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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

Non tracking ads used to be the norm, but two things got in the way:

1. Any kind of even vaguely targeted advertising is better than none. It's common sport on HN to jeer about how badly the ads that people see are targeted towards them but non-targeted is so much worse. It's ads for restaurants that won't be in my area for decades (if ever). Male and female specific medicines, and on and on.

2. The rampant abuse and fraud on the part of the publishers. Much of the js and tracking on sites is not about _you_ so much as making sure that the site that the ads are embedded on isn't just a VPS that someone is flogging with bot traffic.

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You really hit on something for me.

I want some level of targetting in my ads. But too much and it becomes obnoxious and frustrating. I wish I could just check off the boxes I want:

- Canadian - Lives in Ontario - Male - 30-39

Hmm yeah I think that's all I want you to use.

Instead they ask for nothing and seek to take everything. That's the part I can't tolerate.

Restaurants not in my area, maybe I tweet "When are we gonna get a <popular restaurant> I keep hearing so much about on <local radio station>?". Not an immediate return on investment but maybe a hint at where to build next. Medicines, or anything else that may not be for me? I know a bunch of other people that talk all day about things they need and problems they have. If I hear about a potential solution for them, I'm probably going to mention it next time I see them, maybe even shoot them a quick text right now.

My experience with targeted ads is either way off base or suggesting something I don't need because I literally _just_ bought it. But mostly I don't experience them because they're so easy to block. Then they don't even get the potential benefits of word of mouth.

As far as fraud, the roll of an online advertising company should be to ensure both parties are holding up their end of the deal, ensuring links go where they are supposed to and sites are presenting ads as agreed. That can be done with code the ad companies write for the advertiser and content providers to run on their own servers during the agreement. Pawning that off on the user machine doesn't solve the fraud issue, but apparently advertisers are convinced it does, for now. It does get you tracking, but only as long as users put up with it. It's lazy and, hopefully, it won't be a profitable solution much longer.

> It's ads for restaurants that won't be in my area for decades (if ever). Male and female specific medicines, and on and on.

But for a while I've had the worst of both: huge amounts of data slurping, combined with terribly targeted ads.

Don't forget language. In the EU this is a pretty important point and it's something you can't even estimate based on IP in some countries.

Accept-Language: en-GB,en

Getting system languages isn’t straightforward nor does it indicate the actual language of the user same goes for getting the language from the website. Not to mention that is unclear if you do that does it count as personal information or not since there are some wild cards in the GDPR.

My systems have

  LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
  LC_MESSAGES=C

There is substantial disagreement among the programs that I use [1] whether this constitutes a German locale or an English locale.

[1] True, only those programs which are dumb enough to assume that locale is described by a single word like "German" or "English".

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