Hacker News Reader

Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

There's a fourth reason not to do this that isn't mentioned in the article: tracking is unethical. Don't do it.

So tracking your bounce-rates/conversion rates to know if your marketing budget is spent wisely is unethical?

If tracking wasn't useful nobody would do it.

That’s like saying if homeopathy wasn’t useful no one would do it. Both homeopathy and ad tech are “useful” to someone, but most benefit accrues to the seller, not the buyer.

If you go one step further, and assume that the product is good then tracking benefits the buyer, because it can make the company survive, therefore sell the product to the buyer longer.

Though this article is not recommending removing tracking, but rather triggering your tracking from the backend or edge, because that way the user can’t stop it from working! I confess that in some ways I prefer tracking to conventionally happen on the frontend because then I can block it.

(Yet even so, backend-triggered tracking is probably less privacy-intrusive than frontend-, even if you’re sending the data to Google or Facebook or whoever.)

The whole idea of "tracking" is to collect data from users to 1: make them identifiable 2: add more data to a collection about them 3: run profiling on that data 4: manipulate them based on assumptions about the profile.

More server side data harvesting will not make that less intrusive.

As a thought experiment: I run a web store, and I sell funny hats. I’m looking to sell more hats.

Is it unethical if I keep track of how many people buy which hats, so I know which kinds of hats sell best?

What about if I keep track of what hats each of my customers buys, so that I can tell which hats I might want to bundle together into hat packs?

Maybe I’m not super technical, so I pay a 3rd party service to analyze my transaction logs and tell me the above answers.

Or I realize some hats aren’t selling, so I check to see if people are going to that page and just not purchasing, or never going to that hat’s page at all.

To say that sites use tracking to “manipulate” users is playing pretty icky word games. Yes. The purpose of all marketing is to “manipulate”. So are opinion columns in newspapers. Job interviews are an employer manipulating a candidate and a candidate manipulating an employer. Manipulation is just a scarier-sounding word for “persuasion”.

We are talking web tech user tracking - this is not about "keeping track how many hats you sold".

I’m selling my hats from an online store. How is that not “web tech user tracking”?

If it makes the analogy more palpable, I’m selling virtual hats for my video game.

You are the one playing a word game, arguing semantics. I added the "user" prefix to clarify, yet you insist on comparing apples and horse-apples. I understand your angle, yet the whole discussion is about horse-apples, so i do not see your target. My guess is "making the latter sound more palatable". Take your small "the well known term used in this thread and source article is shit" victory and be happy, you are not getting more.

I don’t get any value out of whatever weird victory you’re claiming I’m aiming for. I posed the analogy because I’m curious how people here view different kinds of tracking, and at this point I’m not happy, I’m sad that this thread became a weird attack on my intentions rather than an actual discussion.

there are no meaningful "different kinds of tracking" in this context. The word is well known and used. Arguing that there is a theoretical subset of a more general definition of the word, for which the ethical criticism of the actual common market reality that the word references in this context, may not apply, is semantically possible, but just "playing word games"

I think it is possible to do tracking responsibly. I don’t really see a problem with server-side anonymized tracking used to improve the product. (But yes, the blog author also talks about FB and Google pixel tracking, which is very different)

It's against Google's terms of service to collect personally identifiable information so it's anonymized there, too. It's the same -- you can collect data server side via the measurement protocol via the same hit parameters. Either way, you can be responsible about measurement.

Parker Thomson, aka StartupLJackson, had a great view on this. Would you rather see a ton of ads that are completely irrelevant to you, or see ads that you actually need?

Tracking that makes your life better is useful. If Opendoor knows you are looking for a new house in Arizona, and they can show you just the right house before it's sold to someone else, isn't that fantastic?

I'd rather see some irreverent ads. They feel less intrusive them personalized ads. Just a feeling.

Honestly? I'd rather see more ads that are irrelevant. Ads are already an attempt at manipulation. I would feel better knowing that everyone else is seeing the same shit I'm seeing. That I'm not being pandered to. That there are things that are valuable to others that I have no personal value in.

That's part of living in a diverse world.

I don't know about you, but I don't want a myopic world for myself. The perfect ad targeting system removes my agency; decides what I want and can afford on my behalf; makes my world significantly smaller.

And I'd rather see more search results that aren't tuned to me. Down with algorithms! Down with personalization!

I'm surprised how much hate there is on HN - the entire future of technology feels like it's heavy on data, personalization, and prediction, but a lot of comments read like a parent or grandparent that was targeted and is loading up their shotgun.

The technology isn't the enemy, some of the use is. And in some cases, we need legislation to catch up, like it gas started to for things like loot boxes / gambling in kid's games.

The point of ad tracking is not to show ads that you need. It's to show ads that are likely to make you take the actions the advertisers need you to take. If the trackers determine that you have a gambling addiction and serve you ads for gambling sites, they're working as intended, but they're not helping you. If advertisers determine that their overall profits are increased by not showing ads for houses in desirable neighbourhoods to certain demographic groups, that's not good for the people in those groups.

> Tracking that makes your life better is useful. If Opendoor knows you are looking for a new house in Arizona, and they can show you just the right house before it's sold to someone else, isn't that fantastic?

Maybe? When I look at a couple houses to help get comps for a family member and I get innudated with real estate listings for somewhere I don't live and don't want to live for months, that's certainly not fantastic. See also car shopping, or really anything where one sale is valuable enough to target me.

Also fun --- when you look at documentation or ratea for a service provider when you're their number 1 customer, and ads for that service provider follow you around for weeks. Yeah, I guess I'm highly likely to buy, cause you put me in your SEC filings as a top customer.

That would be a harder choice if ads were better targeted to my goals, but ads based on tracking just aren't that helpful in my experience. They may work to get people to buy things, but that's a separate axis. Ads are not for the consumer's benefit (any benefit for them is incidental). They are designed to benefit the advertiser.

It's not just a choice between relevant and irrelevant ads, it's that plus many more factors. Even if ads were super accurate, I'd prefer irrelevant ads to having my personal habits finely catalogued in order to subconsciously affect my buying or voting choices. And it is subconscious. Anecdotally, I recently noticed I'd started to want a particular type of personal care accessory. I realized the only reason this happened is because I'd been subjected to dozens of ads for this item over several weeks. I have zero need for this item, zero interest in owning one four weeks ago (even though I already knew the product existed), and nobody would even know the difference if I had one or not!

The problem is not that ads are too relevant. It's the tracking itself.

It is possible to do targeted advertising without surreptitious tracking. I listen to podcasts and often buy through their promo links. I'm happy to tell the advertiser where I heard the ad, because I like the content. And it's all explicit - no spying required.

Just as a point of information, that is not entirely true. Podcasts are tracking you too, but the technology is older and can't do it as well as Facebook.

When you listen to an episode of a podcast, an advertiser can get data from the file download, so at the very least they know your location and your phone profile. Say you download a podcast from a certain location Brooklyn, using iPhone X, an advertiser can profile you to be upper-middle-class and show you a Peloton ad, while same podcast download of an old Android phone is going to get an ad for a short-term loan.

The advertisers are hungry for ways to get more data because right now it's still a black box, you throw money in, and maybe someone buys. They would much rather target with precision, than with banner ads.

> Would you rather see a ton of ads that are completely irrelevant to you, or see ads that you actually need?

I don't actually need any ads, so this is a false choice.

>Would you rather see a ton of ads that are completely irrelevant to you, or see ads that you actually need?

You don't have to decide between targeted personalized ads and their toxic rats tail, or no ads at all. There's a middle way called contextual ads which is bound to the topic you're consuming.

I bought into this reasoning for some years until I realized that I never saw a useful ad (except on Facebook properties, which is ironic since they are the ones who know least about me as far as I can tell.)

I never saw a personalized ad to an actual good offer or thing that I didn't really knew about and was interested in. Personalized ads usually show me stuff that I've already purchased. Also, it's like someone pressuring to keep buying somethig and telling your brain "remember, you wanted this, you need this".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com