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Comment by RowanH | Hacker News Reader

I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked but this week looking at some display ads, in Googles audience builder there’s literally an “upload email of who you want to target” feature. Made my skin crawl. Can’t tell me that’s not abused to the ends of the earth and back - some marketing interns will just go nuts, GDPR be damned

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Thats remarketing. Target your existing customers. Your cohort needs to be a certain size and can't just put one person in the ad target.

The problem is remarketing used to work great without sharing email addresses with ad platforms.

Now without cookies, you typically want to share email, phone, zip code, etc in order to do remarketing without 3rd party cookies.

No ephemeral 3rd party cookies = ad platforms rely on user data that never changes (email addresses, phone numbers, etc)

There's got to be some more regulation around advertising in general. I just don't see how it adds anything to the world that even begins to compensate for the damage. It should be like cigarettes, something we used to see as a legitimate business but decided we're really just better off taxing the heck out of and boxing into very limited places.

An easy example is that websites with billions of satisfied users (tiktok, facebook, instagram, reddit, twitter, and google) are all primarily funded through advertising.

I agree with your advertisement of your viewpoint.

Blame the Irish.

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