Comment by karmacondon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karmacondon | Hacker News Reader

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It is their data. What they sell is essentially their http access logs, the ip address and time of every page request. While that information may pertain to you, it's not yours. They own it and can do what they want with it, including selling it to the highest bidder. That's true for any website that keeps access logs.

If the idea that some websites sell their access logs really disturbs you, don't request pages from websites that do that. Just like someone who is afraid of heights can't go to high places, people averse to ad tracking won't be able to go to most websites. Most people don't want to give up their favorite websites, so ad tracking persists.

Many companies that produce or aggregate content do so with the expectation that their efforts will be rewarded with money from ads. When you use an ad blocker, you reap the benefits of their work while knowingly depriving them of what they expected to earn in return. It would be better if you just didn't read their content, effectively voting against their behavior with your feet. Blocking the ads is having your cake and eating theirs too. It's rather benign, there are much worse things, but it isn't really right either.

No company sells their http access logs, please don't talk nonsense. The data that is sold is sold to marketeers and is the highest grade profile data that you could get. See the 'schober' link on the page and try to at least be a little bit informed before you start throwing around such opinionated stuff. Schober is an easy target for me because they actually list what they sell, they are also a very old company (they were in business long before the web was born). But they are not the only ones. If you feel like reading a bit on what kind of information is being made available a good place to start would be the RTB spec:

https://github.com/openrtb/OpenRTB

So your whole argument here is based on a strawman.

What do you think RTB is? There are websites that will sell demographic information from user profiles, but that's relatively rare. The overwhelming majority of the billions of RTB impressions are based only on location and website audience demographics. Those are things you get from cookies and ip addresses, information that comes entirely from access logs. No, companies don't sell their logs directly, but the vast majority of targeted impressions are sold solely on what is contained in a standard server log.

You seem to be knowledgeable about online advertising and forthcoming with sources. Do you have any evidence that anything near 50% of online ad data sold is based on the highest grade profile data? Because I'm certain that is not the case. I think you're confusing the business of selling profile data on individuals, which is indeed very old, with modern ad targeting. It's hard to persistently match that up with an ip address and cookie, you see. Which is why major ad buyers prefer to buy cookies that tag large demographic buckets like "young males in the midwest with an interest in cars" instead of the names and profiles of individual people. It's common sense more cost efficient, and access log data is much more prevalent and reliable than profile data.

I don't think that any of this works in the way that you think it does. Yes, re-targeting is creepy, cookies are rampant and the average page loads way too many external files. But companies do all of these things for a reason, whether you understand the details or not. If you don't like how they do business, you can just stop going to their websites.

> You seem to be knowledgeable about online advertising and forthcoming with sources.

You'd think?

Only a small fraction of the actual bids will ever be on 'high grade data', but what you are missing is that all of the data is available all of the time.

So no, I'm not confusing anything. The advertising industry will use the data available to determine the value of an impression, if the value isn't there they will pass. But they still use the data in that decision, so whether it gets sold or not is not the key element.

> If you don't like how they do business, you can just stop going to their websites.

No, you can't. See there are these little things called widgets that pop up on websites that have absolutely nothing to do with the attempt to sell you something later and since you have absolutely no idea where you will be hit next you can only 'stop going to their websites' after you've been bitten.

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