Comment by IAmEveryone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IAmEveryone | Hacker News Reader

This is a rather asinine line of argumentation.

(a) The New York Time's newsroom and editorial staff are rather well-separated from their business department which makes decision about ad tech on their website. If you don't believe me, see this paragraph from a recent article at The Atlantic, which operates by the same principle:

As you read this article on The Atlantic, roughly three dozen ad trackers are watching you, adding your interest in this story to profiles they maintain on your online behavior. (If you want to know more about who’s watching you, download Ghostery, a browser extension that tracks and can block these “third-party” trackers.)[0]

That's a reporter arguing against the financial interests of his employer. And they are not going to fire him.

(b) There's one big difference between Facebook and generic advertising technology: the New York Times doesn't require you to sign up. Every time you change devices or delete cookies, the ad targeting starts from a blank slate. And while some websites try to get you to sign up, it's trivially easy to switch to a new account every once in a while.

(c) Ad tracking knows which websites I visit. Facebook knows which nude parties I attended in 2005

(d) The New York Times has actually turned to subscription revenue as its main source of income. While the split used to be 50/50, it is not much closer to 75/25 (subscriptions/ads). The "if you're not paying, you're the product..." cliché is getting tired anyway. But its premise simply doesn't apply to the New York Times.

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/data-...

> Every time you change devices or delete cookies, the ad targeting starts from a blank slate.

This hasn’t been true for quite some time. These banks on you are really elaborate. They know where you live, they know where you work, they know where you drink your coffee and they know your online behavior.

Those factors mean that you’re never truely anonymous anymore. When you buy a new device it gets tiered to your access points, then your online behavior gets profiled and matched to people who frequent your access points.

Last summer I was on a business trip to another region of my country. Just before I went I had to turn in my work pc for repairs, which meant I had to use the borrow device from our IT department. Despite never having used this device before, and never having logged in from that particular hotel I still ended up getting adds for a very specific online course that I had taken earlier that month as well as a pair of shoes I had just bought.

I guess the irony in that is that even though they we’re able to pinpoint who I was, through what seem like impossible means, they still didn’t know I had actually already bought those products they were advertising.

> (b) There's one big difference between Facebook and generic advertising technology: the New York Times doesn't require you to sign up.

> (c) Ad tracking knows which websites I visit. Facebook knows which nude parties I attended in 2005

Facebook tracks you off the site and has been known to build shadow profiles of non-users.

It's plausible that a world of ad brokers (with many smaller ad buys) is better than a world of few but very large ad engagements, vis a vis the Chinese firewall. In that world, a single advertiser would have enough (purchasing) power over the newspaper, to the point where they could veto an article critical of that advertiser.

Having worked at nyt I worked on nyt_cookie.so an Apache module for parsing and forwarding some of the early tracking systems . So back on the topic over hacks . The source for it was in a cvs repo hosted on this guys second office laptop , running FreeBSD 3.2-STABLE . So one it was 2009 and 3.2 was incredibly old ; as was the laptop . One day the laptops disk dies and no one had backups of the repo . Nyt_cookie.so was kept on the prod web servers for another 4 or 5 years before it was abandoned. We used to binpatch the binary to fix it up .

Might I suggest reading the article and not just the title?

>By the way, I want to make clear that Zeynep, Brian and Natasha are all innocents here, thanks to the “Chinese wall” between the editorial and publishing functions of the Times. In fact same irony applies to countless other correct and important reporting on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica mess by other writers and pubs.

The mentions your first point, fairly early on.

Yes, you are right (and I was wrong). I admit I stopped reading when they suggested the media was being "ironic" (i. e. hypocritical) on the matter.

If it makes you feel better, I had stopped reading your comment when I found that point, and posted mine. My original version was that "the article addressed your points".

I subsequently reread your comment and realized you made several other points. Oops. I then edited mine.

Arguing against one's interests should not necessarily be taken at face value. It's a viable persuasion strategy if you are in for a long con.

Ah yes, the old "maintain a good reputation by behaving honestly" scheme.

This is the whole basis of a confidence trick. It's harder to believe someone's duping you after they earn your trust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_trick

Regarding (b): That's odd, maybe this differs depending on where the web surfer comes from? The New York Times definitely does require me to sign up.

It's pretty annoying when you pay (a lot) for local newspapers and still have to see advertisement.

> While the split used to be 50/50, it is not much closer to 75/25 (subscriptions/ads).

Thank Trump for that. This didn't happen naturally for them and was only made possible by the election of Trump. Its unlikely that this is going to sustainable for them beyond trump presidency.

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