How relevant is this information?
AFAIK, all that matters is how many conversions you get from $ spent. Both of those are perfectly visible, no tracking needed.
AFAIK, all that matters is how many conversions you get from $ spent. Both of those are perfectly visible, no tracking needed.
Maybe it helps society to go back to such models over destroying privacy.
(And as answer to the question: Statistical methods by comparing areas/times with no ads vs. with ads etc.)
As much as many HN readers would love to see ads and even the most benign forms of tracking to disappear, if you're aiming for something realistic (e.g that would still allow ads to exist and be a minimum profitable for all involved) you cannot just go back to the dark ages, and show the same ads to everyone.
Ads are pollution, and need to be treated as such. Information providers need to develop business models which do not depend upon advertising revenue. (foundations, Patreon, whatever).
Short term: Less tracking is good. (Not only for privacy, but also since I don't want to see "optimized" content – I want to be surprised, contradicting opinions etc. like in a good newspaper)
You can - without detailed tracking - identify rough location of the user. (IP etc.)
You can pick ads based on the content, not based on the user. (A site with beauty tips probably has different readers from a site on woodworking; a site with celebrity news has different readers than deep political analysis)
And yes, Google and Facebook would make less money (disclaimer: I have a handful Alphabet shares in my portfolio and probably funds containing those) and yes spread would be higher, but this could still pay a lot of bills and interestingly could lead to revert from clickbait to proper content, as readers of proper content are more likely the target audience for high-paid ads.
Not willingly, but perhaps they can be forced through legislation. In any case, as long as the industry insists on spying on me, I will continue to fight them tooth and nail.
The one thing that you can't reliably do, browser privacy or not, is gathering the useless number ad-companies currently rely on.