[HN Gopher] WTF Is Server-Side Conversion Tracking
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       WTF Is Server-Side Conversion Tracking
        
       Author : marketingtech
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2021-08-25 20:04 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (digiday.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (digiday.com)
        
       | edoceo wrote:
       | Oh, I remember this, from like 2000 (in CGI/Perl). Did it this
       | way for ages then there was this ground-breaking company for ads
       | called "DoubleClick" (I think) that did it all with cookies and
       | js. Wonder whatever happened to them.
        
         | DaiPlusPlus wrote:
         | DoubleClick became the world's largest web ad broker and was
         | bought by Google to shore-up their own AdSense + AdWords
         | business.
         | 
         | Due to cross-site "third-party" cookies being disabled in
         | modern web-browsers and the HTTP Referer [sic] header being
         | unofficially deprecated the only way for websites and ads to
         | work together is by either IP address tracking or visitor
         | fingerprinting.
         | 
         | IPv4 address tracking is a blunt instrument that is next to
         | useless when visitors are using ISPs with CG-NAT. But IPv6
         | makes every device addressable - and thus - followable. I
         | imagine that eventually CPE (home internet modem and router)
         | will offer some kind of IPv6 address randomisation system on a
         | per-TCP-connection basis, though they'd all share the same
         | 64-bit prefix (I think?) so it doesn't mitigate per-residence
         | tracking.
         | 
         | (EDIT: Ah, so IPv6 does have privacy protection by rotating
         | autoconfigured addresses on a regular basis:
         | https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2014/12/ipv6-privacy-ad...
         | )
         | 
         | ---------
         | 
         | I do believe the end of third-party cookies is going to make
         | internet advertising significantly less profitable and more and
         | more ad-funded sites will either add paywalls or shut-down.
         | 
         | I'm surprised Google went this way, actually - I'd have thought
         | a less-harmful way of protecting users' privacy with balancing
         | the need for attribution in advertising could be accomplished
         | by, for example, auto-nuking cross-domain cookies after
         | 24-hours.
        
       | extr wrote:
       | I don't know how this shit works. But earlier this month I was
       | showing my girlfriend a Halloween costume I googled on my phone.
       | I visited the website for maybe 10 seconds, I did not log in or
       | create an account. A few days later I got an email from PayPal
       | offering me a $5 coupon for that website. WTFFFF. It made me want
       | to go full-nuclear on the privacy front.
        
         | nerdponx wrote:
         | Companies give Google and friends free unfettered access to
         | your highly specific usage data that can be used to uniquely
         | identify you, all without your consent or knowledge, and no way
         | to opt out. In exchange, said companies get metrics on how well
         | their ads are doing.
         | 
         | It's ingenious. The incentives are set up entirely against you.
         | The people who know and care the least about privacy decide
         | what to do with your data, and they are enticed to hand it over
         | by the promise of tracking ad spend, i.e. the promise of making
         | their jobs easier and of making their success quantifiable.
        
         | mgraczyk wrote:
         | Serious question, why is this bad? As far as email
         | advertisements go, is this worse than untargeted Viagra and
         | porn?
         | 
         | fyi I work at Google but not on Ads.
        
           | firecall wrote:
           | Well, even if we cant describe why it is 'bad', we can
           | observe that it is a form of anti-social behaviour by these
           | companies.
           | 
           | People don't like it - people don't like that form of
           | targeting. It may not be clear why they have issues with it,
           | but they do.
           | 
           | At my kids school, if someone is repeatedly doing something
           | to you that you don't like, then it is classed as a form of
           | bullying.
        
         | Fordec wrote:
         | 10 seconds is plenty of time to record IP addresses, do pixel
         | tracking etc. Combine with data from a data broker and you
         | probably have contact detail attribution.
         | 
         | heck, the payment processor plugin probably on that costume's
         | site that's all they needed considering the email came from
         | Paypal, which I assume you have an account with. an IP address
         | lookup table internal to Paypal would do it alone.
        
       | phibz wrote:
       | This is nothing new. We were sharing impression data with client
       | partners from the server side years ago.
        
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       (page generated 2021-08-25 23:01 UTC)