This seems like this is written by an advertiser who wants their profits, but pretending to care about privacy so they get users' support.
Here is a more honest summary:
"This proposal hurts us, small advertisement networks and professional marketers. Reject it, or we will ramp up the tracking to compensate for the lost opportunities!"
>Problem one: Over-rating search, social, and app store ads
Isn't this a problem with today's ad attribution system? The author doesn't try to argue how the new system makes it worse.
>Problem two: Incentives for extra tracking
Same as above. It sounds like he's against attribution in general, which is an okay position to have, but I'd rather he say this upfront and more directly rather than spending 1k+ words on what essentially can be boiled down to "I hate Attribution Level 1 because it's attribution, and attribution is bad in general", and implying the issues he has are issues with Attribution Level 1 specifically.
Agreed, this can't be worse than what it's replacing. Still, the author has some interesting points I hadn't considered before.
I guess from the advertiser's perspective this standard could be a concern, because the loss of cookie-based tracking might make it harder for them to develop alternative attribution tracking methods that don't have the same data quality problems.
> Agreed, this can't be worse than what it's replacing.
The mistake is assuming this replaces anything instead of becoming just one more piece of the tracking puzzle.
Even if it did "replace" cookies or whatever, it's strictly worse than "before" because it's giving advertising a front seat in the browser. My browser should be doing precisely nothing to help you attribute your ad impressions or whatever. But now Mozilla et al have to waste their time maintaining and augmenting this opaque piece of mathematical faff.
This is a debate I've seen many times now on HN. I sympathize with what you're saying, but the flip side is that many users seem to prefer a free ad-supported funding model over a paid, ad-free model. If a site is going to be serving me ads anyway, then all else being equal I'd rather them make as much money off each impression as possible to incentivize them to keep providing me with free services. The privacy and resource cost of a user's browser sending anonymized attribution statistics is very minimal.
So they “reinvented” HTTP cookies but with only advertisers?
> Technically, the way it works is that a script running on a site with ads asks the browser to record an ad impression. Then the browser keeps a record of ads seen from all the sites you visit. Later, when you buy something, the retail site can ask the browser to generate a “conversion report” that can be passed to a centralized aggregation service.
Sort of. Cookies track you as an individual with a unique identifier. The conversion report only tracks anonymized aggregate statistics that can't be used to identify you as an individual.
This seems like this is written by an advertiser who wants their profits, but pretending to care about privacy so they get users' support.
Here is a more honest summary:
"This proposal hurts us, small advertisement networks and professional marketers. Reject it, or we will ramp up the tracking to compensate for the lost opportunities!"
I'm not sure what this blog is complaining about.
>Problem one: Over-rating search, social, and app store ads
Isn't this a problem with today's ad attribution system? The author doesn't try to argue how the new system makes it worse.
>Problem two: Incentives for extra tracking
Same as above. It sounds like he's against attribution in general, which is an okay position to have, but I'd rather he say this upfront and more directly rather than spending 1k+ words on what essentially can be boiled down to "I hate Attribution Level 1 because it's attribution, and attribution is bad in general", and implying the issues he has are issues with Attribution Level 1 specifically.
Agreed, this can't be worse than what it's replacing. Still, the author has some interesting points I hadn't considered before.
I guess from the advertiser's perspective this standard could be a concern, because the loss of cookie-based tracking might make it harder for them to develop alternative attribution tracking methods that don't have the same data quality problems.
> Agreed, this can't be worse than what it's replacing.
The mistake is assuming this replaces anything instead of becoming just one more piece of the tracking puzzle.
Even if it did "replace" cookies or whatever, it's strictly worse than "before" because it's giving advertising a front seat in the browser. My browser should be doing precisely nothing to help you attribute your ad impressions or whatever. But now Mozilla et al have to waste their time maintaining and augmenting this opaque piece of mathematical faff.
This is a debate I've seen many times now on HN. I sympathize with what you're saying, but the flip side is that many users seem to prefer a free ad-supported funding model over a paid, ad-free model. If a site is going to be serving me ads anyway, then all else being equal I'd rather them make as much money off each impression as possible to incentivize them to keep providing me with free services. The privacy and resource cost of a user's browser sending anonymized attribution statistics is very minimal.
Do you want to click through and spend money on the ads?
If not you aren't really working towards them paying a lot for ads, right?
> Agreed, this can't be worse than what it's replacing.
Why can't it?
Because as GP alluded to, the thing it's replacing (cookies) already does exactly the same thing but isn't anonymized.
> When Meta, Google and Apple [and Mozilla] agree on a “privacy” feature, watch out.
?
This feels like a good sign, to me. I get far more worried when I see the likes of Meta, Google, Spotify, Epic etc team up.
And you think that they team up for your benefit?
[delayed]
So they “reinvented” HTTP cookies but with only advertisers?
> Technically, the way it works is that a script running on a site with ads asks the browser to record an ad impression. Then the browser keeps a record of ads seen from all the sites you visit. Later, when you buy something, the retail site can ask the browser to generate a “conversion report” that can be passed to a centralized aggregation service.
Sort of. Cookies track you as an individual with a unique identifier. The conversion report only tracks anonymized aggregate statistics that can't be used to identify you as an individual.
More importantly it's privacy preserving because it doesn't allow for bidirectional communication, which third party cookies could do.