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by panstromek 232 days ago
Yea, this is pretty annoying and not the only problem in this field. There's a bunch of theather or misunderstanding in the marketing space. I feel like marketing people just don't get it. They seem to be hopelessly incapable to accepting that matching people in whatever way possible is the exact practice the laws like GDPR are trying to target. You cannot go around it by hashing, fingerprinting, ad ids, cookieless matching or whatever.
2 comments

They’re heavily incentivised to not get it, both internally with company KPI’s that’ve not kept pace with the reality of GDPR and externally through ad platforms that continue to demand excessive amounts of data without providing suitable alternatives.
Yea, companies are probably abusing this (as I have noted in the sibling comment), but I think marketers themselves truly don't get it. I've been on the implementation side of this and it's always frustrating debate. It's pretty clear that they just think this is about just picking a different vendor with "GDPR" on list of features, not realizing that the law fundamentaly targets metrics they want to use, and they just cannot do it "the old way" as they are used to.
I don’t think this is a problem limited to marketers to be fair. How many developers are still also building all these data collection and delivery pipelines? They should know better too, no?
I also think that many vendors in this space are abusing the fact that marketers are not technical people, so they just wave around some "we're GDPR ready", "anonymized data" slogans such that marketers feel that they can tick the "GDPR" box and get all the metrics they are used to.

While of course not realising that GDPR implementation is partially on them and that some of those metrics are literally impossible to implement without breaching into GDPR territory. Any company saying that they are "fully GDPR compliant" but also giving you retention and attribution metrics by default is probably confusing you in this way.