[Barraketh]

So one issue that this article glosses over is how contextual advertising interacts with attribution.

Essentially, as an advertiser, in order to do effective contextual advertisement, you need to have some idea of how ads perform in a particular context - on a particular web page or app. So what you would really like to say is that "people who saw our ad on X were Y% more likely to visit or website, or buy our product". However, in order to actually measure that, when a user comes to your website you need to know which of your ads they've seen. Traditionally, you'd just serve the ad from your domain and set a cookie, but now you can't do that.

This is more relevant to brand advertising than "click here and buy product X" (direct response), but I think that the people saying "oh, just use contextual advertising" are underestimating the extent to which GDPR makes contextual advertising difficult.

[JohnFen]

> However, in order to actually measure that, when a user comes to your website you need to know which of your ads they've seen.

That may be the case, but so what? If an industry can't function without abusing people, I would argue that it shouldn't function.

But this doesn't mean the industry can't function. It just means that advertising becomes less efficient (i.e., more expensive). Which is fine -- if it's more expensive to operate in a manner that approaches being ethical, I don't see that as a real problem.

[Barraketh]

You're right, it's just that the word "abuse" is doing a lot of work in that statement. I've still never seen any example of any person being actually damaged by the "tracking", so calling it "abuse" feels pretty harsh.

[JohnFen]

I think "abuse" is a fair term, but I acknowledge that it's emotionally loaded. If a company is spying on me (collecting data about me, my machines, or my use of my machines without my informed consent), then I think it's not out of line to call that abusive.

[memefrog]

Every web server logs request information. Is that spying on you too? If you go to a website, they aren't "spying" on you, you are volunteering your information to them. Stop hitting yourself.

[uxp8u61q]

Society as a whole is damaged by the tracking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

[mehlmao]

Off the top of my head: targeted ads towards people who are predisposed to gambling addictions or alcoholism

[kmlx]

> If an industry can't function without abusing people

what abuse? clicks? page views?