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This is it and is how the online advertising industry has worked for over 25 years. In its simplest form the pixel is used to attribute an ad view/click to a c

This is it and is how the online advertising industry has worked for over 25 years. In its simplest form the pixel is used to attribute an ad view/click to a conversion event. At the beginning of the online ad industry that’s all it did, advertisers for the first time had the ability to directly, in real time, see the effectiveness of their ads. The economic value and GDP generated due to this innovation is immeasurable, the internet economy is literally built on it. At the beginning there was no profile building, combining with PII and data gathered from social media or even your gmail emails (yes the content of your emails). And it was magical! It’s the innovations since that have moved the entire industry through a grey area into the blank where the way they operate is questionable at best. The point is, this tracking pixel on its own is incredible what it unlocks. It’s the way that data is then used that we have to call into question. Personally the simplest form of attribution to me is fine. It works and I don’t believe it’s invasive if they aren’t then combining it with pii and profile data. Sadly that time has passed and all advertising networks now rely so heavily of ML/AI that it’s impossible to manage them, as an advertiser, in the way you used to. Hopefully regulation will push the industry back to where it was.

black_puppydog 5y ago
> It’s the innovations since that ... Nice illustration of how "innovation" != "progress"
- judge2020 5y ago
  Innovation is simply building something better. (Societal) progress is subjective, which is why you could probably run a survey and any respondents with marketing degrees would likely indeed call this "progress" towards a better-understood society..
kmeisthax 5y ago
This is also why even Apple and Mozilla (companies with a vested interest in harming the ad ecosystem) are pushing for various privacy-preserving ad attribution technologies. Nobody objects to UberEats knowing that their Tiktok ads are working or not - they object to Tiktok cross-referencing the data from UberEats and everywhere else to build an interest profile on them.
- xico 5y ago
  As a user I have the complete opposite objections: I do not see why I would have Uber run JavaScript on my machine just for them to know how well their campaigns are working, while I totally want advertisement that is highly targeted to me.
  - matsemann 5y ago
    They don't have to run some weird JS, it's often just a 1px img with some query params loaded at the confirmation screen. In itself nothing annoying, the problem is how that data is combined with other data and profiling users.
    - kayodelycaon 5y ago
      I haven’t seen any codebase with an actual tracking pixel in my entire career. (11 years at this point) It’s always some massive javascript file doing God-knows-what on the page.
  - kshdeo 5y ago
    If they know how their campaigns are doing -> they can target better and earn more money and in turn give you more discounts. So it’s just good karma to let them run the tiny js script which does no more harm than 100 other services running on your machine, which you never used either.
    - rhizome 5y ago
      Aside from how well targeting works (it doesn't), it's a bit presumptuous to assume resources on a user's machine are free for the taking, much less justifying it with an assumption about "unused" services running on that machine. At the same time, and I imagine this might be the vantage point you're speaking from, it wouldn't be the first time advertisers played fast and loose with user resources and activity.
      - rscrawfo 5y ago
chinathrow 5y ago
> This is it and is how the online advertising industry has worked for over 25 years. Rotten to the core.
- pc86 5y ago
  If you have a better way to do it people will literally never stop throwing money at you.
  - austhrow743 5y ago
    I’m highly sceptical that they were calling it rotten to the core because they found it economically ineffective.
mst 5y ago
At my first ever job where I was actually hired as a programmer (December 2000) my first project was to build a web stats system. I knew little enough that I flailed for the first week or two, then independently invented the tracking pixel from first principles - backed by an unbelievably ugly perl CGI script - to enable data collection. It collected only pages visited, browser versions and referer (sic) headers - it didn't occur to me to collect anything else - and yet provided vast amounts of business value to our customers as well as a vast amounts of experience at scaling for me (though, uh, given how badly the early versions of that code scaled, not necessarily at the same time). > The point is, this tracking pixel on its own is incredible what it unlocks. It’s the way that data is then used that we have to call into question. I entirely agree with this statement, and what's happened since saddens me. I'm going to pour another drink and take a moment to feel old now. (edited to add: 'tracking pixel' seems to mean that class of instrument to many other commenters, I'm specifically talking about an <img> tag that loaded a single pixel transparent gif ... I also made bar charts for the analytics users' UI using HTML tables with a pair of <td> tags per row, one with a coloured background, one clear, using percentages to provide relative data. 2001 was a different world)

black_puppydog 5y ago

> It’s the innovations since that ... Nice illustration of how "innovation" != "progress"

judge2020 5y ago
Innovation is simply building something better. (Societal) progress is subjective, which is why you could probably run a survey and any respondents with marketing degrees would likely indeed call this "progress" towards a better-understood society..

kmeisthax 5y ago

This is also why even Apple and Mozilla (companies with a vested interest in harming the ad ecosystem) are pushing for various privacy-preserving ad attribution technologies. Nobody objects to UberEats knowing that their Tiktok ads are working or not - they object to Tiktok cross-referencing the data from UberEats and everywhere else to build an interest profile on them.

xico 5y ago
As a user I have the complete opposite objections: I do not see why I would have Uber run JavaScript on my machine just for them to know how well their campaigns are working, while I totally want advertisement that is highly targeted to me.
- matsemann 5y ago
  They don't have to run some weird JS, it's often just a 1px img with some query params loaded at the confirmation screen. In itself nothing annoying, the problem is how that data is combined with other data and profiling users.
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    I haven’t seen any codebase with an actual tracking pixel in my entire career. (11 years at this point) It’s always some massive javascript file doing God-knows-what on the page.
- kshdeo 5y ago
  If they know how their campaigns are doing -> they can target better and earn more money and in turn give you more discounts. So it’s just good karma to let them run the tiny js script which does no more harm than 100 other services running on your machine, which you never used either.
  - rhizome 5y ago
    Aside from how well targeting works (it doesn't), it's a bit presumptuous to assume resources on a user's machine are free for the taking, much less justifying it with an assumption about "unused" services running on that machine. At the same time, and I imagine this might be the vantage point you're speaking from, it wouldn't be the first time advertisers played fast and loose with user resources and activity.
    - rscrawfo 5y ago

chinathrow 5y ago

> This is it and is how the online advertising industry has worked for over 25 years. Rotten to the core.

pc86 5y ago
If you have a better way to do it people will literally never stop throwing money at you.
- austhrow743 5y ago
  I’m highly sceptical that they were calling it rotten to the core because they found it economically ineffective.

mst 5y ago

At my first ever job where I was actually hired as a programmer (December 2000) my first project was to build a web stats system. I knew little enough that I flailed for the first week or two, then independently invented the tracking pixel from first principles - backed by an unbelievably ugly perl CGI script - to enable data collection. It collected only pages visited, browser versions and referer (sic) headers - it didn't occur to me to collect anything else - and yet provided vast amounts of business value to our customers as well as a vast amounts of experience at scaling for me (though, uh, given how badly the early versions of that code scaled, not necessarily at the same time). > The point is, this tracking pixel on its own is incredible what it unlocks. It’s the way that data is then used that we have to call into question. I entirely agree with this statement, and what's happened since saddens me. I'm going to pour another drink and take a moment to feel old now. (edited to add: 'tracking pixel' seems to mean that class of instrument to many other commenters, I'm specifically talking about an <img> tag that loaded a single pixel transparent gif ... I also made bar charts for the analytics users' UI using HTML tables with a pair of <td> tags per row, one with a coloured background, one clear, using percentages to provide relative data. 2001 was a different world)