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Comment by simonbarker87 | Hacker News Reader

The vast majority of websites just want to know where their visitors are coming from and, if they are selling a product, some aggregate level of demographic knowledge to tailor their marketing efforts. They really don’t care about an individual or even small cohort and aren’t selling the data on.

Targeting advertising is sooo much more effective for small and medium sized businesses and actually makes many businesses viable in a way they weren’t in the past.

The ideal solution would be to find a way for businesses to get those insights in a way that preserves privacy at the individual level. Something like apples differential privacy system but web wide.

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> Targeting advertising is sooo much more effective for small and medium sized businesses

I'm starting to question that, but without any proof that just me rambling. Assuming that it works, I'd actually be fine with a site saying "Hey, just letting you know, we use Google Analytics to learn more about you, is that cool?".

The 1500 partners and 50+ trackers aren't numbers I'm making up, those are numbers I frequently see. Sure, you feel you need a tracker, I can easily enough say no to a single tracker. I can also understand a webshop needing to share information with their advertising partner, but not 1500 of them.

The law would never have amounted to anything if the reality was a limited scope of data sharing with a clear obvious purpose. It's the insane amount of tracking and data sharing that triggered all this.

Anecdotally for the three ecom businesses I’ve run/worked at it’s been our only method of profitable marketing.

As usual it’s the extreme ends of the spectrum that ruin for everyone.

I haven't been in that line of business for 10+ years, so my understand and reference is also a bit out of date.

Retargeting did very little. Ads helps in some cases, but rarely generic ads, it had to be extremely targeted, which was normally done by manually buying ad space with certain TV programs or in specific locations. The big ones for us was price comparison sites, if we could get on HotUKDeals we'd have a great week, but in particular Google Shopping did made a big difference.

Agree, retargeting was a waste of money - it essentially just annoyed people.

It doesn't matter what they want. It doesn't matter why they want it. They are not entitled to this information. They should not be able to know anything at all about us without our explicit consent. We should not have to sacrifice our privacy and peace of mind so that businesses can succeed. If they can't succeed without surveilling us and selling us out, then let them go bankrupt.

If that’s where this all shakes out to it will have the affect of creating retail monopolies worse than even in the pre internet days as marketing will be simply too expensive for many online small businesses. 90% of Shopify stores would be dead in the water.

Don't be silly!

Nobody is stopping anybody from advertising or marketing. Simply that if your advertisers wish to track me, then they must ask my specific opt-in permission to do so. And so they should.

If your business cannot survive without illegally (!) tracking and trading in personal data, then you have a scummy business model and a business that has no right to exist.

And you aren't entitled to visit their website. Seems like everything is working fine then? Most of them won't go bankrupt just because you stop visiting; based on reality, most of them are doing relatively fine.

> And you aren't entitled to visit their website.

Yes you are!

The GDPR prohibits conditioning the provision of service on consent to the processing of personal data. Thus mandating acceptance of advertisers tracking cookies ("cookie walls") without providing alternative means of website access are considered violations of the GDPR.

Sure I am. You cannot deny me service because I refused to consent to surveillance capitalism nonsense. It's literally written in the laws. And that's the way it should be. It should be illegal for them to punish people in any way whatsoever for exercising their rights.

Charge people money up front if you require payment. My attention and personal information are not currencies to pay for services with.

Targeting, yes; retargeting, no.

So much user time is spent, for example, on a few big sites which have enough data within their own siloes (based on users' behaviour and topics of interest), they can target pretty well without relying on external data. The big video sites, social media, Amazon/eBay/etc.

And then there's a big layer of smaller sites who can inherently target because they're already specialist in nature.

The losers in this scenario aren't really the brands, they're big generic sites such as news media who don't have any way to acquire targeting information on their own.

> The ideal solution would be to find a way for businesses to get those insights in a way that preserves privacy at the individual level.

Isn’t that what Mozilla and Meta are together experimenting with?

If they can't do business without selling users data, then they shouldn't be doing the business.

all this effort - easily defeated by adblock and antitracking tools xD

Not easily and often not completely.

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