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Comment by tpoacher | Hacker News Reader

This isn't about bubbles or ignorance of the "Real World (TM)". I think this reading shows own biases about academia vs industry more than anything else.

They provide proof that fingerprinting is not only actively used, but also used effectively at that. That vendors claimed they could and would use this is still not proof, let alone gives any insight into its effectiveness or the magnitude of the problem. So this is useful work.

Especially since the extent to which it is effective in "benign" ads is also indicative of the extent to which it would be successful for tracking by other agencies.

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Why wouldn’t admitting doing something be proof, and what else would TRACKING PIXELS be used for?

It is clearly in these companies best interest to use these things for snooping on the world’s internet users.

Aren't the companies who say they're doing this actually selling these capabilities to others? So it's in their interest to pretend to be able to do more / better than what they actually can do. Especially when the clients have little capability to verify what actually happens. So no, their saying "we can do it" doesn't actually mean that they can.

As a user who doesn't have a horse in this race (I work for a "captive clients" company, so ads don't help much, nor do we sell any ads), what I notice is that ads I'm served are absolutely absurd. It's either Google Maps trying to sell me some hotel 50 meters from my home (I live alone, so I fail to see any reason why I'd go for that), or Instagram which somehow figured I'd be interested in buying bras for pregnant women (I'm a male, and I'm single).

More recently, Instagram tries to sell me Range Rovers. Where I live, there's a tax on "heavy vehicles", traffic is absolutely crazy, and we have usable public transit (which I use – while scrolling Instagram). Buying a big-ass car wouldn't help me in any conceivable way, and would be an all-round nuisance.

What leaves me flabbergasted, is that my only interactions with Instagram are around photography. I only follow photographers, who shoot landscapes and similar, I always leave the app when I'm presented with naked girls or other "reels'. So I could maybe, possibly, be convinced to buy some new camera or photo gear. Guess what I never see advertised on Instagram?

This is where gambling and vaping come in…

As a viewer of ridiculous ad placements, and as a frustrated buyer of online ads, I continue to conclude That adtech Is largely snake oil. In fact, I encourage you to look into the well-founded claims and research which call into question the very activity of marketing as a whole.

So then:

What to do with this massive infrastructure and billions of dollars of investment and workers employed by this global machine?

This is where gambling and vaping come in.

> As a viewer of ridiculous ad placements, and as a frustrated buyer of online ads, I continue to conclude That adtech Is largely snake oil. In fact, I encourage you to look into the well-founded claims and research which call into question the very activity of marketing as a whole.

At least from my own anecdotal observations (including conversations with confused less technical friends and relatives started by questions like "how does this website know enough about me to show me that ad?"), the issue to me seems less that ad tech doesn't ever produce relevant ads, but that in practice very few people actually click ads, much less buy things from the destination, regardless of whether the ads are relevant or not. If anything, seeing a well-targeted ad often makes people feel creeped out, and their reaction isn't to go "oooh yes, that's perfect for me, let me click it", but to immediately close the browser tab and maybe even avoid the website that showed it to them in the future (because it's not obvious to a lay user that the ads are usually sourced from another party rather than the website itself). Slightly more tech-savvy users might even be aware of how ads are sometimes a vector for malware and avoid clicking them because the risk of getting something nasty isn't worth the probably quite low reward of buying something they could probably find just as easily on their own by actively looking. In practice, I have to wonder if it even matters whether adtech is effective at targeting or not, because I'm skeptical that the way people interact with ads ever would generate enough revenue to be worth it.

Disclosure is not proof, especially when they have something to sell you.

You're coming at it from this type of tracking being an accusation of bad behaviour and the company having to admit it, like they have to admit a security breach losing personal data.

That's a reasonable approach. It's also incorrect. These companies think tracking users is a great thing. They aren't admitting it, they are boasting about it.

Tracking pixels aren't for fingerprinting, they're just regular tracking. You can block them fairly easily (just block the 3rd party request to the known tracker). Fingerprinting is a lot more difficult to detect and prevent. Companies claiming they reserve the right to do it is a good reason to take precautions, but without insight into what is actually being done, that's hard to effectively do (without resorting to blocking all possible vectors, like Tor Browser).

There have been source code leaks from major websites which clearly show fingerprinting tools being used.

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