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Comment by sdoering | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I am a data analyst. I consult companies in regards to ethical data collection. But I also know of black sheep.

I don't have a problem with websites measuring what I view, click, add to cart or buy. I want them to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of user experience.

And if they do marketing I even want them to be able to see from which source of traffic (aka marketing effort) how many conversions (whatever comprises a conversion) stems.

The problem imho isn't GTM (Google Tagmanager) running as proxy. This would (or at least could) be a data privacy win if done ethically. At least under one imho essential condition: I could be able to run the proxy on any infrastructure that I like. Not only one Google's cloud offering.

And on the second essential condition that marketing departments act ethically. They can send the web analytics data to whatever tool they like. But they should absolutely not send my identifying information with it. They should use the proxy as a privacy protector. The same when sending conversion data to the marketing tools. I am OK with the marketer sending information back that a specific ad (not a specific user clicking on a specific ad) led to a conversion.

I don't need Meta or Alphabet tracking me personally (or my clients'users) with every click. But I understand the business need to measure the effectiveness of marketing money spent. Solutions like these could be a way to achieve this. If done right. And not done in the way GTM does (only hosting on Google, using an A/AAAA subdomain, grabbing every cookie possibly and so on).

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> I want them to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of user experience.

That's not what they're doing, at all. They want to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of maximising profits. That may correlate with good user experience sometimes, but more often it results in the opposite.

Exactly! A company's goal is profit and most of the time, that does not align with the customer's goals. Amazon's goal is to sell me the highest margin item, I want the best value or highest quality.

I have very limited information about which items are a good value or high quality, so why should amazon have the tools to most effectively steer me towards high-margin items? They exist to provide us a service and we grant them the right to make a small % of profit while doing it. Not the other way around!

> I have very limited information about which items are a good value or high quality, so why should amazon have the tools to most effectively steer me towards high-margin items? They exist to provide us a service and we grant them the right to make a small % of profit while doing it. Not the other way around!

As a small aside, The capitalist's answer is that regulating companies to prevent them from steering to the most profitable items is both impossible to be adequately done and prohibitively costly. Even assuming cost isn't an issue, it's hard to imagine such regulation to be equally applied to all market participants (or to be equally effective). So we would be left with companies that cooperate and others that defect, and the defectors would be favored (more profitable) and outcompete the cooperators in the long run.

So instead we start from the assumption that companies are greedy and let them compete to offer customers the best value -- and if that value comes (at least in part) from not being tracked, companies that do not track will attract more customers. We probably just haven't made enough of a fuss about it with our dollar-votes.

For what it's worth, I block all ads without giving it a single thought. The way I think about it is that on the flip side of the prisoner's dilemma, I'm just defecting like some companies would. It's a race to the bottom in terms of the trust between customers and companies, but I didn't make the rules of the game...

Keep in mind that capitalists have all the power and a lot of time and incentive to rationalize the status quo.

The assumption in this argument is that consumers are able to observe and quantify the harm of tracking more effectively than regulators could create laws against data collection.

Personally I think the success of either one comes down to cultural factors that are currently stacked in favor of advertisers.

> The assumption in this argument is that consumers are able to observe and quantify the harm of tracking more effectively than regulators could create laws against data collection.

Not necessarily, because creating laws isn't enough to regulate. You also need to enforce such regulation, and that's where the challenge lies. The argument assumes that in the long run consumers are more effective at rationalizing their choices than the government is able to appropriately enforce regulation.

Alternatively, it assumes the cumulative harm created by the disconnect between current customer behavior and rationalized customer behavior (i.e. prior to their rationalizing the status quo) is less than the cumulative harm caused by inefficient regulation, including the defector's problem mentioned earlier but also other negative externalities such as encouraging corruption / fraud (which itself requires further enforcement)

Yes, my choice of words was hasty and suboptimal. I meant addressing data collection practices via regulation as a whole vs consumer choice as whole.

The way you are framing this serves only to reinforce talking points from those who are benefitting from the current situation. For instance, you're basically stating a priori that regulation is expensive and ineffective, and as evidence you talk about long tail of enforcement and defectors. But the ad revenue market is so consolidated you only need to enforce on a handful of players (Google and Facebook basically). The idea that defectors would then swoop in and create a massive enforcement problem is not substantiated. There have always been fly-by-night operations in all types of business, and they don't gain a huge advantage that catapults them to overnight success just because others play by the rules. No one is saying enforcement is easy, but to assume that it will be fatally flawed if it can't be perfectly applied to everyone plays right into the hands of those who are profiting from abuse of our data.

Now on the other side framing this as a "customer value" problem that will be sorted out by the hand of the market is just pure capitalist oligarch koolaid. How do you expect customers to have any sense of what data practices are behind their every day digital product choices, let alone quantify that into a dollar value? And even assuming they do all that, where are the market choices when everyone behaves this way? Even where there is theoretically a choice, many services have a huge network effect that makes a consumer's choice all but pre-ordained.

We need to have a reality check here. Markets are great when they work, but they are not magic and can not solve all problems.

Most everyone knows the "capitalist's answer". But it's specious, as it assumes a large scale check that requires P = NP.

In the real world market inefficiency creates local maximums, which can then be leveraged to implement policy. The most lucrative policies are to make those maximums even stickier. Advertising itself is a prime example of this - in a perfectly efficient market, once a brand became well known you'd think that additional money going to advertising would be a waste - causing the company to be less competitive and they'd dial it back. But instead what saturating advertising actually does is crowd out any new competitors that might come along. So as a customer, you're effectively overpaying so that you can have less choice!

This effect becomes even more relevant as the costs of production drop to zero, as an upstart competitor cannot get a leg up by optimizing production - in other words, the brand itself is a larger component of the "value". And on the larger topic, these days large corporations are declared "too big too fail" and bailed out by the central bank, rather than letting market mechanics assert themselves in even the most pressing cases.

Effective libertarianism involves recognizing that corporations and government are not dichotomous types of entities, but rather that both lay somewhere on a continuum of coercion. If the companies offering a product or service effectively move in lock step on some policy, then your main ability to reject that policy consists of going without that product or service. This is perhaps easier, but of the exact same vein, as needing to physically move to reject specific laws.

> The capitalist's answer is that regulating companies to prevent them from steering to the most profitable items is both impossible to be adequately done and prohibitively costly.

True, but only because that’s the wrong approach. The correct regulations are the ones that result in more competition. That’s treating the cause rather than the symptom.

If Amazon had to seriously worry about competitors, they wouldn’t be focused on selling overpriced garbage. Why? Because customers will notice that Amazon sells overpriced garbage, and will instead buy from somewhere else.

I don’t know what those regulations might look like, but I do know that pretty much every single “evil” behavior in the market can be solved by throwing in competition. It’s not always possible (e.g. maybe someone is locked in to a single vendor due to a bad contract), but when customers are given choices, the choice that offers the best value will survive in the long run.

The bit you're replying to here hasn't yet introduced the problem of marketing teams.

The kind of tracking in the first section is "understanding how people use your product", and is usually introduced by the product team, rather than marketing. And most product teams i've worked on fiercely fight back against the addition of excessive tracking. Whilst the goal of a business (and therefore a product team), is usually about maximising profits, it's not exclusively about that. I've worked for businesses that literally have a social charter in their articles of association, but they still want to measure how people use their products.

You have been lucky then. At the places I have worked the product people have not fought with thech but if anything they have fought against tech on this matter.

You're right about luck. Though I should clarify, I include tech in the "product team"; and it's usually me fighting back :)

That's not true. I run a site like this and I want both. Yes I want to test what maximizes conversions, but this is also what helps me provide value to more users. And I also need it to determime how to improve the service I provide to users.

That's to easy IMHO. Yes, online marketing is about profit. But tracking is not always about profit. I work for a customer that offers kind of a job search engine. All they want to maximize is the rate of succesful employments. Yes, they need to optimize marketing budget. But not to sell useless stuff, but to reach out to potential employees.

Marketing is almost by definition not going to act ethically: their whole goal is to create a need where there isn't an organic one, and the KPIs by which marketing departments are run are proof positive of that. Nobody starts off with 'what would be the natural limit of our product sales', instead they start off with 'what is the total addressable market and how do we maximize our fraction of that' implying that if you are counted in their market that you are fair game whether you like it or not.

> their whole goal is to create a need where there isn't an organic one

This is reductionist. Was telling people about trains and cars creating a need where there wasn’t one? In a sense. But in another sense, it was broadcasting a better way of being. Marketing doesn’t have to be evil. Saying all marketing is evil is sort of a cop out for the people who do it badly.

> Was telling people about trains and cars creating a need where there wasn’t one?

People were telling each other about these.

> Marketing doesn’t have to be evil.

No, indeed it doesn't. But as a rule it definitely appears to be. It's a bit like arsenic: it doesn't have to be negative but usually it is.

> Saying all marketing is evil is sort of a cop out for the people who do it badly.

If 99% of the people engaging in an activity are doing it badly then I'm all for reigning them in, in spite of the 1% that are doing a swell job.

> It's a bit like arsenic: it doesn't have to be negative but usually it is

This is a good analogy. In stories, arsenic is almost without fail evil. In reality, it has use in medicine, agriculture and ceramics [1].

> If 99% of the people engaging in an activity are doing it badly then I'm all for reigning them in

We agree. And I have no horse in this race. But that 99% figure is largely confined to tech-based marketing. The people painting print ads and planning PR stunts aren’t hurting anyone.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic#Uses

> The people painting print ads and planning PR stunts aren’t hurting anyone.

You must have missed the cosmetics industry.

And you might have missed how the cure for polio was rolled out so quickly.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/05/03/9887569...

Marketing is a tool. It can be misused. It can also be used for good. In fact, now that I raise the point, I wonder why nobody's thought to use ad microtargeting for COVID-19 vaccine campaigns yet.

They probably have and I just haven't noticed, because when good marketing's working it tends to be invisibly transparent.

If I may: I think your larger problem is really that most product is crap, and marketing's job is to put product in front of people whether or not it's crap. Maybe we should be doing something about crap product instead of advertising of crap product?

The polio vaccine serves an actual need, and if you're not selling something I would refrain from using the word marketing.

As for the marketing of 'good' products: even marketing a good product comes with the implied 'right to market', where possibly none exists. You could get people hooked on very high quality vehicles for short trips because of convenience when the alternative, a bike, or even walking are perfectly acceptable. But if all your neighbors have been sold on the car then the message is that you can't be seen to be left behind, and that is a problem. Harnessing peer pressure for gain is an important element of marketing, which rarely is positive in nature, but usually tries hard to push people to feel inferior based on not using/owning a particular product.

And that's for a high quality product. Marketing is all about changing perceptions, to turn the unpalatable into something desirable and to turn the things you don't need into the things that you must own to be happy or to feel complete.

I used the cosmetics industry as an example because they've turned this into a veritable industry: people are made to feel terribly unhappy, to the point of in some cases committing suicide on the strength of marketing aimed squarely at making them feel inferior. This is revolting.

> The polio vaccine serves an actual need, and if you're not selling something I would refrain from using the word marketing.

Then I believe basing policy off your definition of marketing would require first a tribunal to decide if something is "marketing" or... Whatever the polio campaign was. Because the national, then international, polio eradication project absolutely included perception and behavior modification.

Polio was only paralytic to a fraction of a fraction of its victims. For most, it was a bad bout of diarrhea and several bad days. And the vaccine (unlike the safer designs we have now) was either killed virus or half-killed live strain; in one terribly unfortunate batch, it caused polio. People had legitimate reason to believe things were good enough as-is (after all, most everyone had either gotten and survived polio or knew someone who had, with far, far fewer "Uncle Harry got it and he's in an iron lung" stories by volume) and getting some (possibly still-active) vaccine shot into their arms was going to be a bad long-term decision.

Against all of that, the March of Dimes did a huge amount of work to get people to go against their inclinations and the evidence available to their eyes to move polio from an "everybody eventually gets this" common environmental risk to a "makes the news" occasional outbreak. It's a brilliant success story of perception adjustment, on par with Colonel Stapp's crusade to make the seat-belt mandatory (speaking of which... http://persuasion-and-influence.blogspot.com/2015/02/wear-se...).

> Marketing is all about changing perceptions

No disagreement here. Sometimes, it's used to help people believe that the world can be other than it is, if we only all change our behavior to make it so.

> I used the cosmetics industry as an example because they've turned this into a veritable industry: people are made to feel terribly unhappy

No disagreement that cosmetics is full of bad actors and bad action, but people were putting eyeshadow and rouge on back when the closest thing we had to marketing was some statues declaring that a dead pharaoh was a cool guy (with the name scribbled out and replaced by some other dead pharaoh's name). I submit to you the humble possibility that people don't doll up because they're compelled by advertisers to do so (though I've no doubt advertising plays a huge factor in the way they choose to doll up).

> even marketing a good product comes with the implied 'right to market', where possibly none exists

The right to freedom of speech isn't universal, I agree. I submit that we do more harm than good trying to split the hair on deciding when something is freely-offered speech and when something is marketing, however. Good luck squaring those circles without getting eerily close to "prior restraint on open communication of ideas."

> Then I believe basing policy off your definition of marketing would require first a tribunal to decide if something is "marketing" or... Whatever the polio campaign was.

Let's just use the dictionary definition and save everybody a lot of time:

"the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service"

So I think the polio campaign doesn't have to be hauled in front of a tribunal (is that a new thing? I see this term used more and more for things that it has nothing to do with) to prove its worth.

I think we'll simply have to agree to disagree, because we're seeing the same facts and reaching different conclusions. The polio campaign included heavy use of marketing. Its story demonstrates that marketing isn't intrinsically bad; it can be used to bad ends. And any policy separating the baby from the bathwater in this regard will, I think, be a major challenge to implement correctly without risking making something like the polio campaign illegal.

Polio vaccination had to be sold as a concept. The public had to be taught, cajoled, coerced, and door-to-door-campaigned to volunteer to get stabbed with a cocktail of virus parts to protect them from a disease that hardly ever proved fatal or permanently debilitating. They had to be told their friends were doing it, their neighbors were doing it, all the "cool kids" were into it.

It looked like this:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E1XpNTjWQAIRb_y.jpg

https://cbsnews1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2013/03/26/20d5929c-...

https://www.neh.gov/sites/default/files/styles/1000x1000_squ...

There were, of course, additional circumstances (having a President that is visibly impaired by the disease, though his people did their best to hide it, certainly mattered), but the March of Dimes absolutely promoted, sold, and aided in distribution of a service. Hell, the name March of Dimes was coined as a more marketable name than "National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis" because they were trying to convince everyone to chip in 10 cents to pay for the project (https://www.marchofdimes.org/mission/eddie-cantor-and-the-or...). It's every bit as much a sell as Sarah McLachlan showing up and singing over pictures of very sad puppies is today.

(And to be clear... Thank God it worked. It's great to live in one of the decades where my fear of polio is practically nil. But the point is: without marketing, none of that was a given. People didn't just wake up one day and go "I'm going to go get stabbed by a stranger with a needle full of disease-juice..." a vast marketing campaign convinced them that was the right thing to do. Same techniques that were being used to convince them they should drive to the injection site in their shiny new Ford because walking was for suckers).

I would much sooner label 'the march of dimes' a charity and a PSA than marketing, but each to their own. Also: note that exactly those things are trotted out by the marketing people to prove that "hey, marketing isn't all evil" when actually they have to reach back decades into history for an example that people will recognize and that has nothing to do with selling un-necessary stuff, which is the thing they are as a rule heavily engaged in.

I mean, you can, but then you should probably tell Cindy Rahman, their SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, that her job title makes no sense. And the IRS that the 4.9 million-odd they claimed they spent on advertising on their Federal 990 form in 2020 was mis-labeled.

The March of Dimes is and was in the marketing business.

> actually they have to reach back decades

March of Dimes is still here. It's a modern example as well as a decades-old one. Their primary purpose all but accomplished, they've re-targeted their efforts into information, support of families in NICU, and general patient advocacy.

I could have pulled a more recent example, but the polio campaign has the advantages of lack of ambiguity, common understanding, and the historical perspective to come to general agreement that it was an more-or-less un-alloyed good thing that we can avoid getting bogged down in those dimensions.

Nowadays, I'd point to the billions spent on COVID-19 vaccination advocacy and messaging as the good marketing can do, but I didn't really want to drag the modern-era anti-vaxxers out of the woodwork.

But: you are still stuck on the same theme: health related, charities and so on. The fact that charities have marketing is by itself a negative, often enough this translates into them spending a very large fraction of their donation on soliciting more donations. And there are quite a few examples of that being the larger part of the total collected, which shouldn't really happen.

We did not start the discussion about the march of dimes or any such project, that's just a convenient fig leaf, what matters here is companies selling commercial products and services that people don't need while using armies of psychologists and a continuous barrage of media expressions to battle down the natural defenses to get people to act against their own interest.

If you want to have a side discussion that there are some applications of those same techniques that may have positive effect then you're free to do so but preferably not with me.

Like I said, you don't hate marketing; you hate that most of what is marketed sucks.

Take away the marketing and we have a world where most products still suck, and when we seek one out at random we'd be statistically likely to lay hands on something we don't need.

'You don't hate guns, you just hate what they are used for' -> No, sorry, I really do hate guns and I have a very low opinion of everything related to marketing.

> People were telling each other about these.

I've seen this argument a lot, especially by technically minded folks.

When you say "telling each other" what do you mean exactly? Do you think businesses just magically get talked about with zero investment in marketing dollars?

I get the sense that lots of people in the HN community don't realize when they read an article from <insert tech company engineering blog> that this is marketing dollars at work.

> But as a rule it definitely appears to be.

By your "rule", sure. I understand the gripe with marketing from the consumer perspective, but pretending is inherently evil because it (1) invades your personal attention and (2) you think people are going to organically talk about products or services they don't know exist is a pretty myopic view of marketing as a whole.

> When you say "telling each other" what do you mean exactly?

I don't think we need to discuss the meaning of words that are in the top 5000 commonly used dictionary words here.

> Do you think businesses just magically get talked about with zero investment in marketing dollars?

Yes. It's called word-of-mouth and it is how it has always been done.

> I don't think we need to discuss the meaning of words that are in the top 5000 commonly used dictionary words here.

Good. We're on the same page then. Snarky response not required but okay.

> Yes. It's called word-of-mouth and it is how it has always been done.

I don't know where to start with how to respond, but I'll bite:

Let's magically go back to the gold rush in the US. You're traveling from New York and arrive in San Francisco. You know nothing about products and services in that market. You walk into town and look for a general good store to buy some water. You ask a guy on the corner where the general store is and so you find the general store based on his help. Okay, so word of mouth. You want to prospect some gold and know you need to buy a pan. There are two gold prospecting material vendors in town, Gold Supply Inc and Acme Gold (but you don't know this because you're new to town). You walk through town looking for a vendor and notice a guy with a megaphone is yelling to the crowd about Gold Supply Inc offering better prices on pans. He is paid by Gold Supply to do this. This is marketing/advertising.

So, no, this is not "how it's always been done" and its inconceivable to think any modern company doesn't spend money on advertising/marketing. I understand the grievances about having hundreds of thousands of megaphones in your face 24/7, but let's stop pretending the world's marketplaces can operate efficiently on word of mouth alone because that's what you're implying.

> You walk through town looking for a vendor and notice a guy with a megaphone is yelling to the crowd about Gold Supply Inc offering better prices on pans.

Which may be true. Or not. And they may be crappy pans, or not. And that's my point: all that yelling just muddies the water, it's like a mountain of 'fake reviews' and no way to pick up the signal any more because of all of the noise. Marketing mostly lies.

I don't understand your point?

You think that the average person:

- Be fully educated on every product and service available to them in every market they encounter

- Spend the time to speak to N amount of people via word of mouth and understand how many N amount of conversations are required to have the confidence to buy the best product (in terms of value, feature set, price, etc.) for the item they're looking for

- Discover products and services that they didn't know existed but may solve their problem in a novel way

All without any marketing/advertising interaction? And that this is somehow going to magically make buying decisions more clear (i.e. not muddy)?

Sorry but that is hilariously out of touch with reality...

> I don't understand your point?

and

> Sorry but that is hilariously out of touch with reality...

are incompatible with each other.

I posed a bunch of clarifying statements to understand your point and instead of responding to them that's how you respond? Weird.

I respect most, if not all, of your viewpoints on HN (even if we disagree), but dodging the meat of my questions and clarifying statements isn't helping with your argument.

That's fine, but I think that if you don't understand someone's point then your best bet is to ask, not to extrapolate.

I'm not dodging anything here, it's just that it makes responding much harder because now instead of clarification we're off on some wild goose chase.

It's ok with me if you don't believe that people got by just fine before marketing became a weapon in the armory of companies that all compete for the same market because traditionally the reach of companies was fairly limited due to the cost of transportation. But (mass) marketing as a profession is a relatively recent invention, as are companies with global consumer reach.

The availability of 30 brands for the same niche is what drives one form of marketing ('we're better than them', when in fact the products are most likely at best at parity). The other is that plenty of 'need' is merely marketeers pushing jealousy buttons, something that you don't need to do if there is a genuine need for a product.

All that marketing and advertising is in the end an arms race and a big contributor to overproduction and overconsumption. The thing that needs marketing the most is probably the thing that you need the least.

> Do you think businesses just magically get talked about with zero investment in marketing dollars?

Yes. It's hardly magic. If some business or service provides a great value or "a better way of being" people naturally get excited and tell their friends. I'm not a domain expert but my understanding is that these organic word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations are waaaaaay more effective than any other form of marketing. The other organic thing that happens is when people realize they have a need and ask their friends for referrals and recommendations. It works great if your product is great.

If you can't develop and sustain word-of-mouth organically then you have to use other less efficient and more coercive means. Deliberate marketing is commercial propaganda. Someone wants to put their hand in my wallet and is deliberately using professionally-design artificial media to trick me into letting them.

Your example of the barker with the megaphone is noise pollution and a waste of a human being. But you can go much further back. It was decadent when the Romans did it, and it was decedent when we San Franciscans did it, it's decadent today.

> its inconceivable to think any modern company doesn't spend money on advertising/marketing

You can't conceive it, maybe, but I can. There are worlds without advertising/marketing. There are marketplaces that operate efficiently on word of mouth alone. You might not believe me, but it's true, and from those worlds our modern advertising/marketing mania seems like a madness.

> There are marketplaces that operate efficiently on word of mouth alone.

Which ones? Please enlighten me.

First, there are the various "black" markets. There was no appreciable change in availability, quality, or price before and after pot legalization, for example.

The high end of most services and products doesn't need to market, they're "saturated" by word-of-mouth alone. For example, I met a guy once who was part of a very high-end IT consultancy. They had A-list customers, all the work they could handle, and their website was a single line of text that basically said, "You have a problem? Email us". In other words, most markets have a subset of "quiet" companies that thrive on word-of-mouth alone.

> Was telling people about trains and cars creating a need where there wasn’t one?

That's a great example actually, because the reason you can't get anywhere without a car these days is marketing campaigns by the automobile and oil industry. First by suggesting the newly necessary road safety standards and ridiculing people for being in the street without a car ("jaywalking") to the point that it was criminalized, then by sponsoring enormous displays about the glorious car-dependent future at multiple world fairs (GMs "Futurama" holds the attendance record at 5 million visitors to this day), shutting down streetcar companies via lobbying and acquisitions and eventually even providing the US secretary of defense, who then used the defense budget to bulldoze inner cities to run highways through them. A development that caused the US to have the highest car dependence, car ownership and transport emissions of any large nation today.

So yes, I think it's fair to say there was a bit of artificial need created here.

Not to speak of a promised sense of freedom you could only ever possibly obtain by driving around in the right kind of car and smoking the right brand of cigarettes.

>a promised sense of freedom you could only ever possibly obtain by driving around in the right kind of car

You do realize that having the ability to hop in your car and drive wherever you want to go without having to report to anyone provides an incredible amount of freedom, right?

You don't need a car for this. You can use trains and other means of transportation.

Take a look at other countries. Japan, Singapore, France with cities like Paris, Netherlands with cites like Amsterdam, which transformed from a car centric city in the 1950s to now a very lively city with lots of bikes and public transport.

Who are you "reporting" to when you catch a train? Also, in cars, you're using Google maps which is tracking you, you're license plate is fully visible which allows you to be tracked, there are ticketing cameras, aerial monitoring, tool booths, speed traps... Yea sure pretty free.

You do realize that navigating infastucture designed exclusively for cars without one has a much larger negative impact on your freedom?

>because the reason you can't get anywhere without a car these days is marketing campaigns by the automobile and oil industry

We aren't all brainless automatons. Not everything is a giant conspiracy. Have you considered that there are people that actually like cars and find them convenient and useful? Cars and the highway system completely changed the course of commerce in this country. Sure, that has lead to some problems we're going to have to correct, but this idea that a bunch of moustache-twirling executives sat in a board room figuring out how to force cars on people is a bit much.

I was about to reply that this is exactly what happened in L.A. in the 1940s and suggest that you look up the "Great American Streetcar Conspiracy", my favorite example of monopolistic conspiracy. But apparently much has changed since I last did that myself, and now the conspiracy seems to be little more than... fake news.

Unless of course we're in the midst of a "Great American Streetcar Conspiracy"-Conspiracy Conspiracy. ;-)

That is a bit of a misleading way of putting it. There was indeed a "street car conspiracy" and it even led to criminal convictions. The interpretation that this conspiracy was intended to kill off street cars is harder to justify since street cars were already struggling in the aftermath the great depression andany were bankrupt. I do think that the actions of GM et all did accelerate the decline of the street car but the urban myth about is "Great American Streetcar Company" is generally overblown.

Streetcars and public transport in general should never be run on a for profit basis.

> public transport in general should never be run on a for profit basis

Japan seems to do fine [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Japan

Japan is a special case in many ways.

"can be run on a profit" and "should only be run if it is profitable" are very, very different things.

Infrastructure like trains or roads are a huge net benefit to society already, if they can make a profit too that's neat but it shouldn't be the goal.

> Have you considered that there are people that actually like cars and find them convenient and useful? Cars and the highway system completely changed the course of commerce in this country.

Cars would have been wildly successful without marketing, but the deliberate marketing efforts of car companies significantly amped up that demand and pushed us into being a society that is unheathily dependant on these amazing machines.

> this idea that a bunch of moustache-twirling executives sat in a board room figuring out how to force cars on people is a bit much.

This "idea" is strongly backed up by the historic record, so if this seems like "too much" you really need to recalibrate your intuitions with reality.

In this case it was a giant open conspiracy. It wasn't secret.

> a bunch of moustache-twirling executives sat in a board room figuring out how to force cars on people is a bit much.

That's pretty much exactly what happened. I don't know that they twirled their mustaches though, I'm sure they all thought they were doing the right thing.

"The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM

It was a classic case of "seemed like a good idea at the time".

> Sure, that has lead to some problems we're going to have to correct,

That's pretty facile. For one thing more people (in the USA) have died directly from cars crashes than from all the wars we've fought. For another there's the pollution: exhaust is deadly poisonous, tires wear down and shed millions of tons of tiny particles of vulcanized rubber into the environment, the fuel we burn contributes to the Greenhouse Effect, the asphalt of the roads is toxic, and there are so many roads and so much pavement that it affects planetary albedo. Then there are the unquantifiable changes to the social order: streets used to be public ways for everyone, now they are the domain of the automobile and people are confined to the sidewalks for fear of mayhem and death. I could go on and on.

I think if an alien landed here and looked around one of it's first reactions would be, "WTF is up with all these cars!?"

I'm not sure what part of my message lead you to believe I didn't think people enjoyed cars?

The problem is that it wasn't enough for cars to be a useful tool for those that needed it, but that they needed to be a source of endless growth, and marketing played a crucial role in that.

There's no need for mustache twirling here. Car companies rationally maximized their profit by selling to everyone they could, rationally removed barriers to car adoption by removing everyone else from the road and rationally created new markets for their product by encouraging sprawling cities and enormous highways, which also acted as a competitive moat. They then disregarded the consequences, not because they were evil, but because their job was to maximize car sales, not the car's benefit to humanity.

All of this is just things working as intended.

This view is probably too US-centric. There is a lot of the world (including developed world), where people get around everyday without relying on cars for everything.

I do not negate your point that marketing has a strong component of creating a need where there isn't one. But, its success in doing so relies on a strong combination of cultural, economic and political backgrounds.

There had always been a need to move people and stuff from point A to point B and move it fast!!!

Marketing is basically hacking, so yes, it doesn't have to be evil. Apparently there are a few white hats.

Ridiculous. "Tracking" and your so called "artificial" metrics have significantly increased my site's conversions to paying users and my users' experience. I did nothing unethical in the process.

- This thread is about marketing. Did you do all of the marketing, or did an existing infrastructure perform tracking and serve ads for you?

- What data support claims about your users’ experience? Conversions are not a good metric of user experience.

- People generally have a hard time evaluating the ethical merits of things that benefit them. Do you have some kind of independent evaluation so support your claim that you did nothing unethical? If a politician hires a lawyer as a fixer, and pays them to make problems go away with a minimum of information returned, is that politician acting ethically? If the fixer hires a hitman for that problem, does the politician’s ignorance of that act constitute ethical impunity?

Most people only see 1-2% of what a marketing department does. The primary goal of a marketing department is to inform and present information in a clear and attractive manner. A good marketing department is also an advocate for what the consumer wants based on research and consumer feedback.

Are there bad actors in marketing. Yes. A lot. Marketing agencies are full of them. Agencies, to generalize, only care about short-term results and selling the client on the next big idea. They won’t be around or have to live with the repurcuions of their bad actions. In fact, the clients are their customer and so they don’t really care about the client’s customers at all so long as the client is paying them. They just need superficial numbers to go up to show the client. They are screwing over the client and customers are unfortunately collateral damage, but the agencies, again, don’t really have to deal with that.

A lot of the most anti-consumer tactics do not work in the long-run. Most consumers aren’t so easily tricked into buying a product today and they most certainly won’t be tricked twice. It doesn’t take too long—usually—for the snake-oil salesman to get run out of town. They just do a lot of damage while around.

Even when recognizing that there are a lot of bad actors in marketing, that's still an extremely over-optimistic perspective: at some point, tricking people becomes easier than improving the products, value propositions become muddier, and snake-oil starts to be used as the lubricant for business relationships. Only the most obvious offenders get run out of town, while most evolve and get to raise the new normal boiling point; as long as refining the snake-oil is cheaper than refining the actual products, the situation keeps getting worse.

Either the dynamics work in favor of the people, or they don't. That we continually mistake the comfort of our ships with the state of the sea is just the blessing and tragedy of our ignorance.

> Marketing is almost by definition not going to act ethically: their whole goal is to create a need where there isn't an organic one

That's very single-minded. Marketing mainly informs about a product, which obviously also works even if you already have the need for it. And it can also help in realizing a specific need which the customer has not pinpointed yet. That's the whole point of acting ethically, to support, not to bait, trap and abuse.

What would be the utmost, top dream of a Marketing team? I think it is to be able to read my mind. Followed by being able to project an ad into my retina (if writing into my mind is not possible).

If the above is not possible, then they will come to analyze my behavior online.

It's truly sad...

Paraphrasing The Godfather 3 "Finance is a gun, politics is knowing when to pull the trigger" and I would add "marketing is knowing HOW to pull the trigger".

> And it can also help in realizing a specific need which the customer has not pinpointed yet

Don't you love cold calls, spam and pop-ups?

Marketing helped to ruin the latest and finest revolution of our time, that is, the Internet.

Indeed. That's exactly what our marketing department does.

Our product helps our customers comply with the law. The law created the need, we're just trying to make our customers lives easier by assisting them with complying.

So our marketing team focuses on informing potential customers what it takes to be in compliance as few are well aware of what it takes, and how our product can help with that.

Wow, that's quite the self justification story.

Your customers were required to comply with the law, whether or not your company exist.

Whether you help them or not is up for debate, what isn't up for debate is that you sell them something, which they may need but not necessarily so. It's not your product that they need, it is compliance.

Making their lives easier is great: as long as your product doesn't mess up, at which point I'm sure your terms of service will say something to the effect of 'well, sorry, but it was your responsibility after all' and 'informing potential customers' typically - in that context - takes the form of pressing the fear buttons for possibly not being compliant and selling them a solution which they may not even need.

Seriously: this is a fantastic example of how being on one side of such a story you might lose objectivity, if I wanted to know whether your product is useful or not the last party I would trust is your marketing department. Who would I trust? My lawyer, who I would ask to establish whether or not (1) this particular law applies to me, (2) the risk of non-compliance outweighs the cost of your product, (3) whether the products terms and services really protect me or if it opens me up to a new level of liability, (4) whether there is a better / cheaper product and so on.

> Your customers were required to comply with the law, whether or not your company exist.

Indeed. And a lot of companies don't know that they have to, to what degree, or how to do so effectively.

> It's not your product that they need, it is compliance.

It's true they don't need our product. But it can absolutely help them, by spending less time and resources on compliance and the surrounding processes.

But they can't get all those benefits if they don't know we exist.

> Seriously: this is a fantastic example of how being on one side of such a story you might lose objectivity

I really struggle to see how you can come to that conclusion without having seen our product or our marketing.

> [If] I wanted to know whether your product is useful or not the last party I would trust is your marketing department.

But if you didn't know about our product, you certainly couldn't evaluate if it was useful or not. Without word-of-mouth, how would you even find our product?

To be fair, word-of-mouth worked very well for a long time. But there are still a lot of companies out there who aren't in compliance because they don't know any better, and a lot who still use a lot of time on compliance that could be spent on their core business instead.

What's wrong with trying to tell those companies that our product exists?

As a 'white-hat' marketer (I work for some place that's similar to Vote411/ The League of Women Voters and I initially started in library outreach; I don't think anybody would consider my work unethical), the issue is the need for constant growth and profits.

You can do cool and interesting things in marketing and outreach and there are actual use cases for them. For example, libraries often carry unconventional items, and making the community aware that they can borrow a sewing machine/get seeds to plant/get museum passes is technically marketing and 'creating' a need, but it's not exploitative.

It's a very similar situation to dev work in that if I were willing to chuck my ethics out the window, I would make a lot more money, and marketing people do also like money.

The implicit observation that there is such a thing as a white hat marketeer relegating the remainder to black hats is an astute one.

I would rephrase the one as raising consciousness about important issues, and leave the other one under the label marketing, which to me is limited to commercial enterprises and indirect money grabs, a lot of which is related to politics and creating artificial divisions in society (the 'haves' vs the 'have nots' and so on).

> the second essential condition that marketing departments act ethically

This seems like a pretty strong assumption, given that both an engrained culture, lived experience, and an analysis of the different parties' incentives stand against this.

Until we have strong (and crucially, really enforced) legislation against this, I'd say technical means (blocking JS mostly) will be the only thing I'd be willing to bet on.

> I don't have a problem with websites measuring what I view, click, add to cart or buy. I want them to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of user experience.

The problem is not that they measure things. The problem is that they enter the user's private area; they run code on the user's computer and probably grab information about the user too (I don't know exactly how tag managers work because I have never used one). It's like if I enter your home and start measuring things, the problem is not that I measure things, it's that I entered your private area.

Well actually it is more like they you are entering their store. They are measuring the number of people that come in. The number of items (and what items) these people look at. Add to their basket. How many stand in line at the cashier and how many buy. And how many filled baskets stand in the isles at the end of the day.

But - they also could write down the gender of anyone entering the shop. Or the hair color. Or they could note down the license plate of your car. With whom you arrive. The brand of your car. The color. The brands of the clothes you visibly wear.

Then they correlate that to the payment method, your Visa card, the credit ranking they receive back from visa (digitally at least). And so on.

and they measure how often you return.

They could do all of this (and actually a big lot of them does) and not only log that for themselves and do whatever analysis with it, but also send this data happily to the advertising agency that manages the big signs all over town so that they can show you additional advertisements for a new car, because you have money, but your car is old.

That is were the problem begins. It begins when doing way too invasive logging of user attributes that do only marginally have anything to do with measuring how the shop (or the website) work. And more so when this data is being sent to who knows whom in this advertising space out there.

I have no problem with an online store storing the fact that I came by clicking on a display ad. Or on an email newsletter. Or that I am using Firefox. Or Chrome. And that I am on a WIn10 desktop device. Or that I tend to add a lot of stuff to my shopping cart, wait two hours and then sort what I don't need.

I even do not have a problem showing me additional products based on what I looked at in their shop.

But to correlate that with offsite data, sending this to advertisers and so on is a no go for me.

No, you are voluntarily downloading and running their code on your computer. What you describe is hacking into somebody's computer, that is different. Stores take measurements about their customers, so do sites.

I'm also voluntarily running uBlock Origin whose entire purpose is to sanitize their borderline malware code into something that I can actually consume. As you said, it's my computer and they really need to submit to my will instead of finding creative new ways to work around it like some malware developer.

> Stores take measurements about their customers, so do sites.

When stores use Bluetooth or other tech to track their customers movement within their stores, that is also a creepy and unethical.

Also "voluntarily" is a complete misnomer as nobody is volunteering for this, a more correct world would be "unwittingly" or possibly "begrudgingly" depending on their level of tech saviness.

Btw, someone wrote up a guide on hosting this on AWS, which covers what it would take to run it yourself.

https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/deploy-server-side-googl...

If I'm not mistaken, the key bit is that Google makes the docker image available at: gcr.io/cloud-tagging-10302018/gtm-cloud-image:stable

Edit: oh, Google published a guide to self host maybe? https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...

Sadly, most publishers are not interested in developing their own proxy solution just for the sake of data privacy. They vastly prefer a ready-made solution that they can just use.

Much of the power of the advertising space come from people (publishers, consumers and advertisers) generally choosing the path of least resistance. They don't have the technical know-how and they would only acquire it if there were enough benefits. Sadly, privacy is not enough on its own.

I think the solution that can solve all that is when a company acts as a "wall" between consumers and publishers/advertisers. Then, that company can protect the consumer while keeping the user experience as simple as possible.

"Sign in with Apple" is one such solution. But of course, it brings its own (different) downsides.

You're hitting the nail on the head. I'm not against the website owners seeing what I do on their website.

What I am against is what other parties are able to do with the data when sold. They're able to correlate website visits with specific businesses and linkedin profiles.

>I could be able to run the proxy on any infrastructure that I like. Not only one Google's cloud offering.

This is already true.

https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...

Thanks - didn't know that. Interesting. Might be a solution for a client of the team I work in (but not my client).

> But I understand the business need to measure the effectiveness of marketing money spent.

Why? They are not able to track TV, newspaper, billboard or radio campaigns but still spend a lot of marketing money on these.

The are at least quite able to correlate these. Tracking TV advertising'impact is relatively easy and straight forward. Same for out of home advertising. And with a bit more effort attribution to newspaper/magazine advertising is also possible.

But. It often isn't necessary. More often than not these forms of advertising are not direct marketing. They don't necessarily have a call to action. They are a branding asset. And brand awareness is measured differently. With different means.

So while you can and should measure the direct impact, this isn't the main focus.

The same way response and conversion rates on direct marketing efforts were meticulously measured long before the internet. There were even AB tests being run on mailings (snail mail) on test flights to identify the campaigns with the best ROI.

I have a booklet from 1978, the year I was born, explaining AB testing for direct marketing campaigns.

Except for the speed, nothing changed. Nowadays we only have more intrusive tracking methods if we decide to go that route. But the underlying methods (statistics, measuring success, et al) habe not significantly changed.

>The problem imho isn't GTM (Google Tagmanager) running as proxy. This would (or at least could) be a data privacy win if done ethically. At least under one imho essential condition: I could be able to run the proxy on any infrastructure that I like. Not only one Google's cloud offering.

Yup that is where rubber meets the road. Would like to offer google as little data as possible. And use as little google products as possible on the web and internet.

Sibling comment shares this link, but you can run this in your own infrastructure (this is actually how Segment does server-side publishing to Google Analytics, because until very recently there hasn't been a proper API for it): https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...

While I agree with the ethical matter, from what I understand Google offered some form of server-side analytics APIs since ages[0]. I know, this is different from this new GTM server-side thing, but nonetheless it already offered technical ways of proxy-tracking data with whatever infrastructure available, also circumventing ad-blockers.

This to say that this server-side approach is nothing totally new. I'm sure some big business already implemented it, you can't just easily notice it everywhere like the client-side counterpart. The difference here is that now Google has tinkered some ready made solution, using its own infrastructure.

Maybe it's also a matter of convenience: It has always been mostly trivial to setup some JS to collect this data (often, as easy as just pasting a single script tag in your HTML). Once you need App Engine, DNS setup, etc not every business will likely jump into all this technical burden, and this could slow the adoption of the whole server-side tracking.

Or maybe not. Who knows.

[0]: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/...

> This would (or at least could) be a data privacy win if done ethically.

Most, if not all, tracking is unethical.

> marketing departments act ethically

Impossible. All marketing is inherently unethical. At best it's got massive conflicts of interest everywhere: who trusts the opinion of someone who's being paid to say good things about a product or service? I want to talk to real humans with real experiences and real opinions, not paid for ads and testimonials.

Marketing at its worst is kind of an undefined thing because they reach new lows every day, there's no limit they won't cross. It's gotten to the point I consider advertising to be abuse if not mind rape. We don't tolerate people assuming they have arbitrary access to our bodies, and our attention and cognition are absolutely part of our bodies and deserving of respect.

> not done in the way GTM does (only hosting on Google, using an A/AAAA subdomain, grabbing every cookie possibly and so on).

It’s provided as a Docker image that you can run anywhere you want.

https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...

On the conversion tracking point, because I just wrote a privacy policy section on this: I just send the conversion event for the ad, but the advertiser almost certainly has all the user info tied to that already, right? I can say "not my department" but still.

Of course facebook would prefer you just send it all app events, in perpetuity, just in case.

Similarly, I want to be able to show my users ads. They're not really bad ads, but otherwise I lose money on providing service. And then we risk the "youtube paradox": keep showing more ads to your ad watching users so they subsidize the growing number of ad blockers, but this causes more to use ad blockers so show even more ads.

Can't you just switch out the users for bots that watch the ads without adblockers and then gradually switch out the content for ads to keep the growing number of bots busy? That way you can also show really bad ads without anyone complaining. win win.

>ethical data collection Oxymoron. Hence your need to prefix 'ethical'. >ethically >ethically I am overdosing reading your post; rationalise it however you wish, you're well aware of what you're doing and it's clear no comment I could make would change your mind.

> But I understand the business need to measure the effectiveness of marketing money spent.

They don’t need to, but they sure want to.

"Ethical data collection"!

How effective is tracking in increasing user experience over less invasive techniques, e.g. like asking users?

This! The most valuable information is collected via classic communication! We include basic opt-in tracking (selectable in our installer) to get information about basic usage untangled to certain users. While this is just a statistical overview, it shows to us which parts of our software get used only for the customers who activated this kind of tracking.

The most valuable information we get is through our forum which is open to everyone regardless of whether tracking is activated or not.

Most companies do both. If just asking users questions was strictly better than passive tracking, that's probably all they'd do - analytics have a real cost to use, that cost wouldn't be paid if the information gathered was useless.

But, people are pretty remarkably bad at asking for things. It's mostly the "better horse" problem. People ask for fixes to proximal issues (make this faster, cheaper, better) and not the big things.

In my own product, we use gtm to understand where in our sign up funnel people fall off. It is a complicated product and a complicated sign up flow. Since people who fall out of the funnel are unreachable, we can't just ask them why. But we can observe that (say) 40% of users bounce off of step X, so let's make that step easier.

Just block the script by its checksum, and the issue is solved

Article addresses this: google is actually encouraging users to modify said script.

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