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Comment by niknetniko | Hacker News Reader

Am I missing something here? I understand the "The IAB loves tracking users." part of the title, but where is the part about "But it hates users tracking them."? Based on the title, I would have expected an exception in their standard for themselves, or a story about how their own user tracking technology was used against them.

However, there is none of that. Just that the IAB does not want to make it easier for users to escape their tracking (which, given their purpose, is unfortunately entirely expected). What justifies "But it hates users tracking them."?

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The later part refers to the plus addressing, like "han.solo+github@gmail.com", which people use to so that "If they later start receiving spam to that address, they know the service has leaked or sold their info.". Now the IAB requests that advertisers should normalise such addresses by dropping the part after the plus sign, and therefore effectively stopping users from "tracking" the advertisers.

This is dangerous as some mail servers could consider plus addresses unique.

(Web) developers have gotten lazier and simply don't care anymore. The fact of the matter is that if you don't host your email with one of the big three, some services are probably not working anyway. I'd also like websites to show me things like news and recipes without having them run javascript, but apparently this means I deserve white pages because writing HTML is too much of a hassle for the modern web developer.

It's quite sad to see. It's also the reason I'm using somethingunique@domain.tld;, if cyberstalkers start normalising to a domain, they'll only hurt their own business.

> I'd also like websites to show me things like news and recipes without having them run javascript, but apparently this means I deserve white pages because writing HTML is too much of a hassle for the modern web developer.

Often enough the content is there but just hidden until the JS loads for ... reasons, idk.

nobody cares, email, along the majority of the internet as "computers talking protocols", is dead. The absolute majority of email is handled by gmail or microsoft, accounting for >80% of MX servers in the wild by the data i had five years back. I'd imagine the share of the duopoly is even larger today, considering how difficult it is to get into inbox these days.

EMail is more alive than any other federated communication protocol on the internet. It is only rivaled by phones and physical mail.

Defeatism here helps noone.

In the linked document they say to only do it with @gmail.com addresses.

>and therefore effectively stopping users from "tracking" the advertisers.

I guess that's the nefarious explanation, but there's a more benign one: if you want to correlate user behavior, you need some sort of normalization, otherwise john.doe+apple@example.com and john.doe+amazon@example.com would show up as different "people" and cause match rates to suffer. Sure, getting tracked isn't great, but it's not exactly the hypocrisy rage-bait that the OP is implying.

Why would a person want advertisers to correlate their behavior? What’s in it for them?

In a logical world it would mean that you see fewer ads. If your matches increase, your price per ad goes up so the service needs to show you fewer ads to hit their ad revenue target for you.

But if you think that will happen I have an East River transportation startup in New York that is seeking an angel investor.

Revenue targets are certainly dynamic but avoiding user churn is important too.

So you want to keep cost per impression up. You would not want to saturate and devalue.

Better to play 10 ads at 10c each vs 20 ads at 4 or 5c, as high ad load impacts users propensity to return to the service.

> the service needs to show you fewer ads to hit their ad revenue target for you.

In a logical world, yes.

In a capitalist world, that revenue target goes up every year. Apple became the richest company on earth selling hardware, yet here they are now drowning their software with ads.

We really should just cut out the middle man here and ban ads entirely. If an ad broker wants to pay me to watch an ad, pay me directly.

I've come to the conclusion that we should just ban all advertising, completely. Any possible positives to allowing advertising are entirely dwarfed by the negatives.

I would love it if there were no ads. Seems like a dream though. Has any government tried it? If so, what kind of sneaky ads posing as content emerged? "Native ads" posing as content already exist. At least it's easy to tell the difference when the ad is out in the open and marked clearly.

> I would love it if there were no ads.

So would I; they're disfiguring ugly.

So would you ban shop signs? What about a shop-sign that simply said "Cafe"? Or "Meals"? That would be the end of chain stores (which I would not regret).

I don't mind shop signs; I do mind posters all over the street-scene.

The Post Office delivers about 4X as much unaddressed junk advertising pizzas and estate agents than real mail, and I object to that. In this country (UK), anyone can stuff whatever junk they like in your mailbox; in the US, I believe only USPS can put anything in your mailbox. Are USPS allowed to deliver unaddressed pizza fliers?

The best argument in favour of advertising is that it makes it possible for a new entrant to a market to make an impression; without it, markets would always be dominated by incumbents, give or take the occasional surprise. I don't know how to capture that benefit, without ending up with the whole world covered in billboards.

We already regulate shop signs - compare e.g. streets in Asia vs. Europe. Completely different what is tolerated. Tolerating informative signage (e.g. non flashy signs telling you what shop you are looking at) is not incompatible with banning advertisements.

> The best argument in favour of advertising is that it makes it possible for a new entrant to a market to make an impression; without it, markets would always be dominated by incumbents, give or take the occasional surprise. I don't know how to capture that benefit, without ending up with the whole world covered in billboards.

I don't think that argument holds much water as ads require a big capital investment. The main reason new entrants need to advertise is because the incumbents are already advertising so you neeed to compete there just to get back the base level of engagement.

I think this new sort of AI-powered language model assistant search will be interesting once it trickles into end user control. Injecting ads requires the model output to be under central control where the they can inject ads. But when we get to the point that we can just automate our browsers to fetch 1000 pages and generate summaries locally, ads will be toast. There is a massive battle for control over generalized computing brewing because the ad networks need to force us to not build.

> drowning their software with ads

Where? I use Apple hardware basically exclusively. Are they that good in hiding the ads, or are you exaggerating a bit?

GP is exaggerating, but they definitely do seem to be increasing the number of ads in apps. Apple News (even the paid News+) has tons of ads, often after a single sentence in an article. In AppleTV+ (a service I love!) they’ve removed the image cards of shows in your up next queue on the “What to Watch” page and replaced them with a big auto-playing audio and video preview of one of their shows that’s not in your list. There’s no way to get the old functionality back. I’ve stopped using the app other than from the Home Screen where I have it set to show my “Up Next” queue. It’s really disgusting that they’re making these changes and it’s really turning me off of their services which I loved until recently.

off the top of my head:

- App Store (biggest offender)

- Apple News

- Stocks

This year they'll be rolling them out into Apple Maps as well.

Open the AppStore app and look how much ads are stuffed there.

While that's true, the questions was specifically about the claim they are "drowning their software with ads". Providing a single example doesn't really support that claim.

You can get ads for their services (mostly Music an Arcade) in iOS settings (and IIRC System Settings on MacOS), unsolicited push notifications from App Store etc.

Ostensibly it's so that the user can get more relevant ads.

In practice, it's not of course, but that's the answer you'd get if you ask them.

Of course that's the goal. The IAB isn't an NSA front. The problem with advertising is not the primary goal, but all the secondary things that can happen.

lokedhs said "ostensibly" because the internet advertising industry has long maintained the pretence that tracking users and showing them relevant ads is helpful to the user, when the truth is the advertising industry cares about the opinion of users like the thanksgiving industry cares about the opinion of turkeys - which is to say, not at all.

There's a reason these things are opt-out rather than opt-in.

The answer to marcus0x62's question - why would a person want advertisers to correlate their behavior - is that they wouldn't, and if they want to advocate for their own self-interest they should install an ad blocker.

> the truth is the advertising industry cares about the opinion of users like the thanksgiving industry cares about the opinion of turkeys

Nobody asks for the steak’s opinion when planning a BBQ.

If it's the goal, you'd expect ads to be actually be more relevant and useful to users.

They don't, which has been shown in studies. What has been shown is that showing the same things people already bought give people regret which increases total amount of purchases.

In other word, the goal is to not to give users a good experiences watching ad's. It is to make them buy more, which is an orthogonal goal.

Oh, I see what you mean. I guess it depends on whose definition of "relevant" you follow.

Let’s say you’re DHS. You contact some person and have a conversation like this

Govt: “I need IP addresses, ideally cellular and known public wifi, of a person using this email address”.

Data broker: “Here’s the list including the most recent cellular IP address associated with that person at this timestamp and their most used public wifi locations.”

Govt: “Hey, cellular provider, where is this subscriber right now?”

Provider: “Here’s the lat/long, last seen 1 second ago. Happy hunting!”

How does that contradict what the parent poster is saying? Even though ad-tech companies make tracking individuals easier, it doesn't change the fact that it's still largely funded by advertising itself, not through some shady government shell company.

I disagree: The main problem with advertising is with its primary goal, which is manipulting people into excess consumption. There are of course other secondary issues as well, but even without them ads are already a net negative for society.

Yeah; that's not benign. I don't want my behavior being "correlated" by a shady group of companies whose sole purpose is learning how to better manipulate me for their own profit.

I never claimed as such. From the comment you replied to:

>Sure, getting tracked isn't great, but it's not exactly the hypocrisy rage-bait that the OP is implying.

> if you want to correlate user behavior

That in and of itself is nefarious.

I suppose we should start using aliases then instead.

Ultimately they cannot win this fight.

They can’t win this fight against people like us, but for the rest of people it’s a mess.

>> What justifies "But it hates users tracking them."?

Users can tell which site gave away their email address by using the variants discussed. It's not tracking in the same sense, but it does allow tracking who respects privacy. It also allows throwing away junk mail where someone required an email address just to (for example) make a sale or use their wifi.

It was a quicker way of me writing "but hates users being able to track what their members are doing with user data".

The reason my email address for this site is `+ycombinator@...` is that I can track when dang decides to go rogue and sell my email to a Nigerian Prince.

Think of it like sousveillance.

Have you ever received any spam addressed to that account? I've signed up for countless services over the past decade, the only ones to ever spam me were university consulting groups back from the time I was applying to grad school.

Yes. I frequently find services which - either maliciously or through incompetence - allow my email to be used for 3rd party spam.

Even some big companies aren't immune to a dodgy contractor walking off with a contact list.

Let’s say you use a “plus” formatted email, I.e foo+github@gmail.com

Then when you receive spam/unsolicited marketing emails, you can see to which email the spam was sent, and therefore which company sold your data.

This suggests the only way to keep this behaviour is to have your own email hosted and use a truly different email per service.

They don't want us to be able to see which websites are creeps and collaborators building secret dossiers on us.

> What justifies "But it hates users tracking them."?

Nothing, I think, since there’s no indication the normalized email will be used to send email.

The normalization is for connecting together identities against the wish of the user, which is a different issue.

I suspect that part of the title is referring to the section that discusses using different email addresses for different services, so you can tell who sold your email address.

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