I'm no ads expert but my guess would be they run ads on TikTok and have the pixel on UberEats to figure out the conversion rate on those ads.
In its simplest form the pixel is used to attribute an ad view/click to a conversion event. At the beginning of the online ad industry that’s all it did, advertisers for the first time had the ability to directly, in real time, see the effectiveness of their ads. The economic value and GDP generated due to this innovation is immeasurable, the internet economy is literally built on it.
At the beginning there was no profile building, combining with PII and data gathered from social media or even your gmail emails (yes the content of your emails). And it was magical!
It’s the innovations since that have moved the entire industry through a grey area into the blank where the way they operate is questionable at best.
The point is, this tracking pixel on its own is incredible what it unlocks. It’s the way that data is then used that we have to call into question.
Personally the simplest form of attribution to me is fine. It works and I don’t believe it’s invasive if they aren’t then combining it with pii and profile data. Sadly that time has passed and all advertising networks now rely so heavily of ML/AI that it’s impossible to manage them, as an advertiser, in the way you used to. Hopefully regulation will push the industry back to where it was.
Nice illustration of how "innovation" != "progress"
> How does including interest-based tracking for a product make a commitment to privacy from unrelated companies' tracking "smoke and mirrors"? There's a difference between the privacy I expect from a direct service provider and from various random agents seeking to build a profile on me.
On the other hand, you always have a choice to not use UberEats(or most others) and order by phone/walk-in and save your resources.
And it would be a bit of exaggeration to say targeting doesn’t work - It’s obviously far from perfect but it generates billions everyday for a reason.
I don't want to be targetted.
> So it’s just good karma to let them run ...
No. It's my machine, not theirs, they don't get to use it to track me. Not one single cycle. It certainly isn't "good karma" to allow advertisers free reign like that, it's letting the fox loose in the hen-house.
>> Don't open their website
Sure, or just don't allow them to load these things.
Honestly I'm moving in the direction of not visiting. Instead of a useless do-not-track header, I'd much rather send a "will-not-render" header. I'd be quite happy to tell your server that under no circumstances will my browser be participating in tracking or even rendering your ads. If you'd rather not serve me the page at that point then cool, lets go our separate ways.
I imagine a company like uber eats, who I am actually trying to pay when I visit their site, might still like to serve me the page. Ad-supported content less so.
Is this based on your knowledge or experience in the ad industry? Or just your intuition on how it should work? What I see in OP is UberEats loading a tracking pixel directly from TikTok servers, where the “pixel” is actually a full events.js analytics script that could send user data straight to TikTok.
Really? I thought Apple's newly-implemented ATT was exactly what made attribution impossible for things like app store purchases.
This is the specific thing I'm referring to.
Rotten to the core.
It collected only pages visited, browser versions and referer (sic) headers - it didn't occur to me to collect anything else - and yet provided vast amounts of business value to our customers as well as a vast amounts of experience at scaling for me (though, uh, given how badly the early versions of that code scaled, not necessarily at the same time).
> The point is, this tracking pixel on its own is incredible what it unlocks. It’s the way that data is then used that we have to call into question.
I entirely agree with this statement, and what's happened since saddens me.
I'm going to pour another drink and take a moment to feel old now.
(edited to add: 'tracking pixel' seems to mean that class of instrument to many other commenters, I'm specifically talking about an <img> tag that loaded a single pixel transparent gif ... I also made bar charts for the analytics users' UI using HTML tables with a pair of <td> tags per row, one with a coloured background, one clear, using percentages to provide relative data. 2001 was a different world)
How is this not everyone's first thought?