The Washington Post is preparing for post-cookie ad targeting

I know you want to know those things. Find another way to handle those issues.

To be a "good reason", you need to show why your reason is worth paying the high price of betraying every user's browsing path to every server. Worrying about hotlinks and typos... "ain't the same fuckin' ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same fuckin' sport".

> Any alternative would be much more intrusive.

Did you consider only serving that "large file" only when accompanied with a proper session cookie created when they loaded the HTML file? There are many solutions to those problems, including some that are sever-side-only.

Yes, this.

33 bits.

From the article:

>> The Zeus platform monitors contextual data such as ... what URL they have used to arrive there ... The publisher will then match that data to its existing audience data pools ... to create assumptions on what that news user’s consumption intent will be. The technology uses machine learning to decipher the patterns.

They are explicitly stating they use Referrer-like data to track users.

I think it's a reasonable login when we're talking about data points sent implicitly. In my ideal world the website just gets the resource identifier, and browser cares for the rest.

That's correct. I want none of these available without my explicit consent.

Yes, every data point is a privacy concern.

  0 = never send the header
  1 = send the header only when clicking on links and similar elements
  2 = (default) send on all requests (e.g. images, links, etc.)

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Referrer

Doesn't have a few of the features that your extension has, but it's done the trick for me!

You could recreate the newspaper.

I'd happily throw a nickel at a good article, but I don't want to have to make a per-publisher account to do so.

Although in this case they wouldn't have to frame it in such stark terms because ad tech is widely used.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Canard_encha%C3%AEn%C3%A9

I think it's a downward spiral, it only works because each player is forced to play along due to fundamentals of game theory.

So what we are seeing is that the methods become more ruthless every day, but everyone needs to conform, and it's a race to the bottom.

The end result is spending-fatigue and numbness in response to normal ads that are not hyper-addictive.

I also think it does not really pay off for publishers. It only really pays off for the middle men and those players who sell unethical products aimed at manipulation.

I wonder whether Ad-tech has seen a reduction in revenue after Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Protection, as these users can not be tracked via cookies.

This source claims there was no significant dip for Criteo for example:

https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/08/01/despite-apple-s-game...

Please, after a reasonable time try to show me things people who have brought X typically buy after 2 weeks. As an example I would have paid for a curtain service to my new appartment, but google kept pushing (bad, paid) apartment search sites at me.

I now google products only in incongnito mode, since it get so annoyed by this behaviour.

Facebook decided initially that as I was single I must be interested in paid dating sites (even though, statistically I would be better of with a site with a larger audience), so please don't take this as an attack on Google, but as an attack on limited machine learning.

Trump tweets are clickbait and generate outrage. You just need an targeted to people in that mood. And probably a much better return per click than selling ads targeted to people who have been searching for health cover, because they are already in the comparison stage or are no longer in the market, where as the clickbait ad targeted at people pissed off at the government gets to make some first impressions.

The thing is FB does not select a relevant ad from all available ads on FB, but only from a subset of ads matching a certain targeting setting that in turn matches your profile or interest. And this targeting setting is set by the uploader of the ad. And in some cases advertisers select a targeting that does not make any sense at all. (They target you by error.)

Does the placement algorithm like to show you a non relevant ad? Most likely not because on average it yields less money for FB. It could be that FB does not have much information on your interests or your privacy settings disallow using this information and the algorithm does not know what is relevant to you. And/Or the advertiser had a very high bid for the placement and the placement algorithm decided a less relevant ad with a high bid yields more money than a more relevant ad with a low bid.

(This is often the case if the advertiser decided to pay per ad-view and not per ad-click. Pay-per-click ads only yield money to FB if they are relevant, because users don't click on non relevant ads. Per-per-view ads always yield money for FB.)

But in the end it's not facebook who is to blame. It's the advertiser setting up stupid targeting and placement bids. (I once burned through 10000€ in one minute because of an erroneous targeting setting while showing the right advertisement to the wrong people...)

For the second, political ads on all sides, as well as ads targeted to the reader. (Perhaps a book about geopolitics? A fancy globe/map?)

I shared your initial reaction, but after thinking about it a bit more deeply I feel like it could actually work.

20-30 percent of people use ad-blockers, and I think I already know the demographics compared to the exposed population.

But for a serious argument, I refer to the studies on delayed gratification and the association with education and upbringing.

The concern here is that you're just selling a camera that they were already going to buy. So the ad agency wins, Best Buy _thinks_ they win because they register a conversion, but you didn't actually create any value.

In my experience when the PhDs say "this doesn't work," the PMs say "that's fine, because we still get to say we have machine learning [insert other buzzword] and the customer thinks it's delivering value."

> Contextual advertising works, but much less than behavioral targeting. Anyone who has seen and worked on the data knows that.

I admit this is possible, and my gut feeling is that properly implemented targetted ads should be immensely effective, but theory isn't implementation, and I'm taking your word on it either way.

I should probably clarify that I did not mean to say that it doesn't work. What I meant is that it doesn't really work out for the publishers. The parties who profit are just first and foremost the platforms, then come the advertisers, and the publishers come last.

That explains the 1 trillion market cap. And also why Criteo didn't lose money after Apple blocked them from following their users.

I wonder if you can provide me to a study about the difference between Apple/Safari users and Google/Chrome users when it comes to advertising effectiveness, because since Safari users can not be tracked, that means according to your statement the revenue from Safari users would be way less.

There is credible evidence on both sides of this particular debate. But to me, that's not a relevant issue. The issue is what is right vs what is wrong, and behavioral targeting is just wrong.

I am personally acquainted with several active fields that have been trying to make things work for 20+ years with very moderate success. They present their results which amount to "barely better than nothing" in order to keep funded. They also make the same arguments you do, "it stands to reason that it should work", to keep the money flowing.

There is the drug industry, which is chock full of new drugs that are barely better than placebo or generics, if they are at all. The results are hyped because it keeps the cash flowing. It would not be entirely true, but nor would it be too far off the mark, to say that almost the entire drug industry is based on fraud and exaggeration. And that industry is far more transparent WRT data and superficially altruistic than the advertising industry. This example is perfectly parallel because no one denies advertising works, just like no one denies antibiotics work, but the difference between new and old drugs, just like new and old advertising methods, seems to be greatly exaggerated.

Google built its entire empire based on contextual advertising, not behavioral targeting. With Facebook you may have an argument, but Facebook has a very special dataset not available anywhere else, and I would also add that Facebook makes the same amount of money whether behavioral targeting really works, or if they've just convinced their advertisers that it does.

I am neutral on the subject of whether it works because I have never looked into it, but "lots of self-interested people say that it does" is not convincing, and the fact that such an argument is so frequently made makes me think there is no actual proof.

If I were to play devil's advocate to this article, (and this isn't necessarily my perspective) I would say that FB/Google have already carved up the ad market, and even their businesses are under pressure from native ads on Amazon.com, which is where a huge portion of e-commerce takes place.

The twist though is that this is the Washington Post we're talking about, so this plan may have benefited from the business mind of Jeff Bezos himself who knows these businesses very well.

TLDR: despite your models the result I see as a male in Norway are ridiculous and laughable.

Longer version: All I can say is that the last 10 or so years the ads I have gotten have served no other cause than to make me despise the advertisers and distrust any claim about working AI.

Maybe I'm extremely unusual, but I would think this

- pushing mostly crappy dating site ads

- for 10+ years

- to a married man

- who is generally very happy

- and has small children

- while not pushing ads for major infosec events

- and not for family holidays

can hardly be considered very smart unless you are paid handsomely to show those ads regardless of if they work or not, especially as I've repeatingly clicked x -> not interested -> irrelevant.

Seing how Google is botching search accuracy, Google+, Reader etc etc I feel I have good reason to think the company in sum is a lot dumber than the people who work there.

And yes, I think so highly of most men in my exact position that thet won't fall for the crap I've seen.

And, based on my talking with others it seems not to be a fluke: if you are man this seems to be their best (and often their only) idea of what ads might be useful.

Or maybe it works on enough other men to pay off.

But personally I've now concluded that my best explanation is that Google is dumb or deliverately fleecing their advertisers.

PS: Facebook ads have been somewhat better for me. I actually bought something from one once.

This sounds reasonable. But there is quite a way from that to the current implementation which seems to be along the lines of:

  if(male) { 
    showDumbDatingSiteAds();
  }

This sound vaguely like an appeal to authority - or perhaps I'm not using the correct phrasing, but the underlying logic of "X number of scientists can't be wrong" isn't a good look. While I hate when people say things like "evolution is just a theory", it's not a good idea to use # of scientists who hold a view as a proxy for if it's valid if the idea is much less tested than things like evolution or climate change.

JS is like ads used to be: first they put it everywhere, then you get fed up and just switch it off.

... or followed a link from an IM or some other source outside of the browser. Too many possibilities to really assume anything and draw conclusions.

An interesting (research) approach would be to taint the data that can be used as fingerprinting, and forbid its exfiltration, perhaps with different levels of aggressiveness.

Example: a webGL game requires my wwindow width, GPU capabilities, etc? fine. But now, the thread that has this data cannot send anything to the other threads.

It would require some adjustments, and tightening the side-channels (making available download bandwidth/timings/etc more granular, for once). I do not expect it to be completely fingerprinting-resistant, but it would go a long way.

It is for ads, and newspapers adjust their content for different regions. But I wonder if they intend to do what they do for ads for news stories. They may choose to hide some, bring some to the top or even reword them. So if I go to WaPo's front page, I'll see different "news" than what my co-worker next to me sees.