A technology which leaves the door open for exploitation will certainly be exploited by someone. In a self-governing society, people would turn their backs on the most exploitable technology; in the actual world, I just don't see that happening.

Where there is an opportunity for exploitation and humans, there will always be an exploit used. It's just how we are, how our brains are built. Until that exploit yields you no benefit socially.

Meanwhile we see just how effective targeted advertisement can be for both money and political influence.

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. :)

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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?

Data claimed to by anonymized usually can be easily deanonymized.

> 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.

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

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

In what way is it more complex than it has to be?

I don't work in front-end but whenever I've used localstorage for personal projects it's as simple as getting/setting a javascript object with keys & values.

It’s described in the first section of the article.

Care to elaborate? I just re-read the article and honestly still don't know what complexity OP was referring to.

Do you mean the fact that cookies and LocalStorage (or other APIs able to persist data) are often considered the same thing when using the term "cookies"?

This is a good example of how the discourse on this subject seems to have twisted itself around. No one serious ever thought "advertising" was a bad thing, not really. It was the potential abuse of the stored data people were worried about. But that's hard to explain, especially without good examples to which to point[1]. So fast forward a few years and... now it's "adtech" that's the enemy in isolation.

That seems unfortunate. And futile anyway, because the truth is that society as a whole actually wants advertising, in all its forms. We may find individual ads annoying but we still make our purchase decisions based on those ads and use those channels to hawk our own wares.

[1] The truth is that the big ad-driven internet companies have been, on the whole, actually fairly good stewards of this stuff. People don't trust them out of principle (or, just as often, tribalism), but at least so far the dystopia hasn't arrived.

The big ad companies definitely have not been good stewards.

Here's an ongoing example that should get someone put in jail:

Pharmaceutical companies target ads for addictive drugs at the people that are most likely to become addicted to those drugs.

(For the victim of this that I know personally, it wasn't painkillers. As far as I know, there have been no repercussions for the manufacturer of the drug in question or the ad networks.)

See also: The millions of comments on any thread on HN that discusses SEO, dark patterns, cookie consent, or apps that interfere with advertising revenue streams.

"won't somebody think of the drug addicts" is a novel (to me) argument for why all ads are bad

In this case, the drug addicts are people with medical conditions that have been intentionally pushed to abuse their medication by the pharmaceutical company and Google, etc.

The argument is closer to "encouraging and profiting from illegal drug abuse is not 'responsible corporate stewardship'".

That's not true -- many people think advertising as practiced is abusive in its own right.

"Society as a whole" and "many people" are not the same entities. Again, there was a time when serious discourse about internet privacy focused on abuse potential and how to provide data security guarantees. Now it's just "ads bad", and I think that's a real problem with the discourse. To repeat, you can win fights over privacy (c.f. the GDPR, which while pretty flawed was a real and tangible win for users). You'll never win a fight over "ads". Ever.

The vast majority of Americans are concerned about data collection:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa...

There's no point in additional discourse on the issue. We may as well be arguing about whether cigarettes cure lung disease.

But "many people" and "no one serious", which is what you claimed, are also not the same.

> You'll never win a fight over "ads". Ever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

Even for cities that do not outright ban it, outdoor advertisement is heavily regulated in many parts of the world. Compare you typical european and asian big city street. Clearly many people do not like ads even without the tracking.

My personal view is that most ads drive materialism and fulfillment through consumption which is evil. We also have research correlating familiarity and trust, so ads are there to brainwash you into trusting brands you have no reason to trust. If the ad business was boiled down to ads that were good for society it would be so small there’d be little conversation about it. The dark side of the ad business is what keeps everyone in it, the abusive user tracking is just the newest horrible dimension of it.

> People want ads

Says who? Sounds like rationalization from someone who works in the industry. I could be wrong.

> We may find individual ads annoying

I actually don't really mind ads as long as the volume of them isn't too great. But I greatly mind the tracking that comes along with them.

> at least so far the dystopia hasn't arrived

I disagree. From my point of view, we reached the dystopia stage quite a while ago.