The talk is about an aspect of the change that technology and digitalization bring to our society, and how we deal with that. Language is a key factor in change, and the talk is focussed on that.

I highly recommend watching it.

Well yeah, they said 'we ... want'. How much clearer do you think they could have stated that? They never said you or anyone else wanted it.

You can't have ads without tracking.

You see, even when they get presented with rules, they try to work around them.

It's like a robber saying: We want to develop victim-friendly ways to steal you.

It's easier to sleep at night knowing there is a roof over your head.

I feel like this needs some additional specification/limitation to make it a believable statement. The only good employer in the ads/data selling business?

Remember that the GAFA only have offices in a very few locations worldwide. Can't work for them if they are not here.

I left Criteo a handful of years ago and I can easily admit the work conditions were really nice, and the skill level among the team quite high.

I can also say there are other companies with comparable perks and technology level (or maybe the code level of Criteo has very considerably increased, but looking at what's open sourced, like cuttle, it doesn't seem like it), like some founded by former criteo employees (or c level dudes, since JB Rudelle is creating a new tech company with Romain Niccoli)

Your answer sounds to me like a false dichotomy argument.

It's not mutually exclusive: 100% paid content vs instrusive and obnoxious tracking. However Content publishers are desperately trying to increase revenue and these ad-tech companies provide a means to do so.

Creating is a natural activity that we enjoy doing.

If they where I'd be happy to pay.

Nobody wants their privacy invaded, but they do want cheaper products. In theory better targeted ads allow a company to spend it's advertising budget more effectively. Selling more products for the same amount of ad cost should allow for cheaper products.

I'm sure some companies will not pass on the savings, but I believe economic theory says the market as a whole should.

If the savings are enough, some people may be willing to give up some of their privacy in the name of cheaper products.

How much more do companies make? Is all this invasive tracking really necessary in order to keep websites like Google and Facebook free? Is it worth saving 10% (or whatever) on some product?

Unfortunately the decision is forced upon everyone by advertisers with little thought to allowing for an informed choice (or any choice really).

But we don't know how much online advertising lowers prices. Would be interesting for an economist to study.

For all we know, online ads could have no effect. And what about ads intended to generate demand instead of address current demand? Maybe online ads are tricking us to by more of what we don't want (Yay, another subscription box).

If the difference in effectiveness is enough to make Google, etc unprofitable than maybe there is an argument to be made that it is necessary.

If it means they make 10% less profit, people would probably prefer privacy."

Possibly in aggregate, but they almost certainly have an effect for individual advertisers. No company is going to cut their advertising if their competitors aren't going to make the same cuts.

But it would be very cool.

Imagine if all browsers suddenly shipped perfect ad blockers[1]. Many sites would die off; but I suspect a number of micropayment platforms would quickly spring up in their place. The result might not be as diverse, but it would be interesting.

[1] A perfect ad blocker would have to do the impossible, i.e. identify sponsor segments of YouTube clips, slice out native advertising, and somehow kill off all promotional consideration. I.e. absolutely impossible and probably not desirable.

I still don't see why customers want this. I would rather a company struggle to spend its ad budget effectively, and then conclude that it could better spend its resources investing in making a better product (or its employees, or its infrastructure, ..).

I don't have an econ background, so feel free to clear up what's wrong here.

If the goal on the social level is to get valuable information to potential customers, then it would follow we should get rid of most tracking and most advertising. Most of it is disinformation and deception that buries lower-budget information in the stream of messages from those with the biggest pockets.

Advertising needs to be expensive enough that it is always dominated by quality of product and reputation spread by word-of-mouth, as this puts the power in the hands of consumers. This is critical for the healthy functioning of markets, because advertising distorts the natural expression of demand.

The current hype-fueled cryptocurrency craze is the apotheosis of advertising dominating product.

Ah, but this is not what the discussion is all about, is it? "Telling potential customers about their product" can be done with a static hypertext page, it does not require infesting the entire Internet with tracking parasites to profile every individual. And your "incremental dollar" can be spent on SEO to improve the visibility of your page.

Moreover, in this scenario where the entire market is now able to spend their advertising budget "more effectively", there are many possible outcomes besides more products being sold for the same ad cost. The market-wide increase in "ad effectiveness" may effectively cancel itself out. Ad spend may remain the same, but with more budget allocated to speculative ad strategies. Or the savings may be funneled back into product to further differentiate it from competitors.

This. At least in the US, consumers are pretty much spent out. In that situation, advertising does not increase economic activity. It just moves it around. This is an argument for not allowing advertising and marketing as a deductible business expense, an idea that's been floated in Congress a few times.

Historically, advertising was a small part of product cost. Today, in many industries from movies to drugs, it dominates. This runs up prices for everyone. There's an economic argument for limiting advertising spend.

Advertising spend as a share of GDP hasn't changed much at all on average over the last century: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisi...

And some say it has even declined in recent years: https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/273094/us-adv...

The strange thing is that it doesn't feel like that at all. Advertising has become obnoxious to such a degree that it renders many sites entirely unresponsive on some devices (like my aging iPad). I have stopped visiting some sites or reduced the number of visits dramatically.

The advertising industry and indeed the publishing sector itself is clearly on a suicide mission. Someone needs to save them from themselves.

Although there's some portion of apathy, the vast majority of people are ignorant or even misinformed. You can't conclude from the actions of an ignorant person that they don't care about the thing they don't know about / don't understand.

Most people do understand that the loyalty-cards are not necessarily the only way to get discounts or even that they are actually discounted (in the absence of those cards, prices would be set differently overall).

There are certainly stores we may legitimately feel more trusting of than others.

Anyway, lots of people really appreciate a store like Trader Joe's that just has reasonable prices across the board, never does any sort of discount promotions and never tracks anyone — even if the customers never explicitly thought through that aspect of the experience, they still experience it and feel differently than they do with the other tracking-focused stores.

On a side note: I learned recently that sales and such at most grocers are actually driven by the brands themselves. The reason Trader Joe's is free of all that is because they sell relatively little that is of the big-marketing-budget style branded products…

With advertising, it's a lose-lose proposition. In exchange for being tracked everywhere, we get shown pictures of things we don't want. Who would opt into that?

Stuff like this comes about organically. No one held a big meeting and decided the internet would be funded by privacy invading ads. The ad ecosystem just shifted that way over time due to competition.

Before there was internet, companies already spent all their marketing dollars on stupid TV and radio ads.

If viewing lingerie ads meant I could get my alcohol half price, I might start accepting them.

(If we could make advertising less effective, we could have better products ... maybe because spending more on advertising wouldn't work as well as spending more on engineering or QA. But overall spending/cost is a bit orthogonal.)

If the ad companies are making less money; it doesn't suggest that the ad cost is going up

And ofcourse you don't even realize but ads is one of the best ways for underprivileged to get on to internet.

More search ad revenue allows Google to invest more in search. Better search could benefit content creators by giving them more and better targeted users. Users benefit from better search because they are able to find the content they are looking for faster.

I'm sure that Google is already investing the amount they need to in search to make it as profitable as possible.

It seems that more search ad revenue allows Google to bank roll the rest of the Google/Alphabet behemoth on projects unrelated to search, but within its mission to "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" ie. to know everything about everything, which I'm sure tracking plays a role in.

and that's become an abusive relationship where they are being de facto censored by google because of advertisers being skittish. You have more sponsored content showing up because it's a lot easier than relying on google and their amazing algorithms to not screw you over.

I am pretty sure there are tons of things Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc. can improve but not having any data about user isn't definitely one of those approaches.

IBM and Sun might be crying though.

SUN sadly has kicked the bucket and his picture is on the table with the punchbowl.

If Facebook wants to target ads on their site based on information I have entered in my pubic profile I am okay with that. If Google wants to target ads based on keywords related to what I am searching for at the time I am okay with that. It's when you start tracking across time and across sites and inferring things I may not to have public that I think it gets invasive.

Google and Facebook know they are being invasive. They specifically don't allow advertising on things that might trigger people and make them realize how invasive they are being. For example, you can't start retargeting people who searched for information on erectile disfunction with ads for Viagra. People would rightfully get upset about that level invasiveness. Instead of not being invasive, they just don't allow the things that would trigger people. If people in general were made to realize how creepy all the tracking is, laws would require advertisers to change.

Given the option I would prefer that not being invasive be the default. If that makes things slightly more expensive, so be it.

In 99, Yahoo bought GeoCities for three billion dollars. Some of it was the dotcom bubble, but there were plenty of massive companies, and this was when most people did not have an internet connection.

Anecdotally, I've been seeing more and more success getting friends to switch over to DDG. This feels like early mass-adoption. It's rather exciting.

This is perhaps the most insidious thing that Google et al have achieved: making so many believe that they and the online ads they peddle are essential for anything. The world will continue to exist without both.

This debate isn't about whether ads exist, it's about whether or not they should be allowed to hoard massive amounts of data and track every online action in order to ads that might sometimes be slightly more relevant.

It's ridiculous.