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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

Google does not "sell data" directly to anyone, so only the 'indirect' part of your comment applies.

Even then, Apple's changes have little impact on the "selling data" aspect of things... the real thing that they prevent doing is sale attribution, which is critical for advertising business and not really all that privacy invasive.

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Apple has provided frameworks and technology specifically for pro-privacy sale attribution, and continues to be invested in efforts to support standardization of such techniques.

Except they deliberately delay the attribution messaage so optimising ads takes longer for buyers, and hence costs more money.

That sounds like a feature to me, the end user.

Higher costs being passed on to you?

Increases the incentive to look for brands that don't waste money on advertising.

As someone who has found multiple small businesses that I use regularly, and wouldn't have without ads that are relevant, I vehemently disagree.

Then you can opt in to sharing data so ads can target you more effectively.

And that would be fine and dandy if the permission request was allowed to be in the same format the Apple App store one uses - but it isn't.

It's blatant.

What’s your method for discovering those brands?

Sometimes it could be "YouTuber advertising", where instead of a YouTube ad, the advertiser directly pays the YouTuber to market the product.

Doesn't require any of my personal information to target me (targeting is based on the YouTuber's audience and metrics I'd assume), and I have made multiple decisions to purchase a product or not based on this advertising.

I currently pay for YouTube Premium, so I guarantee you I am not conflating this kind of advertising with YouTube's regular advertising.

You generally don't need those brands. If you do, you search for them, filter out spam, then judge.

Or you hear about them organically, by participating in specific forums or following well chosen publications.

Sales attribution is often extremely privacy invasive. That data is how it works.

I would take issue with extremely. It is not tracking you all over the internet, it's just passing a token with a given ad click.

Sale attribution wasn’t critical before the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix_modeling got big in the 1980s. It's always been pretty important for marketers to know what channels work and what ones don't.

Mail order ads used to list different PO Boxes so they could track sales attribution.

Motor vehicles weren’t critical before the invention of the internal combustion engine

Right, but it's the reason on-line advertising is efficient.

I would correct that to "it’s the reason on-line advertising is believed to be efficient."

I’ve been seeing reporting over the last several years that suggests that a lot of the belief in sales attribution to ads or even specific interactions on-line are tenuous at best.

Pretty easy to prove this to be false with elementary A/B testing.

For big organizations that have the capacity and data, online advertising becomes a ROI optimization game, and one that they perform quite well at.

For a random business that wants to advertise online, without the infrastructure and data capability to back it, they will struggle to compete unless they exist in a segment full of similar peers. When the former happens, we see articles about how PPC doesn't actually work, etc.

Reality is that it takes engineering work and infrastructure, coupled with some data capabilities to unlock real value in the online advertising space.

As noted, online advertising brought all sorts of insight and visibility over traditional 'offline' marketing channels, but with that comes more savvy competitors that will do all the data things you're not.

Many platforms, such as Google, make A/B testing attribution (ie. incrementality measurements) really easy to perform.

Most people don’t know how to run or interpret A/B tests, or even understand what the confidence levels should be for their sample size.

By and large, people don’t understand statistics (I mostly include myself in that).

I find it hard to believe Google research doesn’t move data in or out in the form of peering agreements. Same for other parts of the org.

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