[sysmuird]

I’m in adtech and we manage to do ads in a completely user respecting way within the retail space. We monetize on search traffic without user data, cookies, local storage. The only browser feature we leverage are click events and img tags.

Though I appreciate your frustration, your aggression is a little off target. :)

[user3939382]

> The only browser feature we leverage are click events

Do the users want their click events fed into an advertising engine? Did you ask them? If you made this opt-in, how many would say, yes, please track my clicks in order to advertise to me? Even if its anonymized/aggregated.

A huge amount of advertising is enabled by tracking users against their will, exploiting the fact that many users aren't aware of what's going on, don't know how to stop it, or aren't as invested in their preference as the adtech companies are in their revenue. "A man is always right in his own eyes". If you're smart it's easy to justify this stuff to yourself because you're getting paid, but that doesn't make it right.

[sysmuird]

I should have known my comment would only make you more aggressive. Walked into that I guess.

You are right in that a huge amount of ads leverage user data at the expense of the user.

The point I’m trying to make is that not all involved in the advertising technology are exploitive. We do zero ad targeting based on user data. You make a search for specific products, we take the response and shuffle the order a bit based on vendor campaigns. That’s it. Nothing is associated or even collected from the user. It’s all system metrics.

The greatest harm that my team does is hurting optimized relevancy, which is inherit to advertising but also something we work hard to alleviate.

That misused proverbs quote is a nice touch. Shows a lot of self awareness.

[JohnFen]

> The point I’m trying to make is that not all involved in the advertising technology are exploitive.

I don't doubt that you're being truthful here. The problem is that the vast majority of adtech is extremely exploitive, and there is no way for a user to tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys". So all adtech must be treated as hostile.

[matyasrichter]

I'm sorry if this hurts your beliefs, but in what way are aggregated and anonymized data exploitative? Every "offline" store does it. How do you expect businesses to make profits if they can't look at what drives their revenue without bothering every single customer with consent requests?

[trasz]

Data claimed to by anonymized usually can be easily deanonymized.

[account42]

> I’m in adtech and we manage to do ads in a completely user respecting way within the retail space.

Ads by definition try to influence the user to do things they would not have don on their own. They cannot ever be user respecting.

[JohnFen]

Good point. I'm pretty sure he meant "privacy respecting" when he said "user respecting".

[unconed]

A completely user respecting way is no ads. Try again.