Marketers are panicking over Google's plan to yank cookies from advertising | Hacker News Reader

Marketers are panicking over Google's plan to yank cookies from advertising

businessinsider.com

35 pointsarabadzhiev36 comments

At this point I'm absolutely convinced that anything bad for adtech is good for society. Absolute profit driven evil.

An entire industry built around psychological manipulation for the sole purpose of convincing people to consume products that they likely don't need, while simulataneously setting the stage for an Orweillian surveillance state... No one with a conscience should be working in adtech.

And there are far more insidious consequences to adware. I'm just speculating, but I have a feeling that when non-technical society is bombarded by ads, its capacity for critical analysis of information is reduced. Given the ubiquity of ads, and the many decisions that humans must make personally and professionally every day, if this is true it has a seriously negative ripple effect which permeates much of human endeavor.

I am certainly no fan of current advertising - it is fundamentally backwards from what is useful - the customer wants information on what would fufill their needs and desires and should shape the provider. Beyond sinple "this exists" advertising tries to shape their desire to the product. Unfortunately there isn't exactly even a good theory for a better information propagation mechanism for resource allocation let alone one in practice.

I wouldn't go so far to go zero sum with ad tech vs society. To be a smartass bathing the worls in nuclear fire would be bad for adtech and bad for society. Not to mention society is horrifyingly vague and exploitable. You can call the downfall of the Kim Jonh dynasty, the military, and the rise of a free and democratic North Korea/unified Korea the a destruction of a society.

Personally I suspect that critical analysis by default isn't used period and the issues of influencers far predate ad tech. One bit of accidental good they can engage in is building skepticism - a cure all claim is greeted with more incredulity today than in the old west.

Sure, there isn't a good theory for information propagation. Everything we have is flawed.

But advertising is, at it's core, based on lies and highly optimized manipulation.

It's not hard to offer something better. The internet, with all the fake news, and the SEO's is still somewhat better, in my opinion.

And if we aim higher, compare that to something like the WireCutter reviews - which tries(afaik) to offer an in-depth, unbiased reviews, and is backed by the reputation of the NY times.

If it were driving new novel great “free” services that’d be one thing, as it did with maps gmail and search, but now that it’s reached maturity and there aren’t as many low hanging fruit its all gone to consolidation and anti customer incentives.

If only I had a pair of glasses which let me see the real world of subliminal, consumer-driving messaging a la "They Live".

Who defines what people need? Buying a can of soda is not something people need when water is so cheap. Buying that soda (as a collective effort) keeps thousands of people employed, and keeps their families growing. Society relies on advertising. The Orwellian state has been growing for decades. Adtech is no unique villain in this story.

Adtech has been used to sell copies of 1984 and A Brave New World. Something people arguably don't need to survive, and enjoy reading anyway.

Bill Hicks had a great bit on advertisers. I think the argument for adtech's potential for evil can be better articulated. After all, ublock origin, adblocking tech has millions of users. How effective could the brainwashing be if people are choosing to leave it?

Why do I need to work to further someone else’s goals just to earn currency to “pay my way”?

How does encouraging people to buy Coke help the nation more than just giving that money directly to the public utilities?

Because there needs to be something for 330mil people to do and providing each other with more options for having a quality life is a valuable pursuit. We need doctors, engineers and a life outside work. Soda has its place as an entertainment and socializing drink.

Arguing against adtech and work are two separate things. Distribution of resources will always be controlled. Currency used to buy things is a method of directing resources to people who behave in a way that continues the system. What system do you think works better? I don't know what your goals are, maybe they are achievable without working for the man.

> Because there needs to be something for 330mil people to do

I am sure people could find something to do that was productive and fulfilling if they weren’t required to be debt slaves simply to put food on the table.

Manufacturing dietary diseases doesn’t seem to be productive or fulfilling to me. The idea that manufacturing soda is meaningful and productive use of peoples’ time is the broken window fallacy. That, or the very worst of fetishising GDP-as-a-measure-of-quality-of-life.

The diseases from an FDA approved soda come from lifetimes of over-consumption of an entertainment product. Exercise leads to injuries from overwork, eating too much asparagus has it's downsides, too much alcohol or sugar are problems. Nothing is pure and infinite.

You don't need to push meaning to it's extreme to prove it's existence. It exists as it is. Soda is a good party drink and sweet drink for restaurants. People drink a few empty and sweet calories to refresh themselves and socialize. That's all it is, it's not a demon, it's not a saint. It's just fizzy water. It keeps many people at soda companies employed, it keeps many restaurants in profit.

Advertising soda is a fine way to have people put food on their table. If you want to productive and fulfilling work, go do it. You can't erase the fact that food is a limited resource that requires a system of distribution and we use money for allocating who and who can not obtain food. In a world where food were truly free and magically appeared out of thin air then there would be no starving people and you could do eat whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted.

You would still "wage slave" for a house, or running water, or whatever else. If you want to live a zero-cost life, build a log cabin in the woods and grow your own food, install your own solar panels. You will be doing the same work you're paying others to do right now but far less efficiently and with greater restrictions. You wouldn't have soda, or anything you couldn't manufacture yourself. But you would have control over the distribution of resources, there you go.

>How effective could the brainwashing be if people are choosing to leave it?

I think you're overestimating the average user's technical knowledge. The vast majority of people probably don't even know browsers have plugins.

I'm aware of that. I'm pushing the argument to the edge to show that ads are likely not as effective in reducing intellect as parent describes. Technical knowledge is not a panacea against the psychological effects of being advertised to, it only allows a user to turn them off. People fully soaked in advertising choose to leave the ad world.

Cola doesn't needs ads to be sold. It's tasty, people like it.

But ads and branding are powerful tools in creating huge companies.

What happens without that ? maybe the sugary drinks industry starts looking like the craft beer industry.

Is that a bad thing ?

Soda on the other hand can be easily overconsumed and delivers empty calories that aren't balanced at the next meal. Soda is in the group of foods, usually ultra-processed, that are responsible for the obesity epidemic. And it's being advertised to children mostly, who don't have much self control, with obesity and diabetes rates in children climbing year after year.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think soda is toxic or evil or that it should be taxed or banned. But in the context of a worldwide obesity trend, I would ban the commercials for it, or at least the ones targeting children.

I understand that buying soda keeps people employed. But it's also the perfect example of what's wrong in the current society.

Maybe we can find more worthwhile pursuits than selling sugared water.

I work in marketing. It's hard to anticipate the all the effects, but we have of yet no reason to be too concerned. Google is unclear on how it will affect the options of their advertisements, but we anticipate that however they implement the rules, their own network will come out on top, and we will have even less reason to use any other advertisement network (surprise, surprise).

I wonder if this will finally be the death of display advertising - the value is already insanely low. And for the most part we have moved on to other channels.

Is this a broadside against Facebook's trackers?

Does anyone believe for one picosecond they will block their own cookies? I switched to Firefox when I tried to block all 3rd aprty cookies on Chrome and found some (Google's) that just wouldn't disappear.

As noted in a recent (and very busy) thread, Chrome sends an installation-specific ID to Google domains in a special header. This can easily be used as an identifier for tracking in the absence of cookies, and it's an advantage that Google's competitors lack.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236106

Not sure, but it seems there may be a fundamental question being asked here. If I trust somedomain.com, does this automatically mean I trust advertisers on said website? In fact it becomes even clearer where the trust boundary lies when taking into account the fact that even somedomain.com is putting advertising decisions into the hands of a 3rd party.

So, how far should the infrastructure of the web go in terms of assuming trust boundaries transcend the immediate trust and obvious relationship between end user and domain?

> If I trust somedomain.com, does this automatically mean I trust advertisers on said website?

And vice versa, if I don't trust advertisers on somedomain.com, does this automatically mean I don't trust said website? The answer for many people is yes and it results in them not visiting them anymore.

So Chrome is getting something Firefox has has for years. I've had third-party cookies blocked for the last decade. Plus Privacy Badger.

This is something safari has being doing by default for more than a decade (I think from the very first version).

Firefox has been doing it for a while now as well iirc.

Chrome only appears to be doing it now that they’ve got people logging into their browser, and even if not, sending a unique ID to googles servers - some far more powerful and persistent than anything a cookie ever gave.

Amusingly, the paywall appears to be frontend-only. Stop the page from finishing loading before the modal appears and you can read the whole thing.

> The IAB Tech Lab this week called for publishers, advertisers, and adtech companies to unite to create standards and a replacement for third-party cookies on browsers like Chrome, Apple's Safari and Mozilla-owned Firefox. Dubbed Project Rearc, the effort is eventually supposed to include a consumer ad campaign to reach 2 billion people.

...bwuh?

IAB also wants things like safaris intelligent tracking prevention to be illegal.

In their ideal world every browser would be required to include a persistent unique per user ID.

Tangent, it bugs me the degree to which Google is thought of, by people including this headline writer, as being in charge of the internet.

The article is paywalled (or at least gated).

It's not a paywall, just poor design: if you're outside the US, you might get redirected to a local version of that website, where the page doesn't exist. The workaround is apparently to add ?IR=C to the URL.

This extension is useful for bypassing sites that use 'article limits' : https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

Doesn't allow me to read the article.

so is the web button under OP's link.

Still paywalled

can't repro; worked fine for me.

but here's an alternative i.e. what I see after I load the page and switch into reader view on firefox: https://i.imgur.com/uN0CU9Q.jpg

Thank you so much for having gone to the trouble of doing that for us. Unfortunately, imgur has compressed it into near-unreadability.

https://i.imgur.com/uN0CU9Q_d.jpg?maxwidth=1920&shape=thumb&...

Imgur is only nice to Reddit. For everyone else, there's visiting the main imgur page, copying the image url, editing it, and opening it as such.

Paywall

TP;DR?*

    * Too Paywalled**, Didn't Read

    ** Although for some articles one might legitimately say 'Toilet Paper, Didn't Read'

https://beta.trimread.com/articles/5241

Reply on news.ycombinator.com