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Comment by zpeti | Hacker News Reader

Come on, this is such a ridiculous take. Adding google adsense to a website needs a cookie bar.

That’t not "doing sketchy shit with people's data"

I can’t believe how many people have bought into this EU regulation hook line and sinker. It’s ridiculous, imagine the man hours that have been wasted in the last 7 years just clicking cookie bars. And as OP says, it’s completely unrealistic to not have them.

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Using anything Google on your website without asking for consent before loading it from Google, is in my definition quite sketchy. It may be either uninformed, no conscience, or not properly thinking about the ethics of ones choices, or whatever, but it is definitely not right and not ethical to do so. I am quite happy with regulations coming down on people and especially businesses, who continue to do this.

Many websites that you rely on would not be around if it wasn’t for Google ads.

You think it’s some sort of choice you have between being tracked or not, but it’s not, it’s between having a fairly decentralised internet or not.

And unfortunately with recent google SEO changes almost all small blogs at this point have been wiped out. Googles own properties, Reddit and Quora, and large websites like NYT and CNET are the only websites left in search rankings.

Do you mean a generalized "you", as in general Internet using population, or do you mean me in particular? If the later, I would ask, how you know what websites I personally rely on and perhaps state, which sites you think those are. I am quite far from the norm in that aspect, but maybe there is something I can further cut away.

Of course this is "doing sketchy shit with people's data".

Selling my personal info to external companies so that they can manipulate me easier is sketchy in my eyes if I don't consent

“ Selling my personal info to external companies”

What? What are you even talking about? Google does not sell your personal info. You’re delusional

if a company is making more money by using google adsense, which tracks me across the internet, it has sold my data to google

You attributed a medical diagnose to me for saying something that is possibly uninformed. That makes me not ever want to have a conversation with you again. Just food for thought...

Turns out you were the uninformed one. From the context through parent posts you can clearly see this was about a website using google adsense and by that, the company sells my info to an external (google) which then tries to take advantage of me to extract money from me.

That is what I am talking about and I think this was clear from the previous posts. I think you owe me an apology

“ Turns out you were the uninformed one. From the context through parent posts you can clearly see this was about a website using google adsense and by that, the company sells my info to an external (google) which then tries to take advantage of me to extract money from me.”

This is not how it works. You might not be medically delusional but you are saying things that are not true.

Which part is not true and why do you think so?

I don't see people advocating for cookie banners; I see them advocating for stopping the tracking.

> That’t not "doing sketchy shit with people's data"

Of course it is. If you add AdSense to your website you are letting Google track your users in exchange for a cut of the profits. Of course you should have to warn your users that they are being tracked at the very least.

That is absolutely “doing sketchy shit with people’s data”.

So you need to tell people you are doing that, so they can consent.

Using Google adsense absolutely meets the bar for doing sketchy shit with people's data.

Google Adsense is doing sketchy shit with peoples data.

Indeed. Just because it is widespread doesn't make it okay. We should not allow greedy companies to set the Overton Window of acceptability.

Advertising is “ground zero” for the cookie explosion because nobody trusts anybody in the advertising biz.

For instance the website selling ads has every reason to inflate view and click count numbers, the ad buyer has reasons to diminish those numbers. In fact if you measure an honest pipeline it is going to look that way because some people drop out at each stage.

One reason you have 87 trackers on a typical web site is that many sites and advertisers figure if they have a large number of trackers they can’t all be wrong.

Site X could show ads to users just fine without third-party cookies but then advertisers would not be so sure about the stats.

Sure, but is that situation worse than other traditional forms of advertising? Are we just saying that the advertising industry is so greedy that they want so much more of the pie than they used to have, that we should enable them?

> Site X could show ads to users just fine without third-party cookies but then advertisers would not be so sure about the stats.

Feels like 99% of people would prefer this. Maybe advertising becomes less effective, but it may actually become more effective if it leads to more ads being visible since they are no longer ad-blocked.

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