At least the bulls generally succeed in not breaking any porcelain. These "marketers", "ad-tech" companies, and tech giants could not possibly GAF less about the consequences for anyone else as long as they get their money. It is more like "See no evil" than "don't be evil". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unXVAfbA_xs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unXVAfbA_xs
keepper 5y ago
"here’s a bunch of reasons why this might not work, not least that no-one except Google and Apple want Google and Apple to have that much control over publishing and advertising. " I've said this previously, if you for a second think Apple is protecting you against evil "Social Media company" or "Evil X Advertiser", you are wrong. Apple is only looking out for Apple. And they want to be the one who controls user data. Plain and simple. The enemy of your enemy is not necesarily your friend. Things SHOULD change. Moving the power from one big corp to another big corp is not the answer. No matter how convenient it may seem.
- macintux 5y ago
  Except Apple does a pretty good job of keeping your data on your device. Sure, they’re no saints, but they put a lot of effort into privacy.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - keepper 5y ago
    Explain AirTags and their ability to highjack the internet connectivity of any apple device. Did you get asked about that? So why is it ok for apple to do that, and non of their vendors?
    - macintux 5y ago
      Their partners can use the Find My network. https://www.macworld.com/article/342763/apple-opens-up-its-find-my-network-to-third-party-devices-no-airtag-needed.html https://www.macworld.com/article/342763/apple-opens-up-its-f... I'm not sure how that's relevant to your privacy as a user, although obviously the tags and other trackers raise concerns around abuse.
      - keepper 5y ago
        Relevance here[1] [1]https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2021/05/14/apple-airtags-hacked-again-free-internet-with-no-mobile-data-plan/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2021/05/14/apple-airtags-ha...
viktorcode 5y ago
> I think it’s very likely that Apple is looking at offering this in third-party apps and in Safari as well [browser analyses your behaviour and puts you into (mostly) anonymous, interest-based cohorts] It seems to me very unlikely.
nielsbot 5y ago
“Chrome and Safari are turning off third party cookies anyway.” Is that really true though? I though advertisers are getting around this despite browsers’ efforts.
- fumar 5y ago
  Ad tech companies are building and releasing identity replacements, but not replacing 3P cookies. At the end of the day, consumers should gain more transparency and control over their digital selfs. https://principle.substack.com/p/consumer-transparency-and-control https://principle.substack.com/p/consumer-transparency-and-c...
- Qub3d 5y ago
  Yes, the primary tool is CNAME cloaking. On Firefox, uBlock Origin already detects and blocks this. Unfortunately Chrome and Safari don't expose the APIs to allow this there. https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/780 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/780
leothecool 5y ago
> A version of this essay was sent to premium subscribers to my newsletter earlier this week. Find out more here. The solution is right there on the page, just not in the article itself.
- coldpie 5y ago
  Yeah. Everyone boils this down to a debate between paywalls and ads. For example, from this article: > When those publishers are in the news business, this is another trade-off - pay walls (and privacy!) conflict with reach and public purpose But there are other ways. One which is already successful is community supported free content, just like this article's author is already doing: they release it early to paying people and then release it publicly. They still get paid, and they still get the reach. I even support quite a number of people on Patreon who provide no benefit to the payer. I like the content they produce, so I pay them to make it, regardless of who else gets to view it. I think this is one of the most harmful effects of advertising-based business models: it kills other business models. If advertising pays well, then there is incentive for someone else to "steal" your content and slap ads on it. But if we destroy advertising as a viable business model, then that incentive disappears, and we can start exploring other business models.
  - Nagyman 5y ago
    > then that incentive disappears, and we can start exploring other business models At times it feels like we're stuck in a local maxima. Momentum plays a part and it can take a significant shift (e.g. from privacy abuses and shifting expectations), before we bother to try alternatives. This _takes time_, and technology moves faster than policy, business, or culture seem capable of tracking.
mdoms 5y ago
> But it’s also worth stepping up another level again, and asking what advertisers are trying to do, anyway. People say ‘privacy’ so often that one can lose sight of the fact that advertisers don’t care who you are - they just want to show ads to people that might be interested in them, and not to show ads to people who won’t be interested. They don’t want to ‘violate your privacy’ - they want to show diaper ads to parents, car ads to people who want a car and watch ads to rich people. This guy says this like advertisers have an inalienable right to show ads to people. Get the heck out of here.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Their complaining is music to my ears (or whatever the analogue is for eyes in this case).
- kristjansson 5y ago
  I mean, they have a right to _try_. Publishers can put (basically) anything they want on their channels, and take money from (basically) anyone to promote their content. Whether that's a winning strategy for publisher or advertiser is down to consumer choices. Hopefully the worst offenders here (Samsung Smart TV ads?) are rightfully punished by their users here.
- benedictevans 5y ago
  No - it's pointing out what advertising is trying to do, which is not necessarily about privacy at all. Meanwhile, it's apparently also worth pointing out that advertiser do not show anyone ads. Newspapers do. The media you enjoy and value shows you ads, and is paid for by them.
  - finnh 5y ago
    Advertisers also want to actually get that private data, so they can refine their targeting. And then of course there is the problem of leakage (Cambridge Analytica et al). So it's not quite so benign as you suggest. Every marketer I've ever met has a voracious desire for any/all data about anyone they might consider marketing to.
  - 5y ago
defaultname 5y ago
"and Apple has deliberately framed the question such that almost no-one will say yes" ... "We could spend a lot of time arguing about the rights and wrongs of privacy and Apple’s framing and steering and use of its market dominance" Nice demonstration of apophasis there. Regardless, how else should they frame it? The question seems incredibly concise and matter of fact. Indeed, the question simply claims that it will "ask" the app not to track, which seems pretty broad and permissive.
- criddell 5y ago
  Can apps require tracking permission to be granted? For example, if you start the Facebook app and it detects tracking is disabled, can it pop up a message telling the user that they have to allow tracking to continue?
  - drexlspivey 5y ago
    I think the way it works for every single permission is that you can request it only once and your app can’t stop working if the user refuses.
  - KoftaBob 5y ago
    Apple explicitly prohibits that.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
From the article -- "Ads were based on context, and on inferring the audience from the context." This is incorrect. Since the beginning of advertising there have been people who survey those who read a particular magazine, newspaper, watch a particular show. And for those who are willing to share those habits with advertisers PAY THEM MONEY for that. Ever heard the term "Neilson family"? That was a family that agreed to put a special box on their television which recorded which channels you watched, when, and for how long. It would then aggregate that information and send it to advertisers and broadcasters alike. Based on who the "audience" was, they would negotiate advertising rights. And from the very beginning broadcasters try to "game" the results with known desirable content during "sweeps weeks" which were the weeks where the statistics were gathered. Nearly every periodical I ever subscribed too occasionally sent a "marketing survey" with some compensation for filling it out like an extra year of subscription or a branded bag or something. There were, and ARE, periodicals today where the only "subscription price" you pay is giving up your personal data about why you want to read that periodical. So the "apocolypse" here, is that these platform owners found a tasty revenue stream by disintermediating all of the surveyors and poll takers and returning statistics with 100% participation. No modelling necessary, here are the exact characteristics of your readers. They didn't give their users a choice, they just took that private data and sold it. And now they are whining, loudly, that OMG that value we were stealing? They want us to pay for that? That could ruin us! Newsflash, it won't ruin you. Does this mean the end of "free" journalism? Maybe, but it was never free to begin with, it only felt free.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  The surveys you're describing is the inferring. The ads are still based entirely on context, so the article is correct. The inferring is still just statistical aggregation. Readers of the Economist may be on average wealthier, but a poor college student may still be reading it and seeing the ads for expensive watches. Even if they personally filled out a survey. Which is why the inferring is often wrong. In contrast, actually search for watches today, and get watch ads for the next 3 months on every site you visit...
  - ChuckMcM 5y ago
collaborative 5y ago
As a small manufacturing company we're really struggling to replace Google Ads now that it no longer works. We've had to start doing horrific things like searching potential customers through the directory and sending unsolicited emails
- no-s 5y ago
  welcome back to the olden days...not at the bottom yet, heheh. We used to rely on networks of contacts for B2B marketing. Maintained via junkets to conferences and retreats at exotic locations.
  - collaborative 5y ago
    Thanks for the tips :-)
- lxchase 5y ago
  Are you talking about Google display or Google search? I assuming the former given the context but wanted to ask to be sure. Google search shouldn’t be any different. I find it a common roadblock for one to think about advertising as a one sided transaction. Customers hate it, most advertisers don’t love it. Agencies and publishers love it because they get the fees. If you solve the customers problem, it’s a matter of reaching them in a contextual way. How is your organic funnel, trade marketing, direct mail, etc. I don’t know what industry so it’s hard for me to give a specific example (Disclosure: I work in marketing/advertising and audience analytics and attribution is one of my focus areas)
  - collaborative 5y ago
    Google search. Totally broken since March/April. Worked solidly for 5 years (requiring fine tuning of course, but it worked). Something has changed
    - lxchase 5y ago
      Could it be that the auctions got that much more competitive because display budget has gone elsewhere? (Genuine question, it's been a while since I heavily invested into search)
ssklash 5y ago
I am always so surprised when I read articles like this by people in the "ad tech" space by the amount of sheer entitlement to people's attention and data. Apple making this move is treated as if they were denying access to a natural resource, like Nestle putting a fence around your local lake and selling you the water. Ads are not inherently good, consumers don't need them, and ad companies don't have any right whatsoever to our attention or data. If it can be abused, it will be, and Google and Facebook have shown you can make tens of billions off of personal data and attention. To me it's fundamentally immoral. To see the terrifying endgame to all this, check out "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff.
- treeman79 5y ago
  Was in adtech. The money involved is obscene. Lots of high paying positions will go away if work arounds are not found. Some level of targeting is fine. Pushing denture cream to 5 year olds makes no one happy. Otherwise yea, creepiness is off the charts, wouldn’t mind most of it going away.
- benedictevans 5y ago
  I don't work in ad tech at all and never have. I'm just interesting in trying to work out what's doing on and what might happen. I also try to avoid moral panics and hysteria.
  - lxchase 5y ago
    As someone who has helped build an attribution platform tying offline sales to online impressions, my hunch of what might happen is that the 3rd parties (in this case ad tech companies) will become more of the “connecting the pipes” role more than they already are. What is happening now with cookies has been happening since direct mail flyers were (and still are) a thing. Advertisers are selling purchase data (or trading) so you get commingled onto a list of people who like wine, watches and steaks. That list is then matched blindly with a 3rd party credit agency and commingled with other identifiers etc. Cookies are just a medium among many many identifiers, albeit a really easy one to use.
  - 5y ago
natch 5y ago
I for one am enjoying the new world of random ads I am getting. It feels like being let out of a bubble. I get to see all sorts of products I had never thought about. Not relevant ones, but the personalized ads never worked anyway. Personalized ads were always about showing you ads for diapers just after your child had outgrown them, or ads for a crappy car just after you had bought a good car. Meh.
perihelions 5y ago
"and Apple has deliberately framed the question such that almost no-one will say yes" Translation: Apple worded the question plainly and without deception.
- nicbou 5y ago
  I just looked it up, and you're right. It's plain as day, and completely neutral.
- benedictevans 5y ago
  In different parts of your iOS settings, Apple will ask you it it's OK for ads to 'track' you, OK to 'personalise' ads and OK to 'measure ad effectiveness'. Framing is important.
  - cosmojg 5y ago
    Those all sound reasonable and unbiased to me. That's exactly what most ads and cookies do.
    - hyperpape 5y ago
      I’m on Apple’s side, and think all three phrasings are fine. However, I think that “track” sounds much more invasive than personalize. Of course we know they’re the same damn thing, but “personalized” sounds more innocent.
      - chmod775 5y ago
        Not quite the same thing. Serving personalized ads is the goal and tracking is the means.
      - rhizome 5y ago
        Content is personalized, people are tracked.
    - Dah00n 5y ago
drexlspivey 5y ago
I feel that the solution to the pay for content problem is micropayments. Why do I have to pay subscription to 10 news papers if i only read 2 articles per month from each? Why can’t I have a button at the bottom that says pay 10 cents to read the whole article where payment happens instantly without redirects and filling credit card info. Why does paypal/stripe have a fixed minimum fee of $0.30 for doing a database update? Here is an example of what I am talking about that is implemented via the lightning network: https://yalls.org/ https://yalls.org/
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  > Why does paypal/stripe have a fixed minimum fee of $0.30 for doing a database update? That's Visa + Mastercard's network fee. ------ Y'ever noticed how no-one has ever actually disrupted the online payments industry? It's because Visa and Mastercard own the very substrate of e-commerce through their private inter-bank networks. You cannot get anything done without going through them - and their minimum fees.
  - gurumeditations 5y ago
    That’s the problem that cryptocurrency originally tried to solve, but of course that comes with its own set of drawbacks and shortcomings. The fundamental problem is that the US Dollar was not designed for digital transactions. When bank networks came into existence, they stopped trading physical bills and just started flipping bits in their privately owned databases. What needs to happen is the Federal Reserve needs to create a digital Dollar system that is secure, is accepted everywhere, and can be transacted quickly with zero fees. Erase the bank networks and turn banks into customer service centers who are given custodial powers (credit, chargebacks, rewards, etc) over your wallet in return for fees. The government could even levy taxes over the entire US economy this way. No more tax dodging and loss of trillions in public funds. No more TurboTax.
- FabHK 5y ago
  I am not sure. I think the bundling of content might have a positive side effect: I think there is a lot of content that people love to consume (cat videos, food porn, sports, etc.), even if it is not particularly “worthy”, and vice versa content that is important or worthy, and that you might want to have (even if you don’t always want to actually consume it!), such as deep investigative journalism exposing misdeeds of the powerful, operas, what have you. With bundles, like The Economist or any other newspaper, or TV channels, you can support or cross subsidise the latter with the former. With micro payments, not sure that would work. It might lead to more clickbait. It’s a bit like in the experiment where you could preorder your food at the work canteen for the entire week - people would pre-order a nice balanced healthy diet, while when you make the choice every day, you end up with pizza most days. Or how people would buy the Encyclopaedia Britannica for home for a substantial amount, and then rarely if ever use it. However, one thing in favour of micropayments versus ads: they allow you to support an article without having to read it… TLDR: subscriptions and bundles might allow “the better angels of our nature” to support better and more valuable content than micropayments or ad financing.
codeflo 5y ago
> Apple has deliberately framed the question such that almost no-one will say yes Not quoting the question makes it easier for the author to frame the formulation as malicious without risking the reader coming to a different conclusion. Here's the question: "Allow APP to track your activity across other companies' apps and websites? Your data will be used to deliver personalized apps to you. [Ask App Not to Track] [Allow]" (AFAICT, the second sentence can be different, e.g. "Your data will be used to measure advertising efficiency", depending on the app.)
janaagaard 5y ago
"advertisers don’t care who you are - they just want to show ads to people that might be interested in them, and not to show ads to people who won’t be interested. They don’t want to ‘violate your privacy’" Amen!
fleddr 5y ago
What I find most telling is that in the article, not a single thought is dedicated to the user. A deep introspection of advertisers, browsers, publishers. Users, the fundamental owners of the data we're talking about, seem to not even be at the table.
- warkdarrior 5y ago
  It seems to me that behavioral data is jointly owned by users and websites. "Here is what user X did on website Y." Can website Y share data with an ad network about that user? Can user X share data with an ad network about that website?
musicale 5y ago
Unfortunately Apple's changes are probably accelerating the shift to server-side tracking.
ashneo76 5y ago
I don't care what the advertisers care about. Fuck them. They never asked my permission. Straight and simple
kaishin 5y ago
I’m quite confused by the paragraph arguing that advertisers don’t want to violate my privacy. So if I’m a parent and rather keep that private from everyone, how’s showing me diaper ads by obtaining that information from somewhere I didn’t suspect not a violation of my privacy?

136 points by tmfi 5y ago

I'm confused as to what FedEx has to do with this article. It is in the article's title, but is only mentioned in passing in the concluding paragraph.

samatman 5y ago
Cheap trick to maintain interest. Done well, it's actually ok: you read the article looking for that last breadcrumb from the headline, and find it in the last paragraph with a sort of 'a-ha!' moment. Here it's done badly, with some vague handwaving about how ad spend might go to Fedex for free returns. As a consumer, if I were given a choice between intrusive cross-site tracking and free returns, the choice is completely obvious.

hermanradtke 5y ago

> ... one can lose sight of the fact that advertisers don’t care who you are Companies were literally using Facebook's ad targeting to discriminate against certain groups of people [1]. There is also the Cambridge Analytica scandal to concern ourselves with too. 1: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/28/707614254/hud-slaps-facebook-with-housing-discrimination-charge https://www.npr.org/2019/03/28/707614254/hud-slaps-facebook-...

squeegmeister 5y ago
I think the point is that advertisers care about groups, not individuals
- jerf 5y ago
  I'd suggest it's not groups instead of individuals, but the other direction; particular attributes (fragments of individuals) instead of individuals. An advertiser, at the point where they want to advertise their baby wipes, don't care whether or not you're into fishing. They only care about whether or not their ad for baby wipes is going to someone who has the attribute "in the market for baby wipes". To the extent they care about groups, it's only because they aren't interested in an advertising campaign that targets one person, but they don't need anything more than "a bunch of people who are in the market for baby wipes". An advertiser may care about more than one of these things at a time ("interested in baby wipes" + "what culture do they identify with" so I can target things culturally, for instance), but even a very highly-targeted ad will be ignoring all sorts of attributes.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    You said "not groups" but then you wrote a bunch of words that describe "groups" so the distinction you're trying to draw doesn't make any sense.
    - teachingassist 5y ago
      I understand that the parent's point is "people who are into fishing and baby wipes" is not a coherent or meaningful group (in the sense of 'stratum' or 'cohort') of the population. Neither fishing nor baby wipe marketeers would typically care about this so-called group. If you are really applying attribute tags to individuals, you are not "grouping" them in the usually-understood meaning of stratifying. In truth, you are still building an individual profile for each person, but describing it in a disingenuous way.
    - jerf 5y ago
      My point is that advertisers aren't interested in groups of people as they are whole people, but just fragments of individuals that happen to match very specific characteristics they are advertising at. Under most circumstances this would be a distinction without a difference, but in this specific case it turns out to be important. If advertisers are interested in "groups" than they may still think of themselves as needing identity, and demographic breakdowns, and wanting addresses for those groups, etc... but if you conceive of all they care about as being "in the market for baby wipes" there is no reason to give advertisers anything more than "here is an advertising opportunity for baby wipes", and no other information. Not an aggregation of "individuals", with all the extraneous baggage that comes with, but aggregations of fine slices of attributes that they have no need to correlate to anything else. (Only residual desire because they're probably still used to thinking about "individuals".)
      - bryan_w 5y ago
        I'm having trouble understanding your point. >there is no reason to give advertisers anything more than "here is an advertising opportunity for baby wipes", and no other information. That's exactly what advertisers are offered. Do you believe otherwise?
- mdoms 5y ago
  Advertisers want to divide the population into smaller and smaller and more and more specific groups. Given the technology they absolutely would target individuals.
wheelie_boy 5y ago
I think what he was saying is that advertisers don't care about you as an individual, only what groups you fall into. That's true for advertisers that are discriminatory as well as ones that just want to advertise what they're selling to people most likely to buy it.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  For now but when the tech gets better why not target better will be heard from thr adtech companies.
adolph 5y ago
In context the point being made is different from that you argue against and probably agrees with you. The context is that of "privacy" and the assertion is that advertisers are not concerned with individual person who a person is; rather the advertisers are interested in relatively non-private broad characteristics of targeted clusters of people. The author paints a relatively rosy picture of advertising based on the interests of an ad's targets instead of the discriminatory interests of the target-er but the concept still stands that on the whole the particulars of an individual are not germane to the business as currently conducted. People say ‘privacy’ so often that one can lose sight of the fact that advertisers don’t care who you are - they just want to show ads to people that might be interested in them, and not to show ads to people who won’t be interested. They don’t want to ‘violate your privacy’ - they want to show diaper ads to parents, car ads to people who want a car and watch ads to rich people.
- csunbird 5y ago
  > They don’t want to ‘violate your privacy’ - they want to show diaper ads to parents, car ads to people who want a car and watch ads to rich people. I find this to be untrue many times, as advertisers also want to convince people to buy stuff that they do not actually need or want as well.
  - ficklepickle 5y ago
    I agree! They are also very concerned about fraud. A great way to ensure a real user saw your ad is to... wait for it... invade your privacy! I have no sympathy for these parasites. Surveillance capitalism needs to die in a fire.
legitster 5y ago
All advertising is already targeted. A billboard is targeted to a geographic area - it's not randomly assigned. A commercial is on a station who's demographics are critically important. The HUD case was a bit unique because there are specific laws about how housing can be advertised. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is the real jarring one because they were given data normal Facebook advertisers couldn't even dream of getting a hold of.
- Angostura 5y ago
  Traditional advertising directly targets the content - where it is, what it is - and indirectly targets the audience through that. Current online adverting targets the individual - irrespective of where they are (what site or app) or what they are looking at.
  - legitster 5y ago
    That's not always true - traditional marketing included things like direct mail, direct calling, door to door sales, etc. Also, unless you manage your own lead database, targeting to the individual level doesn't really happen in modern marketing systems. You build cohorts like "everyone who downloaded this app and put food as an interest". While it's certainly possible to de-anonymize people occasionally with the advertising data you work with, a) ad platforms never want to give it to you and b) there's an unbelievable amount of noise in the system so you just build programs with the assumption that ~50% of the data is going to be flat out wrong.
- mdoms 5y ago
  So what you're saying is there's no need to track users and violate privacy. Great! We can agree. Stick to billboards and television commercials.
- zpeti 5y ago
  Cambridge analytica got data from surveys on Facebook. You know who was “given” data by Facebook that others couldn’t even dream of? The Obama campaign. A fact that is very much forgotten by the NYT and every other Cambridge analytica hater.

jefftk 5y ago

you can target an Economist reader a week later on a different website. If FLoC works, you can still do that. https://github.com/WICG/floc https://github.com/WICG/floc won't really let advertisers do that, this is what https://github.com/WICG/turtledove https://github.com/WICG/turtledove is for (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

devoutsalsa 5y ago
In case you happen to know... I keep getting logged out of all websites on Chrome, pretty much every day. That’s a recent development. Is this symptom of how flock FloC works?
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  FLoC should be unrelated to cookie settings (for now), unless maybe you're using some alpha version. Check if you've accidentally enabled some auto-delete?
fumar 5y ago
What about the rest of the browsers? Safari has over 30% market share in the US.
- jefftk 5y ago
  Chrome's FLoC and TURTLEDOVE proposals are nascent web standards under the Web Incubator Community Group (https://wicg.io https://wicg.io). My understanding is that Chrome is hoping to come up with something that other browsers also like? Other browsers are working on this general project ("how do you do ads without cookies") too: Edge has https://github.com/WICG/privacy-preserving-ads/blob/main/Parakeet.md https://github.com/WICG/privacy-preserving-ads/blob/main/Par... and Safari has https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-attribution-for-the-web/ https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-att...
XMPPwocky 5y ago
"I work on ads at Google" why?

legitster 5y ago

As someone who works in marketing, I tend to think that traditional mediums like billboards or direct mail tend to be highly underrated specifically because the tracking is not as detailed. As we move to a world with less data for digital ads, I have to imagine the playing field will be levelled out. But really, the winners are Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn etc. Nearly all of our digital ad purchases have been directly on the big platforms. In-app or network ads have increasingly been absolute dogs for user acquisition anyway. Meanwhile, I can pay Facebook directly to access their users and they don't have to give up any of their valuable data to anyone to do it because it's all in a closed system.

zerocrates 5y ago
I've long assumed that the benefits of mega-targeting are overstated: we've all seen the ultra-targeted ads for say, TVs right after we bought a TV. Unobtrusive targeting based on the content of where the ad appears feels like it should capture much of the value without all the data collection. Maybe I'm wrong and the targeting really does work that well that it should displace practically all other forms of advertising, but it just feels like a situation where it's to nobody's benefit within the ad buying/selling system to really take a hard look at whether this is worth it.
- danaris 5y ago
  I don't have a link right now, but I recall seeing at least one study within the past few months that showed just that: that despite the increased intrusiveness of data collection and ad tracking and targeting, conversion rates have not increased appreciably over simple context-based ad placements like we had a decade or so ago.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Those are two different datapoints. The assumption being if they went back to context ads we would have rates similiar to 2005. The consumer has changed and is smarter than the group of who joined aol and discovered the internet. Clickthrough rates have been falling since so it doesn't compare well. People will pay more to target fewer because it costs them less to get sales.

parhamn 5y ago

> When those publishers are in the news business, this is another trade-off - pay walls (and privacy!) conflict with reach and public purpose, and again they tend to work best for the strongest. I think the most interesting "ads are good" argument I've heard is being able to give free tools to people who don't have the discretionary budget to pay for things like premium news. A bit sad about information paywalls over this. At the same time, I'd still gamble that this 'apocalypse' will prove to be created because there wasn't pressure to perform better with a limited ad capabilities. My bet would still be that things will be fine even after the playing board is tamed -- the markets just need some time to react and correct.

jen20 5y ago
> free tools to people who don't have the discretionary budget to pay for things like premium news. Is there evidence that blasting even very targeted ads at people without discretionary income yields conversion?
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Presumably you wouldn't be blasting ads for luxury goods or premium products. You'd be blasting ads for payday loans, gambling, get-rich-quick schemes and other scams. Morally, ethically and potentially even legally wrong (technically the ad network should be held complicit if they're promoting a scam), but it does work. "No discretionary income" doesn't mean the mark won't spend money if they believe they have a high probability of making it back + more.
- collaborative 5y ago
  Yes, this is true. We have run a company at a (small) profit using this method for 5 years But it also no longer is tge case. AdWords stopped working (at least for us) in April
whakim 5y ago
There are some other interesting ideas that aren't simply "invasive ads" or "subscriptions." Obviously, advertising was effective before the advent of the modern internet, so it seems like it should still be so if we rid ourselves of privacy-invasive hypertargeting and everyone has a level playing field (that being said, as the author and you yourself note, this does concentrate power in the hands of the best advertising "spots", e.g. Facebook or Google). There's stuff like BAT, which seems like it has a lot of potential but hasn't really taken off because most people just don't care enough about ads, and ads work well enough that there isn't sufficient motivation on the part of businesses to make it happen.

jamescun 5y ago

> Before the internet, that meant car ads in car magazines and watch ads in the Economist. Ads were based on context, and on inferring the audience from the context. You can still do this. Car ads on car websites. Watch ads on the Economist website. Has there been any research on the effectiveness of retargeting?

dawnerd 5y ago
Just using myself as data, I'm less likely to buy a product if it keeps getting shoved down my throat in ads.
oakfr 5y ago
There is a tremendous amount of research on the effectiveness of retargeting. This is dubbed "incrementality" in the field. Issues are: 1. Incrementality is extremely hard to measure due to noise and biases, in particular when trying to account for the multiple agents in the game. Attributed sales are easy to measure. For global, incremental sales, it is much harder. 2. Because of 1, this research needs large amounts of data, which only large ad tech companies have access to. 3. Because the topic is so hard to pin down and so sensitive business-wise, no private ad-tech company would publish ground-breaking material on the topic.

helloguillecl 5y ago

FTA: "One side-effect of this was relocation of value - you can target an Economist reader a week later on a different website." Don't this new tracking restrictions favor content creators at the expense of advertising networks? Let me explain better: If I understand well, now The Economist could sell exclusive access to their readers by selling advertising directly to the advertiser? I believe this gives media with a certain volume of visitors and engagement an entire new leverage over "legacy adtech"

kfarr 5y ago
Yes
kornish 5y ago
Correct. Previously, advertisers bought segments of 3P cookies, then targeted those IDs wherever they appeared. Cookiepocalypse means that advertisers will be unable to buy segments of domain-agnostic IDs (3P cookies), and so it will be up to the publisher to segment up its viewers and sell access to those segments to advertisers. There will be more layers of aggregation on top of that, such as SSPs (supply-side platforms, which aggregate access to publishers' inventory) or PMPs (private marketplaes, which are effectively funnels of select inventory per some critera for some client), but the general principle is that targeting capabilities are shifting from the demand side to the supply side, closer to the viewer. So instead of picking the right segment, effective advertising will be about picking the right publishers. That's good for Google and Facebook because their 1P data is so rich.

aNoob7000 5y ago

I think the article misses the point totally. I think the question is how much data is enough for advertisers and companies? The problem I see is that companies like Google/Facebook is that they have too much information gathered about users. I get that all this information is great for targeting me with better ads, but I think there should be a limit to what data is collected and for how long it is kept. Personally, I hope Congress (USA) creates some laws to allow consumers to opt out of all this tracking. If it is truly beneficial for users, then they will opt-in

refulgentis 5y ago
That's a tough conversation to have because if you're worried about data retention, then you start looking at Apple. It's a new regime, which is off-putting because it flips the tired hero/villains narratives in unexpected ways
- cosmojg 5y ago
  What's the lowdown on Apple and data retention?
  - refulgentis 5y ago
    Unfortunately, in theory, _everything_: law enforcement stopped pushing for decryption because Apple became responsive to requests for icloud backups, which are _not_ encrypted, and no plans to. Word on the street is that was a negotiated understanding with gov't In practice, Apple says they use the following data for targeting: search queries, news articles you've read, any content bought through their various store fronts, App Store searches, and app usage data and using it for targeting. Some of this is un-differentiable for privacy/needs to be stored server side, the Apple docs neither mention this distinction nor differential privacy at all, and there's no public indication any of this is covered by differential privacy

legerdemain 5y ago

Advertisers may not want to "violate my privacy," but they also don't want to protect my privacy. They will be happy to collect rich information about me inadvertently, and then leak it with total impunity. I'm sure the bull in the china shop doesn't want to break any porcelain, either.

toss1 5y ago
At least the bulls generally succeed in not breaking any porcelain. These "marketers", "ad-tech" companies, and tech giants could not possibly GAF less about the consequences for anyone else as long as they get their money. It is more like "See no evil" than "don't be evil". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unXVAfbA_xs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unXVAfbA_xs

keepper 5y ago

"here’s a bunch of reasons why this might not work, not least that no-one except Google and Apple want Google and Apple to have that much control over publishing and advertising. " I've said this previously, if you for a second think Apple is protecting you against evil "Social Media company" or "Evil X Advertiser", you are wrong. Apple is only looking out for Apple. And they want to be the one who controls user data. Plain and simple. The enemy of your enemy is not necesarily your friend. Things SHOULD change. Moving the power from one big corp to another big corp is not the answer. No matter how convenient it may seem.

macintux 5y ago
Except Apple does a pretty good job of keeping your data on your device. Sure, they’re no saints, but they put a lot of effort into privacy.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- keepper 5y ago
  Explain AirTags and their ability to highjack the internet connectivity of any apple device. Did you get asked about that? So why is it ok for apple to do that, and non of their vendors?
  - macintux 5y ago
    Their partners can use the Find My network. https://www.macworld.com/article/342763/apple-opens-up-its-find-my-network-to-third-party-devices-no-airtag-needed.html https://www.macworld.com/article/342763/apple-opens-up-its-f... I'm not sure how that's relevant to your privacy as a user, although obviously the tags and other trackers raise concerns around abuse.
    - keepper 5y ago
      Relevance here[1] [1]https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2021/05/14/apple-airtags-hacked-again-free-internet-with-no-mobile-data-plan/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2021/05/14/apple-airtags-ha...

viktorcode 5y ago

> I think it’s very likely that Apple is looking at offering this in third-party apps and in Safari as well [browser analyses your behaviour and puts you into (mostly) anonymous, interest-based cohorts] It seems to me very unlikely.

nielsbot 5y ago

“Chrome and Safari are turning off third party cookies anyway.” Is that really true though? I though advertisers are getting around this despite browsers’ efforts.

fumar 5y ago
Ad tech companies are building and releasing identity replacements, but not replacing 3P cookies. At the end of the day, consumers should gain more transparency and control over their digital selfs. https://principle.substack.com/p/consumer-transparency-and-control https://principle.substack.com/p/consumer-transparency-and-c...
Qub3d 5y ago
Yes, the primary tool is CNAME cloaking. On Firefox, uBlock Origin already detects and blocks this. Unfortunately Chrome and Safari don't expose the APIs to allow this there. https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/780 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/780

leothecool 5y ago

> A version of this essay was sent to premium subscribers to my newsletter earlier this week. Find out more here. The solution is right there on the page, just not in the article itself.

coldpie 5y ago
Yeah. Everyone boils this down to a debate between paywalls and ads. For example, from this article: > When those publishers are in the news business, this is another trade-off - pay walls (and privacy!) conflict with reach and public purpose But there are other ways. One which is already successful is community supported free content, just like this article's author is already doing: they release it early to paying people and then release it publicly. They still get paid, and they still get the reach. I even support quite a number of people on Patreon who provide no benefit to the payer. I like the content they produce, so I pay them to make it, regardless of who else gets to view it. I think this is one of the most harmful effects of advertising-based business models: it kills other business models. If advertising pays well, then there is incentive for someone else to "steal" your content and slap ads on it. But if we destroy advertising as a viable business model, then that incentive disappears, and we can start exploring other business models.
- Nagyman 5y ago
  > then that incentive disappears, and we can start exploring other business models At times it feels like we're stuck in a local maxima. Momentum plays a part and it can take a significant shift (e.g. from privacy abuses and shifting expectations), before we bother to try alternatives. This _takes time_, and technology moves faster than policy, business, or culture seem capable of tracking.

mdoms 5y ago

> But it’s also worth stepping up another level again, and asking what advertisers are trying to do, anyway. People say ‘privacy’ so often that one can lose sight of the fact that advertisers don’t care who you are - they just want to show ads to people that might be interested in them, and not to show ads to people who won’t be interested. They don’t want to ‘violate your privacy’ - they want to show diaper ads to parents, car ads to people who want a car and watch ads to rich people. This guy says this like advertisers have an inalienable right to show ads to people. Get the heck out of here.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Their complaining is music to my ears (or whatever the analogue is for eyes in this case).
kristjansson 5y ago
I mean, they have a right to _try_. Publishers can put (basically) anything they want on their channels, and take money from (basically) anyone to promote their content. Whether that's a winning strategy for publisher or advertiser is down to consumer choices. Hopefully the worst offenders here (Samsung Smart TV ads?) are rightfully punished by their users here.
benedictevans 5y ago
No - it's pointing out what advertising is trying to do, which is not necessarily about privacy at all. Meanwhile, it's apparently also worth pointing out that advertiser do not show anyone ads. Newspapers do. The media you enjoy and value shows you ads, and is paid for by them.
- finnh 5y ago
  Advertisers also want to actually get that private data, so they can refine their targeting. And then of course there is the problem of leakage (Cambridge Analytica et al). So it's not quite so benign as you suggest. Every marketer I've ever met has a voracious desire for any/all data about anyone they might consider marketing to.
- 5y ago

defaultname 5y ago

"and Apple has deliberately framed the question such that almost no-one will say yes" ... "We could spend a lot of time arguing about the rights and wrongs of privacy and Apple’s framing and steering and use of its market dominance" Nice demonstration of apophasis there. Regardless, how else should they frame it? The question seems incredibly concise and matter of fact. Indeed, the question simply claims that it will "ask" the app not to track, which seems pretty broad and permissive.

criddell 5y ago
Can apps require tracking permission to be granted? For example, if you start the Facebook app and it detects tracking is disabled, can it pop up a message telling the user that they have to allow tracking to continue?
- drexlspivey 5y ago
  I think the way it works for every single permission is that you can request it only once and your app can’t stop working if the user refuses.
- KoftaBob 5y ago
  Apple explicitly prohibits that.

ChuckMcM 5y ago

From the article -- "Ads were based on context, and on inferring the audience from the context." This is incorrect. Since the beginning of advertising there have been people who survey those who read a particular magazine, newspaper, watch a particular show. And for those who are willing to share those habits with advertisers PAY THEM MONEY for that. Ever heard the term "Neilson family"? That was a family that agreed to put a special box on their television which recorded which channels you watched, when, and for how long. It would then aggregate that information and send it to advertisers and broadcasters alike. Based on who the "audience" was, they would negotiate advertising rights. And from the very beginning broadcasters try to "game" the results with known desirable content during "sweeps weeks" which were the weeks where the statistics were gathered. Nearly every periodical I ever subscribed too occasionally sent a "marketing survey" with some compensation for filling it out like an extra year of subscription or a branded bag or something. There were, and ARE, periodicals today where the only "subscription price" you pay is giving up your personal data about why you want to read that periodical. So the "apocolypse" here, is that these platform owners found a tasty revenue stream by disintermediating all of the surveyors and poll takers and returning statistics with 100% participation. No modelling necessary, here are the exact characteristics of your readers. They didn't give their users a choice, they just took that private data and sold it. And now they are whining, loudly, that OMG that value we were stealing? They want us to pay for that? That could ruin us! Newsflash, it won't ruin you. Does this mean the end of "free" journalism? Maybe, but it was never free to begin with, it only felt free.

crazygringo 5y ago
The surveys you're describing is the inferring. The ads are still based entirely on context, so the article is correct. The inferring is still just statistical aggregation. Readers of the Economist may be on average wealthier, but a poor college student may still be reading it and seeing the ads for expensive watches. Even if they personally filled out a survey. Which is why the inferring is often wrong. In contrast, actually search for watches today, and get watch ads for the next 3 months on every site you visit...
- ChuckMcM 5y ago

collaborative 5y ago

As a small manufacturing company we're really struggling to replace Google Ads now that it no longer works. We've had to start doing horrific things like searching potential customers through the directory and sending unsolicited emails

no-s 5y ago
welcome back to the olden days...not at the bottom yet, heheh. We used to rely on networks of contacts for B2B marketing. Maintained via junkets to conferences and retreats at exotic locations.
- collaborative 5y ago
  Thanks for the tips :-)
lxchase 5y ago
Are you talking about Google display or Google search? I assuming the former given the context but wanted to ask to be sure. Google search shouldn’t be any different. I find it a common roadblock for one to think about advertising as a one sided transaction. Customers hate it, most advertisers don’t love it. Agencies and publishers love it because they get the fees. If you solve the customers problem, it’s a matter of reaching them in a contextual way. How is your organic funnel, trade marketing, direct mail, etc. I don’t know what industry so it’s hard for me to give a specific example (Disclosure: I work in marketing/advertising and audience analytics and attribution is one of my focus areas)
- collaborative 5y ago
  Google search. Totally broken since March/April. Worked solidly for 5 years (requiring fine tuning of course, but it worked). Something has changed
  - lxchase 5y ago
    Could it be that the auctions got that much more competitive because display budget has gone elsewhere? (Genuine question, it's been a while since I heavily invested into search)

ssklash 5y ago

I am always so surprised when I read articles like this by people in the "ad tech" space by the amount of sheer entitlement to people's attention and data. Apple making this move is treated as if they were denying access to a natural resource, like Nestle putting a fence around your local lake and selling you the water. Ads are not inherently good, consumers don't need them, and ad companies don't have any right whatsoever to our attention or data. If it can be abused, it will be, and Google and Facebook have shown you can make tens of billions off of personal data and attention. To me it's fundamentally immoral. To see the terrifying endgame to all this, check out "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff.

treeman79 5y ago
Was in adtech. The money involved is obscene. Lots of high paying positions will go away if work arounds are not found. Some level of targeting is fine. Pushing denture cream to 5 year olds makes no one happy. Otherwise yea, creepiness is off the charts, wouldn’t mind most of it going away.
benedictevans 5y ago
I don't work in ad tech at all and never have. I'm just interesting in trying to work out what's doing on and what might happen. I also try to avoid moral panics and hysteria.
- lxchase 5y ago
  As someone who has helped build an attribution platform tying offline sales to online impressions, my hunch of what might happen is that the 3rd parties (in this case ad tech companies) will become more of the “connecting the pipes” role more than they already are. What is happening now with cookies has been happening since direct mail flyers were (and still are) a thing. Advertisers are selling purchase data (or trading) so you get commingled onto a list of people who like wine, watches and steaks. That list is then matched blindly with a 3rd party credit agency and commingled with other identifiers etc. Cookies are just a medium among many many identifiers, albeit a really easy one to use.
- 5y ago

natch 5y ago

I for one am enjoying the new world of random ads I am getting. It feels like being let out of a bubble. I get to see all sorts of products I had never thought about. Not relevant ones, but the personalized ads never worked anyway. Personalized ads were always about showing you ads for diapers just after your child had outgrown them, or ads for a crappy car just after you had bought a good car. Meh.

perihelions 5y ago

"and Apple has deliberately framed the question such that almost no-one will say yes" Translation: Apple worded the question plainly and without deception.

nicbou 5y ago
I just looked it up, and you're right. It's plain as day, and completely neutral.
benedictevans 5y ago
In different parts of your iOS settings, Apple will ask you it it's OK for ads to 'track' you, OK to 'personalise' ads and OK to 'measure ad effectiveness'. Framing is important.
- cosmojg 5y ago
  Those all sound reasonable and unbiased to me. That's exactly what most ads and cookies do.
  - hyperpape 5y ago
    I’m on Apple’s side, and think all three phrasings are fine. However, I think that “track” sounds much more invasive than personalize. Of course we know they’re the same damn thing, but “personalized” sounds more innocent.
    - chmod775 5y ago
      Not quite the same thing. Serving personalized ads is the goal and tracking is the means.
    - rhizome 5y ago
      Content is personalized, people are tracked.
  - Dah00n 5y ago

drexlspivey 5y ago

I feel that the solution to the pay for content problem is micropayments. Why do I have to pay subscription to 10 news papers if i only read 2 articles per month from each? Why can’t I have a button at the bottom that says pay 10 cents to read the whole article where payment happens instantly without redirects and filling credit card info. Why does paypal/stripe have a fixed minimum fee of $0.30 for doing a database update? Here is an example of what I am talking about that is implemented via the lightning network: https://yalls.org/ https://yalls.org/

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
> Why does paypal/stripe have a fixed minimum fee of $0.30 for doing a database update? That's Visa + Mastercard's network fee. ------ Y'ever noticed how no-one has ever actually disrupted the online payments industry? It's because Visa and Mastercard own the very substrate of e-commerce through their private inter-bank networks. You cannot get anything done without going through them - and their minimum fees.
- gurumeditations 5y ago
  That’s the problem that cryptocurrency originally tried to solve, but of course that comes with its own set of drawbacks and shortcomings. The fundamental problem is that the US Dollar was not designed for digital transactions. When bank networks came into existence, they stopped trading physical bills and just started flipping bits in their privately owned databases. What needs to happen is the Federal Reserve needs to create a digital Dollar system that is secure, is accepted everywhere, and can be transacted quickly with zero fees. Erase the bank networks and turn banks into customer service centers who are given custodial powers (credit, chargebacks, rewards, etc) over your wallet in return for fees. The government could even levy taxes over the entire US economy this way. No more tax dodging and loss of trillions in public funds. No more TurboTax.
FabHK 5y ago
I am not sure. I think the bundling of content might have a positive side effect: I think there is a lot of content that people love to consume (cat videos, food porn, sports, etc.), even if it is not particularly “worthy”, and vice versa content that is important or worthy, and that you might want to have (even if you don’t always want to actually consume it!), such as deep investigative journalism exposing misdeeds of the powerful, operas, what have you. With bundles, like The Economist or any other newspaper, or TV channels, you can support or cross subsidise the latter with the former. With micro payments, not sure that would work. It might lead to more clickbait. It’s a bit like in the experiment where you could preorder your food at the work canteen for the entire week - people would pre-order a nice balanced healthy diet, while when you make the choice every day, you end up with pizza most days. Or how people would buy the Encyclopaedia Britannica for home for a substantial amount, and then rarely if ever use it. However, one thing in favour of micropayments versus ads: they allow you to support an article without having to read it… TLDR: subscriptions and bundles might allow “the better angels of our nature” to support better and more valuable content than micropayments or ad financing.

codeflo 5y ago

> Apple has deliberately framed the question such that almost no-one will say yes Not quoting the question makes it easier for the author to frame the formulation as malicious without risking the reader coming to a different conclusion. Here's the question: "Allow APP to track your activity across other companies' apps and websites? Your data will be used to deliver personalized apps to you. [Ask App Not to Track] [Allow]" (AFAICT, the second sentence can be different, e.g. "Your data will be used to measure advertising efficiency", depending on the app.)

janaagaard 5y ago

"advertisers don’t care who you are - they just want to show ads to people that might be interested in them, and not to show ads to people who won’t be interested. They don’t want to ‘violate your privacy’" Amen!

fleddr 5y ago

What I find most telling is that in the article, not a single thought is dedicated to the user. A deep introspection of advertisers, browsers, publishers. Users, the fundamental owners of the data we're talking about, seem to not even be at the table.

warkdarrior 5y ago
It seems to me that behavioral data is jointly owned by users and websites. "Here is what user X did on website Y." Can website Y share data with an ad network about that user? Can user X share data with an ad network about that website?

musicale 5y ago

Unfortunately Apple's changes are probably accelerating the shift to server-side tracking.

ashneo76 5y ago

I don't care what the advertisers care about. Fuck them. They never asked my permission. Straight and simple

kaishin 5y ago

I’m quite confused by the paragraph arguing that advertisers don’t want to violate my privacy. So if I’m a parent and rather keep that private from everyone, how’s showing me diaper ads by obtaining that information from somewhere I didn’t suspect not a violation of my privacy?