user17843

It's more like a mixture of context and client-targeting (referer for example)

I don't work in the field. I think part of the reason why my perspective diverges from yours is probably that your profession is extremely intransparent about what actually happens behind the curtain. Obviously people will speculate and err on the side of caution.

I should probably clarify that I did not mean to say that it doesn't work. What I meant is that it doesn't really work out for the publishers. The parties who profit are just first and foremost the platforms, then come the advertisers, and the publishers come last.

That explains the 1 trillion market cap. And also why Criteo didn't lose money after Apple blocked them from following their users.

I wonder if you can provide me to a study about the difference between Apple/Safari users and Google/Chrome users when it comes to advertising effectiveness, because since Safari users can not be tracked, that means according to your statement the revenue from Safari users would be way less.

because I never see any ads :P

20-30 percent of people use ad-blockers, and I think I already know the demographics compared to the exposed population.

But for a serious argument, I refer to the studies on delayed gratification and the association with education and upbringing.

there are state-sponsered media like BBC, etc.

Probably.

I think it's a downward spiral, it only works because each player is forced to play along due to fundamentals of game theory.

So what we are seeing is that the methods become more ruthless every day, but everyone needs to conform, and it's a race to the bottom.

The end result is spending-fatigue and numbness in response to normal ads that are not hyper-addictive.

I also think it does not really pay off for publishers. It only really pays off for the middle men and those players who sell unethical products aimed at manipulation.

All of this money and effort to create something that has never scientifically been proven to work: Super-targeted ads, instead of contextual ads.

The context is already there. Each article on a newspaper already provides the context.

What is the true purpose of this? The true purpose is psychological control and manipulation, as well as making additional money with the data beyond ads.

Psychological manipulation gives the ability to actually create demand. And this is what this is about, because that's the only way to actually increase revenue in a meaningful way.

If you can target a person everywhere on all channels, and all the time, you can do things that are not possible with simple contextual ads, and the profiles that are being created are for lots of different purposes, not for ads.

I wait for the day some newspaper actually does an in-depth investigative study into the level of manipulation that drives sales in ad-tech, because I suspect that the entire system feeds off low-educated and poor people, for example lower-class stressed-out people who struggle to lose weight and are prone to manipulative ads. This is the target audience that you can manipulate into spending 500$ instead of 50$.

Should be easy to avoid with simply using another cookie jar or blocking third-party cookies. It seems the direct connection can only be made when a user is logged into a facebook or google profile. Otherwise the data can not be connected to a personal account without some degree of uncertainty and illegality.

G and F could use other data, like the browser fingerprint, OS information and the IP address to associate the data, which may be illegal, at least in Europe. Thus they probably use some other technique, for example creating pseudonymous shadow profiles and associating them based on similarity. In their front-end the data would just show clusters of profiles, which means they can claim they do not collect personal data, but from a quick glance it would be obvious to see connections between a user and "anonymous" clusters, if the similarity borders on 100%.

Thus a good practice would be to use a different Operating system and browser, together with the usual protective measures.

The functionality is part of every decent password manager, which takes care of basically all your passwords, not the ones stored in your browser. So I don't understand the enthusiasm.

There is "sexism" on both sides. Powerful women use it against powerless men, and vice versa.

Ignoring one aspect over the other won't lead to lasting solutions. Since more men are leaders than women (men are naturally inclined to be leaders), the percentage of men enriching themselves at the expense of women is accordingly.

Google Protest has also been going on for many things that aren't related to gender, for example AI and their China project.

It doesn't sound like scraping. What they do is they fetch the prices for their own products when the users browses a competitor. The prices of their competitors' products are already in the open, they won't need them. What they need is the browsing history of their customers in order for whaterver they want to better understand about the shopping process.

> More like software companies whose installers 'helpfully' install their browser extension behind the users back.

When there's a will, there is a way...