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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

> “We also want to work across the industry (ideally including Apple) longer-term to address more robust, cross-device advertising targeting and measurement capabilities that are also consumer friendly.”

Just to be clear: you want that. Whatever lies you tell yourself to get to sleep at night, no one outside your parasitic industry wants this. I, for one, absolutely 100% do not want you to target and measure me robustly across devices.

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Relevant: "privacy is the right to be human" https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8797-social_cooling_-_big_data_s...

I was at that talk and it was amazing, but I remember it as: “privacy is the right to be imperfect”. Not a big difference and I might remember it incorrectly, but worth a note me thinks.

No, the phrase is the exact direct quote: "Privacy is the right to be human" (look around 31min in the talk)

Ha, I guess we're both right. At 24.55 it's "imperfect", at the final slide it's "human".

What an amazing talk. There are some audio problems in the beginning, but the quality of the content makes easily up for that.

The talk is about an aspect of the change that technology and digitalization bring to our society, and how we deal with that. Language is a key factor in change, and the talk is focussed on that.

I highly recommend watching it.

> Just to be clear: you want that.

Well yeah, they said 'we ... want'. How much clearer do you think they could have stated that? They never said you or anyone else wanted it.

I believe the goal was to identify the disconnect between what they envision and what the targeted users actually want. I’m in agreement that this is not something that I would want and am glad that the difficulties exist to being with.

Can't speak for GP, but what I took from the quote and GP's response was that the advertising industry is kind of in a monopoly position of being able to screw all consumers over with nobody to reign them in, and now that someone is finally standing up to them and making it every so slightly more inconvenient for them, they're throwing a hissy fit, and that their statement kind of shows that they're well aware of all this and are pretty fine with it actually, and not even really trying to hide it.

"Criteo, which took advantage of that loophole"

You see, even when they get presented with rules, they try to work around them.

This is not constructive. The meaning of emphasizing 'you' and then providing a contrasting viewpoint is not lost on anybody.

But there's an attack there. 'Just to be clear'. They were crystal clear. The GP's attack is unfair.

Close to nothing the ad industry unilaterally “wants” or has ever wanted is “consumer friendly”. Most of the purpose of advertising is to trick consumers into doing things they otherwise don’t want to do or buying things they otherwise don’t want to buy. That goes doubly for building pervasive spy systems compiling a detailed dossier about every person on the internet, with absolutely zero transparency or public accountability and no liability for selling that information or having it hacked.

Yep every once in a while I see someone talks about "acceptable ads like static images". But those days are long gone.

You can't have ads without tracking.

It's pretentious for them to assert that the industry they're speaking for includes Apple.

They imply that consumers also want it by saying "consumer friendly".

It's like a robber saying: We want to develop victim-friendly ways to steal you.

I'm pretty sure you just described a kidnapper, not a robber.

Criteo is the only good employer in France when it comes to work conditions and salary.

It's easier to sleep at night knowing there is a roof over your head.

> Criteo is the only good employer in France […]

I feel like this needs some additional specification/limitation to make it a believable statement. The only good employer in the ads/data selling business?

The only good employer in tech for highly skilled developers.

Remember that the GAFA only have offices in a very few locations worldwide. Can't work for them if they are not here.

That's simply not true.

I left Criteo a handful of years ago and I can easily admit the work conditions were really nice, and the skill level among the team quite high.

I can also say there are other companies with comparable perks and technology level (or maybe the code level of Criteo has very considerably increased, but looking at what's open sourced, like cuttle, it doesn't seem like it), like some founded by former criteo employees (or c level dudes, since JB Rudelle is creating a new tech company with Romain Niccoli)

Your answer sounds to me like a false dichotomy argument.

What other good employers do you have in mind?

So you want to pay for all internet content?

It's not mutually exclusive: 100% paid content vs instrusive and obnoxious tracking. However Content publishers are desperately trying to increase revenue and these ad-tech companies provide a means to do so.

I use blendle but a lot of the articles I would like to read are not available there.

If they where I'd be happy to pay.

Most internet content was anyway free before the ads craze started.

Creating is a natural activity that we enjoy doing.

I don't think it's that simple.

Nobody wants their privacy invaded, but they do want cheaper products. In theory better targeted ads allow a company to spend it's advertising budget more effectively. Selling more products for the same amount of ad cost should allow for cheaper products.

I'm sure some companies will not pass on the savings, but I believe economic theory says the market as a whole should.

If the savings are enough, some people may be willing to give up some of their privacy in the name of cheaper products.

How much more do companies make? Is all this invasive tracking really necessary in order to keep websites like Google and Facebook free? Is it worth saving 10% (or whatever) on some product?

Unfortunately the decision is forced upon everyone by advertisers with little thought to allowing for an informed choice (or any choice really).

The prevalence of Alexa and other “assistance” devices shows that people willingly allow their privacy to be invaded for the perceived benefit gained from it. Advertising is one of those things where they want to analyze every action, effort, and thought, without any regard for the impact it has on the affected users’ privacy and there will be lines of potential customers waiting to signup after being enticed by the carrot. I think the blame is shared between both sides and I do believe the pendulum will continue to shift as long as technology continues to be embedded in our everyday lives.

I think it’s more likely most people outside the HackerNewsosphere don’t understand what it is, let alone the value of the “it” they are trading away.

If it doesn't cost them any actual ongoing money then I think most people simply don't care. Same reason people find advertising annoying, but don't really care on any deeper level, it doesn't cost them anything tangibly.

Citation?

Although there's some portion of apathy, the vast majority of people are ignorant or even misinformed. You can't conclude from the actions of an ignorant person that they don't care about the thing they don't know about / don't understand.

Well, I use supermarket loyalty cards as the primary example, they've existed for years, lots and lots of people carry them, if you point out that companies are using them to track your spending habits (across multiple different industries and product categories) people don't care. They receive a tangible benefit from it (discounts) and don't perceptibly pay anything for it.

I don't think that's a fair example. The vast majority of the people have never thought about all the ramifications. It's not a case of well-informed people who understand the issues deciding that they don't care. It's a case (like most) where people don't sense that the issue is important enough to make even understanding it be a priority in their busy lives.

Most people do understand that the loyalty-cards are not necessarily the only way to get discounts or even that they are actually discounted (in the absence of those cards, prices would be set differently overall).

There are certainly stores we may legitimately feel more trusting of than others.

Anyway, lots of people really appreciate a store like Trader Joe's that just has reasonable prices across the board, never does any sort of discount promotions and never tracks anyone — even if the customers never explicitly thought through that aspect of the experience, they still experience it and feel differently than they do with the other tracking-focused stores.

On a side note: I learned recently that sales and such at most grocers are actually driven by the brands themselves. The reason Trader Joe's is free of all that is because they sell relatively little that is of the big-marketing-budget style branded products…

With Alexa, there's a clear value proposition. In exchange for this device listening, you can perform various tasks by voice control that would previously be done at a computer or manually.

With advertising, it's a lose-lose proposition. In exchange for being tracked everywhere, we get shown pictures of things we don't want. Who would opt into that?

Yeah but can you quantify exactly how much savings you get for giving up your privacy? If targeted ads lowered the cost of an 8 dollar widget by 10 cents, I think most people would take their privacy.

But we don't know how much online advertising lowers prices. Would be interesting for an economist to study.

For all we know, online ads could have no effect. And what about ads intended to generate demand instead of address current demand? Maybe online ads are tricking us to by more of what we don't want (Yay, another subscription box).

Agreed. It's not currently an informed choice, nor clear it's even necessary. To steal from another of my replies: "You can have still have ads without invasive tracking, they just might not be as effective.

If the difference in effectiveness is enough to make Google, etc unprofitable than maybe there is an argument to be made that it is necessary.

If it means they make 10% less profit, people would probably prefer privacy."

> For all we know, online ads could have no effect.

Possibly in aggregate, but they almost certainly have an effect for individual advertisers. No company is going to cut their advertising if their competitors aren't going to make the same cuts.

But it would be very cool.

Imagine if all browsers suddenly shipped perfect ad blockers[1]. Many sites would die off; but I suspect a number of micropayment platforms would quickly spring up in their place. The result might not be as diverse, but it would be interesting.

[1] A perfect ad blocker would have to do the impossible, i.e. identify sponsor segments of YouTube clips, slice out native advertising, and somehow kill off all promotional consideration. I.e. absolutely impossible and probably not desirable.

> In theory better targeted ads allow a company to spend it's advertising budget more effectively.

I still don't see why customers want this. I would rather a company struggle to spend its ad budget effectively, and then conclude that it could better spend its resources investing in making a better product (or its employees, or its infrastructure, ..).

I don't have an econ background, so feel free to clear up what's wrong here.

Should the company spend any money at all telling potential customers about their product? If so, should they use the incremental dollar to reach a random person, or a person who seems likely to be interested in the product?

There's lots of ways to target without being personally invasive. You can simply put your message in places where the target audience tends to be, like has always been done.

If the goal on the social level is to get valuable information to potential customers, then it would follow we should get rid of most tracking and most advertising. Most of it is disinformation and deception that buries lower-budget information in the stream of messages from those with the biggest pockets.

I don't think there's a future in telling customers about the product via direct advertisement. It's too easy to filter out or ignore. The most reliable conversions are by word-of-mouth and friend recommendation, and those are nearly impossible to buy.

A company should spend a minimum amount on advertising, and to incentivize that, advertising should be expensive. If effective advertising is cheep, then there is less incentive to compete on product, and instead pressure to pour your resources into marketing, structured around a quick buyout and exit.

Advertising needs to be expensive enough that it is always dominated by quality of product and reputation spread by word-of-mouth, as this puts the power in the hands of consumers. This is critical for the healthy functioning of markets, because advertising distorts the natural expression of demand.

The current hype-fueled cryptocurrency craze is the apotheosis of advertising dominating product.

Should the company spend any money at all telling potential customers about their product?

Ah, but this is not what the discussion is all about, is it? "Telling potential customers about their product" can be done with a static hypertext page, it does not require infesting the entire Internet with tracking parasites to profile every individual. And your "incremental dollar" can be spent on SEO to improve the visibility of your page.

I'd prefer this too, and I'd buy from companies like this every time if I actually knew they were there.

Trickle-down advertiser-to-consumer economics, ladies and gentlemen!

If you gave people the offer of "you have to let companies search through your financial details, but you'll get more free mobile games", how many people do you think would take you up on it? I'm sure some would, but it'd hardly be popular.

Stuff like this comes about organically. No one held a big meeting and decided the internet would be funded by privacy invading ads. The ad ecosystem just shifted that way over time due to competition.

Exactly. I hope at some point we are going to have to ask how much is too much because left to it's own devices the market answer seems to be "enough to not be obviously creepy".

This is not the choice the users get. The profit from tracking goes disproportionally to Google/Facebook, not creators of mobile games. So more tracking like financial information will make that disbalance even worse making it rather pointless for mobile game industry.

There are a lot of dollars taken besides Google and Facebook.

Before there was internet, companies already spent all their marketing dollars on stupid TV and radio ads.

Lower costs do not straightforwardly translate into lower consumer prices, unless we're dealing with commodities in a perfectly competitive market.

Moreover, in this scenario where the entire market is now able to spend their advertising budget "more effectively", there are many possible outcomes besides more products being sold for the same ad cost. The market-wide increase in "ad effectiveness" may effectively cancel itself out. Ad spend may remain the same, but with more budget allocated to speculative ad strategies. Or the savings may be funneled back into product to further differentiate it from competitors.

The market-wide increase in "ad effectiveness" may effectively cancel itself out.

This. At least in the US, consumers are pretty much spent out. In that situation, advertising does not increase economic activity. It just moves it around. This is an argument for not allowing advertising and marketing as a deductible business expense, an idea that's been floated in Congress a few times.

Historically, advertising was a small part of product cost. Today, in many industries from movies to drugs, it dominates. This runs up prices for everyone. There's an economic argument for limiting advertising spend.

>Historically, advertising was a small part of product cost. Today, in many industries from movies to drugs, it dominates. This runs up prices for everyone. There's an economic argument for limiting advertising spend.

Advertising spend as a share of GDP hasn't changed much at all on average over the last century: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisi...

And some say it has even declined in recent years: https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/273094/us-adv...

The strange thing is that it doesn't feel like that at all. Advertising has become obnoxious to such a degree that it renders many sites entirely unresponsive on some devices (like my aging iPad). I have stopped visiting some sites or reduced the number of visits dramatically.

The advertising industry and indeed the publishing sector itself is clearly on a suicide mission. Someone needs to save them from themselves.

I do not want lingerie ads showing up on every page I view just because I browsed /r/tallgonewild for an hour last night.

If viewing lingerie ads meant I could get my alcohol half price, I might start accepting them.

Advertising is already a competitive arms-race. More effective advertising means that more of a firm's spending will shift to advertising because it will have a bigger effect than more engineering or QA or anything else.

(If we could make advertising less effective, we could have better products ... maybe because spending more on advertising wouldn't work as well as spending more on engineering or QA. But overall spending/cost is a bit orthogonal.)

> Selling more products for the same amount of ad cost should allow for cheaper products.

If the ad companies are making less money; it doesn't suggest that the ad cost is going up

Best of luck paying 1 cent for every search result you do.

And ofcourse you don't even realize but ads is one of the best ways for underprivileged to get on to internet.

You can have still have ads without invasive tracking, they just might not be as effective. If the difference in effectiveness is enough to make Google, etc unprofitable than maybe there is an argument to be made that it is necessary. If it means they make 10% less profit, people would probably prefer privacy.

That's the 90s. I don't think people were happy with that. I wasn't on internet then, so not 100% sure. In general, I see money as a representative of how effective certain company/technology/etc. is and there were no multi billion dollar companies in 90s (though the internet was young at that point).

I am pretty sure there are tons of things Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc. can improve but not having any data about user isn't definitely one of those approaches.

I think it's a matter of degree, not absolute. You can do targeted advertising without being invasive.

If Facebook wants to target ads on their site based on information I have entered in my pubic profile I am okay with that. If Google wants to target ads based on keywords related to what I am searching for at the time I am okay with that. It's when you start tracking across time and across sites and inferring things I may not to have public that I think it gets invasive.

Google and Facebook know they are being invasive. They specifically don't allow advertising on things that might trigger people and make them realize how invasive they are being. For example, you can't start retargeting people who searched for information on erectile disfunction with ads for Viagra. People would rightfully get upset about that level invasiveness. Instead of not being invasive, they just don't allow the things that would trigger people. If people in general were made to realize how creepy all the tracking is, laws would require advertisers to change.

Given the option I would prefer that not being invasive be the default. If that makes things slightly more expensive, so be it.

While companies weren't as huge as some of the ones today, there were plenty of billon dollar companies back in the 90s. Some you probably know, like Microsoft and Apple.

> I see money as a representative of how effective certain company/technology/etc. is and there were no multi billion dollar companies in 90s

In 99, Yahoo bought GeoCities for three billion dollars. Some of it was the dotcom bubble, but there were plenty of massive companies, and this was when most people did not have an internet connection.

There were no multi billion dollar companies in the 90s? Seriously? Microsoft had a market cap of hundreds of billions of dollars by the time 2000 rolled around. You folks who came around after the 90s are pretty late to this party ;-).

Somewhere in a dark corner at this party, HP is crying to himself.

HP, Dell and Lenovo are not doing that bad.

IBM and Sun might be crying though.

HP is doing horribly compared to the 80's and 90's.

SUN sadly has kicked the bucket and his picture is on the table with the punchbowl.

The difference was in the 90s you had companies that got those valuations by actually selling technology, instead of privacy hating ad companies.

Off the top of my head: IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Intel ... I'm sure I'm missing a lot of them

Google does not create content yet receives over 70% of money from advertisement. Tracking is one of the reasons for that. Surely it is effective for Google, but does it effective for creators and users?

Possibly. Part of Google's advertising revenue comes from AdWords and YouTube ads. This revenue is split with content creators, enabling them to invest in more and better content to the benefit of their users.

More search ad revenue allows Google to invest more in search. Better search could benefit content creators by giving them more and better targeted users. Users benefit from better search because they are able to find the content they are looking for faster.

I'm skeptical that Google divides its revenue and investment up in this way and that more search ad revenue allows Google to invest more in search.

I'm sure that Google is already investing the amount they need to in search to make it as profitable as possible.

It seems that more search ad revenue allows Google to bank roll the rest of the Google/Alphabet behemoth on projects unrelated to search, but within its mission to "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" ie. to know everything about everything, which I'm sure tracking plays a role in.

> This revenue is split with content creators, enabling them to invest in more and better content to the benefit of their users.

and that's become an abusive relationship where they are being de facto censored by google because of advertisers being skittish. You have more sponsored content showing up because it's a lot easier than relying on google and their amazing algorithms to not screw you over.

You'd better tell DuckDuckGo that their non-tracking, non-intrusive adverts aren't going to make them money then!

DuckDuckGo isn't public right? So, this question doesn't apply to them.

Why not? They are a competitor in the search space... Public, private, doesn't matter.

Well.. are they profitable?

According to the founder, they have been profitable since 2014.

Anecdotally, I've been seeing more and more success getting friends to switch over to DDG. This feels like early mass-adoption. It's rather exciting.

Well, except for chrome using their near monopoly on search to shove a browser in your face that further cements their place in search. and bundling it with the OS on mobile.

That's not a stable situation. The EU forced Microsoft / IE to unbundle - Google's day of reckoning approaches.

Yes, quite profitable since 2014. Turns out it doesn't take many engineers to make a search engine that doesn't track you: https://www.quora.com/Will-DuckDuckGo-get-profitable-anytime...

It's demonstrating a viable business model. Their corporate structure doesn't affect the demonstration.

Question is whether there's all that much content worth searching for, when the incentive is to put clickbait left and right, and everybody knows search is heavily gamed and manipulated anyway. Check your recent browsing habits: do you actually visit many sites, and sites you recently discovered via search? Or would searching Wikipedia and stackexchange, say, serve you well enough with some search improvements?

At least for me Google search is quite helpful. I get into new hobbies every once in a while, travel to new third-world countries. There doesn't exist one or ten places to get this info. I also couldn't imagine living without Google as a college student when the internet was way way younger and immature.

I don't have to imagine it, we managed fine.

This is perhaps the most insidious thing that Google et al have achieved: making so many believe that they and the online ads they peddle are essential for anything. The world will continue to exist without both.

90% of the time I just use a search engine to find the page I’m looking for on Stack Overflow or Wikipedia. Without the search engine it’d just take a bit longer

They can show me ads based on what I just searched for then.

This debate isn't about whether ads exist, it's about whether or not they should be allowed to hoard massive amounts of data and track every online action in order to ads that might sometimes be slightly more relevant.

It's ridiculous.

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