1. Sanctioning bad actors: Placing wide ranging economic sanctions on bad actors is a potent tool but it can backfire. U.S can penalize any company that does business with sanctioned individuals. In the case of China, applying sanctions on party members would make it virtually impossible for them to transfer their wealth overseas via global banks, property markets, investment vehicles, etc. This ratchets up the pressure on the Chinese government as it immediately and adversely affects the interests of China’s powerful elite. The downside of this approach is that China is likely to retaliate against U.S. economic interests within China. It’s a large market coveted by many U.S. companies, so there is likely to be political blowback, which makes this unlikely to happen.

2. Diplomatic pressure to isolate China: China cares deeply about how it’s perceived on the world stage. We rarely hear strong international condemnation of China’s social, political or economic policies. This is partly due to the China’s success in using their economic power to strengthen their global standing. Much has been written about China’s debt diplomacy, for example. China now plays an outsized role in organizations like the WHO and various UN bodies. It’s even a member of the UN human rights council. The U.S. on the other hand has been withdrawing from these bodies, effectively ceding the stage to China. The U.S could apply pressure on China by once again assuming its leadership position within these bodies, and working with allies to counter Chinese influence and condemn China’s internal and external policies. China has no effective response to this tactic and it’s therefore one that they are particularly concerned about IMO.

3. Stronger military and economic alliances with Taiwan, India, Japan and Australia would create a counter balance to rising Chinese dominance in the region.

4. The U.S can also take steps to prevent knowledge transfer to China by limiting foreign student intake, or preventing research collaboration with Chinese universities.

It's not like cookie based targeting is very effective either. It's very difficult to get cookie based ad targeting right – you have to make significant investments into product, technical integrations and data buys. Given the fact that the cookies to which you are tying these investments can vanish at any time (and a large % do so regularly), it rarely makes business sense to make the right sort of investments. Instead most companies do the bare minimum and try to make a guess that is slightly better than a coin flip. I actually remember seeing a deck from a data company boasting how their gender data was ~ 60% accurate.

Why are we worried about this? Contextual targeting is far more effective. As an example, targeting an ad on Elle.com is more than 60% likely to reach women than an ad targeted based on cookie data.

Genuinely curious so would appreciate calm, non-aggressive responses. I'm wondering whether this is due to a generally poor understanding of cookie targeting effectiveness or if I'm missing something.

All of today's ad-tech is set up and developed for that purpose. Whether overtly or covertly, it is the singular purpose, because the case is so clear cut: We are distributing the share of the pie between companies and consumers.

It is therefore clear why people aware of basic economics consider agressive tracking and privacy violations hostile, because they ultimately are or will be.

I am not worried about actually showing ads that are personalized in some way. But as others have pointed out, cookies are not for that. You can target based on the site's content and you are probably showing me a much more relevant ad anyway.

I am worried that every offsite ressource and every ad is used to track me across hundreds or thousands of shady services that operate under zero regulation or control, the combination of which allows market actors to determine how much of my consumer surplus they can extract in every sense, and thus actively devaluing the internet for me, in excess of what happens in the real world!

And the responses of the ad industry lobby groups pretty much prove to me what they think about choice and what they expect to get from consumers.

At this stage, it is entirely rational and ethical to consider the entire ad industry as hostile. As a group, with all side-effects, the notion of just "showing an interesting ad" simply does not exist anymore. At least for the collective industry. Any effort you took to track users, no matter how noble, will ultimately be hostile to me in the future.

That's not entirely true though. Better ad targeting increases the "size of the pie" by increasing the chances that a consumer will find something that's useful to them.

>At this stage, it is entirely rational and ethical to consider the entire ad industry as hostile.

At that point, why not consider the entire software industry as hostile? They're the ones that enable this, so clearly they are also the devil. Life is not this black and white. Ads do serve a useful purpose, to which degree cookie based ads do that, I'm unsure, but it would be very difficult to start a business without any kind of advertisement.

Most ads people see are not for novel products solving problems. The ads are just fighting for brand recognition and space in peoples brains. This parasitic and wasteful industry is squandering some of the brightest minds of several generations to dare. Ad cos are also wasting untold billions of dollars suffocating development of infrastructure and industries that increase quality of life.

The house of cards needs to come down.

That would only be possible if the online stores could perfectly discriminate users based on price. Which happens to some extent (booking flights is a popular example) but is difficult to pull off and also illegal in most countries. You are not allowed to make personal discounts for each customer for example. Better and stricter legislation to prevent these kinds of personalized discounts would be pretty straightforward to implement if it were a major concern.

It is a major concern. It is used in booking sites, and it will be used in other sites. We can not rely on regulation.

My point stands: User targeting is a threat and we, the users, are entirely justified in not liking it.

It is surprising. Couldn't find anything about it in a quick search. It would also make flea markets illegal, wouldn't it?

I think that some forms of price discrimination are forbidden (but still practiced). Women pay no entrace in clubs, young students pay less etc.

Beyond the legality of the issue, the point remains: Here, companies and consumers are strategically at odds.

Should I pay 1.2x, 3x or 100x as much today, just because you know I desperately need the product/service today vs. yesterday?

What happens when I get (wrongly) classified as rich and now can't afford a normal life?

Should medication cost <som of your savings> if it is for life threatening issues? Should basic necessities cost more because my house burned down/got robbed/lost my luggage/whatever and you know I have money?

I'm not saying that I buy this line of reasoning, but there's the counter-argument.

I was arguing against people based discrimination, without any meaningful relevance on availability. Again, I think reasonable and reasonably qualified discounts are ok, but not increasing prices for the same product and service.

Aside from that, "charging the highest price the customer is still ok with" means to eliminate the consumer surplus. Which is bad for consumers, i.e. everyone.

And aren't prices supposed to be signals? How are customers supposed to compare the costs of each good if you don't tell them? All you tell them is how much they're willing to spend.

They already know that. But you (probably) don't. If you did, congratulations: you've solved the economic calculation problem. This should raise red flags.

I highly doubt that they would actually decrease the price. They maybe wouldnt increase it, but unlike the bargaining on a fair, the seller can not see that the prospective buyer is really struggling to make ends meet, and sell it at a loss to help them out.

I'm interested how this works. Car dealerships do this all the time in person. I wonder why they can do it, but websites can't.

My browser history is none of your business. That’s it.

I don’t take care if violating my privacy by stealing my browser history is less effective than the newest way of violating my privacy.

Doesn’t make it any better.

You're right that this is just how browsers and websites and the internet as a whole works, but what tech workers and tech companies are just recently discovering is that people don't actually like or trust how it works and aren't always willing to accept it. In Apple's case they can leverage that distrust to market their products.

[1] Today facial recognition and phone tracking means that you are 'sharing' that data with tracking companies, obviously.

You can literally buy that data. Either by targeting credit card transactions of people who shopped at a walmart via a broker or you can get more direct data (albeit probably more limited) from them directly here: https://www.walmartmedia.com.

Isn't that exactly what membership cards for stores are for? Isn't credit card data also sold in a similar way? I find the credit card one to be a much bigger problem.

That is not informed consent.

What you were doing was exploiting people by going beyond the scope of their knowledge of the world and rationalizing it by working backwards from "well, they must understand what's going on" to "they must like it or get something out of it."

Problem is that's not true.

The reality is, even today barely any of them likely have the faintest clue what you did to them.

If they knew they would likely be far less than thrilled.

~ another ex-adtech worker

Tell that to the likes of Amazon and Ebay. Their cookie-based advertising is extremely effective. They not only get to advertise things at you that they already know you like, they also learn about other things you like by knowing what websites and content you're viewing.

Why are we worried about this? Because megacorps learning everything about us isn't desirable. It only serves to intensify the advantage they have over individual sellers, and in doing so, lessening competition over many layers of business (all the way from manufacture to delivery).

I'll agree these things apply much less at smaller scale, but that's also why this is so important. Handing the biggest marketing advantage to the biggest players isn't good for anybody but them.

But these companies are few and far between. Most ad tech companies have nowhere near this quality of data or access to users.

if they do that it's very, very subtle. I get mostly product that I bought, with a handful of product that I saw recently, and zero original suggestions, even if I'm open to impulse buy, I am driven by new impulses, showing me something I haven't bought once is not going to tip me over as that decision was already rationalized.

In the adverts they show you what is most likely to convert today. Stuff you've been looking at recently. But every adview is another blob of data to profile you with for future recommendations.

We talk about Facebook knowing too much about us but they really only have a social handle on us. Amazon knows where we live, what we buy, how much money we have, when we're going on holiday, when we're pregnant, how many children we have, what pets we have, what cars we drive, what we like to watch, what we like to listen to, when we're home.

Every new B2C service they launch is another intrusion. Advertising is just one ring in a long chain. It gives them reach over everything you view online.

Probably this. Adtech (ironically) do not advertise what they do. Most people read and think that e.g. google literally sells personal files on themselves.

Third party cookies should've never existed.

> I fail to understand the fuss about cookie based targeting

...because he...

> worked in ad tech for half a decade,

To continue

> It's not like cookie based targeting is very effective either

Then why's it being done? Because it doesn't work, or because it does?

> Instead most companies do the bare minimum and try to make a guess that is slightly better than a coin flip

Uh huh. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising

"In 2016, Internet advertising revenues in the United States surpassed those of cable television and broadcast television. In 2017, Internet advertising revenues in the United States totaled $83.0 billion, a 14% increase over the $72.50 billion in revenues in 2016"

That's the bare minimum. Right.

As to your question on why it's being done if it isn't effective, I believe there are two reasons for it:

1. A vast % of digital ad spend goes to a few companies that have personally identifiable information and very effective tracking. Google, FB. I did point of this exception in my comment. Frankly, these companies don't need to target you to be effective. They gather their richest data from your usage on their service.

2. As for the rest of ad tech: Media buyers at agencies tend to be fresh out of college grads. They don't fully grasp the capabilities/limitations of ad tech products, targeting effectiveness, etc. Agencies want to spend their digital budgets and not exclusively on FB, Google. They want to show that they're diversifying, innovating, etc. This IMO is how the rest of ad tech stays afloat.

That's not addressing the argument. Advertising follows eyeballs, so naturally it went online. There is no evidence that its effectiveness has increased however, despite all the claims about high ad tech.

If you're right, those who commission ads are idiots because they aren't doing the most basic cost/benefit analysis.

And this in an area where doing so is very easy (don't run the ad then do run the ad, then see the immediate and longer-term difference).

Also, from the same wiki link I gave

"The EU limitations restrict targeting by online advertisers; researchers have estimated online advertising effectiveness decreases on average by around 65% in Europe relative to the rest of the world."

Further, by "There is no evidence that its effectiveness has increased" are you saying no studies have been done, or studies have been done but show no such evidence? In the latter case please post a few links, thanks.

i should clarify i meant the effectiveness of ads overall, not just targetting. there is no doubt that online ads work, and that tracking ads perform better than display ads. However despite the shift to online ads, advertising spending overall is similar and it doesnt seem to have increased consumption. So i dont understand if the rise in online ad spending means anything (imho it's purely because online audience is bigger now).

What matters to ad campaigns is lift and not accuracy. What about conversion attribution? Don’t you need cookies for Amazon/etc to figure out what website led you to a purchase?

What the article lacks is a breakdown of who the ad buyers are. In particular, there’s probably a big difference between today’s Facebook vs display ad buyers (especially vs 5 years ago).

But there is so much more available today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evercookie

Contextual targeting is a bigg problem, and the fix will require a fundamental change. It is almost impossible to use technology to prevent contextual targeting in areas like email service and social media as long as the data is in clear text and available to the server. The current best bet is to use laws like GDPR but it is slow and not something a browser can dictate with a software update.

If I am on a tech site reading about disk drive failure rates, feed me an ad about an SSD sale. If I am reading about mountain climbing, show me ads about climbing equipment. Fine. But don't start following me around the web with adds about ascenders for the rest of the afternoon. Or travel insurance. Or ... It is none of your business what I browsed half an hour earlier.

Thank goodness at least one business (Apple) has enough customer focus left to try to address some of this nonsense. All the better that it helps them against some of their competitors. That just makes them more motivated. Bully for that. At least we are still the customers rather than the products with Apple.

I read a dispassionate rebuttal of your point. Calling the reply "too emotional" is not an okay tactic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm not sure there is any stronger interpretation available here. You're baselessly speculating on gp's emotional state. That is the opposite of "assume good faith."

I actually agree with your point. I was just asking the question because I was genuinely curious whether there was technically a way to do so w/o cookie targeting. I have no interest in doing such targeting. I was interested in whether a HNer had a creative workaround.

There is still fingerprinting. If you take that away also then it gets trickier and fuzzier. But hey, if I can recognize you by the way how you walk then it should be even easier to do so by the way how you move the cursor or how you scroll. Or the time you usually visit my website. IP-address? Ping-times, animation delays.. And if somebody pays me good money I will find even more opportunities :-P

> What if I want to target women who recently bought Chanel perfume? How would I go about doing that unless I do video surveillance and face-recognition targeting?

Suppose a woman walked into a dress shop, and the clerk said, "We find that our $LINE line of dresses over there works really well with the Chanel perfume you just bought."

Do I have to explain why 1) people think it's creepy, and 2) why people think you don't have a right to do that?

Fortunately, at least in the EU that's illegal.

> It's awesome until your private key gets stolen and suddenly a hacker in Russia owns your house.

I like the legal system. The transactions I'm involved with are already cheap and the non-cheap transactions aren't made cheaper with the blockchain.

Given that a small number of companies are responsible for a large proportion of brand advertising spend, I would posit that it isn't too difficult to scale quality control if you focus on building relationships exclusively with heavy spenders. Quality control becomes a bottleneck at the long tail end of the market, where ad budget per creative is much smaller. At the top end, you can behave like a TV channel and reuse established quality control practices. If you have 100m+ active users and a video-heavy medium, this shouldn't be impossible to accomplish.

That said, I have heard several reports about Snapchat's eagerness to build programmatic ad expertise, which (in the context of this discussion) may pointing to one of the following possibilities:

1. Large brands are not exhibiting TV-style buying behaviour (i.e. large upfront buys) on Snapchat. This would make sense as it mirrors trends in the rest of the industry. If you, as the buyer, have access to technology that lets you better control and manage your spend, gather intelligence, and understand ROI, then why wouldn't you? This is the buying mechanism that programmatic technology enables, and its more or less incompatible with TV-style upfront buys.

2. Snapchat wants to open their doors to mid-market and long tail advertisers. The goal might be to boost spending, drive up prices, or to go after performance advertising dollars. If I were a Snapchat investor, I'd find this second scenario slightly worrying, as quality control becomes very very difficult.

How do you see their recent policy updates[1] in this context?

[1] http://marketingland.com/snapchat-changed-terms-service-priv...

It might be that they want to pass this ID into programmatic platforms. Some systems treat them as pseudo-cookies for frequency capping, measurement, and basic targeting.

But consider any highly complex communication task. For instance, say you have to explain how recursion works. You have to go through abstract thinking, analogising, structuring, word selection, and delivery. It's hard work, and unless your execution is spot on, vital information maybe lost in transmission. Importantly, your thoughts here may not be a linear vocalised stream, and the process may not take very long.

It seems that tasks like these would benefit from some form of information exchange mechanism that doesn't rely on information being encoded in present day language. It would be most efficient to somehow "compress" your thought process around recursion as you're thinking about it, and then have the receiver unzip it on reception.