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Comment by Despegar | Hacker News Reader

>We believe that industry consultation is critical for changes to platform policies, as these updates have a far-reaching impact on the developer ecosystem. We’re encouraged by conversations and efforts already taking place in the industry - including within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the recently announced Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (PRAM). We look forward to continuing to engage with these industry groups to get this right for people and small businesses.

Yes they would certainly prefer a "UN of ad-tech" that doesn't do anything rather than Apple's unilateral action.

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To be fair though, don't you remember how the DNT header worked really well for everybody involved, and how all these advertisers today universally respect it, and how they totally didn't abandon the entire concept as soon as it started seeing mainstream use and platforms started turning it on by default?

What could go wrong if we give them another spot at the table?

I mean, PRAM has already released so many good plans, like... a mission statement. But that counts! I mean, come on, it has 'Responsible' right in its name!

We've even had P3P spec that allowed users to say in browser's settings "I don't want your tracking cookies", without any consent pop-ups. It was even implemented in Internet Explorer!

And then Google found a loophole in the P3P syntax, and abused it to bypass it entirely. Fun times.

We respected it in our ad pixel server. DNTs didn't get tracked, just returned 200 blank, no logs generated. It didn't matter, though, in the end. Didn't get us positive/negative attention, users didn't really care, browsers stopped supporting it, and then it was just dead code.

Left the guard clause in, in the end, because of some misguided need to "do the right thing". It's just dead code. I'd just get rid of it now.

Despite online Internet attention, users don't care about this stuff so long as it's wicked fast (response times < 20 ms) and doesn't interfere with the thing they want. They want the thing it enables and they'll happily pay the price.

People online who talk about all this stuff visit whacky sites, get angry at being infected with god knows what from some shit Forbes.com or some crap or some porno site and then flip out at "Google for tracking me" or some crap.

Glad I'm not in that industry anymore. No one outside it knows what it does or enables.

> users don't care about this stuff

we do.

Right, should clarify that I mean "Users do not act in a manner that reveals they care about this". I.e. the majority of users won't use a product that's more compliant with the spec over one that does an extra thing they'd like.

Users don't have much choice in which ad streams they see. Publishers had the choice and seemed indifferent, but it feels weird to blame users for turning on a feature and not noticing a difference when that feature didn't work because most publishers failed to act on that feature / make it a requirement of their ad buys.

Why is Facebook alarmed about users getting a choice if users are happy to be tracked?

FB isn't really alarmed... The majority of their revenue comes from their own app which they'll continue to be able to target you on because people give data to it willingly. They won't be able to use their partner mobile apps to display ads to, that was a decent business but obviously will become less valuable, but it wasn't that big for them. They are signaling to their customers that things are changing and to expect that they'll change dramatically. FB however remains with your real email address on file and lots of accurate data about you, with their SDK and other mobile apps their accuracy in data collection won't change a whole lot.

Because forced decision making is a barrier to tool use. For instance, imagine if every time you opened your IDE it asked you which language you're going to type in. You like your IDE to be work best with the language you're working in, so that's good. You're adding user choice here, so that's good. But the outcome is bad. Why is that?

This isn't every time you open an app though, it's once, on install.

Imagine if the first time you opened your IDE it asked you what language you're going to type in. That would actually be very reasonable and helpful.

Well, if the discussion has shifted from "Why is Facebook alarmed about users getting a choice if users are happy to be tracked?" to "What frequency of being asked about a choice is acceptable?", I think all the tough parts of the argument are now complete and it's possible for the reader to walk through to the conclusion of why Facebook is alarmed.

I don't think the discussion has shifted. It's just that the objection you're raising, that too much choice is a barrier to tool usage, doesn't really apply to this situation.

Given that this isn't overloading the user with a ton of options each time they launch an app, why is Facebook alarmed about users having the choice to opt out of tracking?

And I'll extend on that question: even if users are annoyed at a single extra popup that gets shown once when they install an app, why does Facebook care? Users will still pick the option that they prefer, they'll just be annoyed at Apple for asking. Why is Facebook alarmed that users on iPhone will have to spend a half second, once, saying, "ugh, Apple, of course I want a company to track everything I do online"?

Writing behavior like that is probably the least-charitable interpretation of an instruction to ask the user what they want, and is certainly not within the spirit of that original request.

Ergo that tactic makes whoever uses it a malefactor

Yeah the DNT header didn't work due in large part to middle men (like routers or anti-virus tools) flipping that bit without asking the user in automatic, or again broad decisions, such as from Microsoft, of flipping the default of that header without asking users. Obviously if one side chooses to just do what they want, the other side is free to do what they want as well. This whole situation needs people to sit down and talk these issues through, like it's happening inside the W3C. It doesn't need a few companies to strong arm whatever is better for them financially (Apple makes no money off of current ads, but they'll force themselves in the picture with their attribution tool and will get more paid app revenue out of this, pretty clear incentive).

> Yeah the DNT header didn't work due in large part to middle men (like routers or anti-virus tools) flipping that bit without asking the user in automatic

A privacy option that's not allowed to be turned on by default based on user data and likely preferences isn't a real privacy option. Advertisers are the kings of trying to guess what users want, did they really think that browsers wouldn't be allowed to do the same with request headers?

This argument comes up a lot, and I'd debate it, but I also think behind the surface-level objections, the heart of the argument basically boils down to, "we didn't realize that people were going to use this thing."

The advertising industry was happy to have an opt-out as long as not too many people used it. Once it started getting turned on by default (because of course a user who's installing antivirus or privacy tools wants DNT to be enabled), Microsoft just became an excuse to abandon the whole thing.

If Microsoft had never turned DNT on by default, but the majority of users had sought out the option and turned it on, then advertisers would have come up with an excuse. Their participation with DNT was a compromise: "you can have a few of these users that probably run adblockers anyway, and in exchange, we want you to get off of our back about everything else."

For these people, respecting DNT always depended on it not being adopted. And that's why trusting them to talk about "responsible ads" or "consumer choice" is a waste of time. They know what they want the consumer choice on privacy to be, and they will only offer that choice as long as the average consumer chooses what they think the 'right' option is. If advertisers discover that the average consumer doesn't want to be tracked, then all of their talk about sitting down and having a dialog is going to go away.

DNT just became another fingerprinting datapoint, so it ended up being better to just set it to whatever the critical mass is using (which is typically off).

The problem with DNT was that it was off by default, advertisers didnt support it, and that it was yet another bit advertises used to create IDs for anon users.

The only real solution is to do away with third-party cookies being on by default. There are very narrow use cases that are beneficial to the end user, but the user-hostile ones far outweigh those.

DNT is based on a flawed assumption that ad tech has good faith. In the real world, though, you don't ask for privacy, you take it.

This is the real lesson from DNT: you can not trust bad actors to be good.

Every time we see these voluntary initiatives about how advertisers are going to be responsible from now on... they can't. The industry will never be responsible, left to their own devices they'll use DNT as a tracking mechanism, and then justify it by saying that they need to remain competitive.

There is no such thing as a responsible advertising industry, it doesn't exist. They've demonstrated over and over again that they have to be treated like malicious actors, they are incapable of self-regulating.

> Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media

My guess is that this partnership is very similar to a hypothetical Foxes’ Partnership for Responsible Henhouse Interactions

It reminds me of Gavin Belson's "Tethics" from the Silicon Valley TV show.

Presumably they would also like veto power.

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