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Comment by bowlofpetunias | Hacker News Reader

Wow. "Don't be evil" is really dead and buried isn't it?

How exactly is this more evil than a tracking cookie? To me it sounds pretty much the same.

The reason, at least here in Europe, is legislation: cookies are written by the website to the user's PC. As far as I understand, this alternative doesn't write anything to a device, thus circumventing the law.

They can't be deleted or blocked. They are not confined to one device.

After reading the article, I fail to see how these are not confined to one device. basically, the article suggests that they'll add a random unique ID to the browsers' identification (I assume they're talking about the user agent). How would this spread across devices?

My mistake. But they are trivial to correlate and I would expect them to be correlated.

Correlating seems very easy & likely indeed, I didn't think about that.

If it's tied to some "anonymous identifier" in the browser it's also possible to follow you in incognito mode.

I imagine that incognito mode would use a different anonymous identifier.

It was dead from day 1.

Read the article. This is the same thing as the IDFA but on the Chrome browser. Pretty sure you'll be able to reset its value or turn it off entirely.

Most advertisers don't want to reach you if you don't want to be reached.

Doesn't mean we can't start looking for alternatives...

Duh, it stopped when organic growth stopped. But we were stupid to have believed it in the first place.

Now they are desperate: ads everywhere, penalties everywhere (makes you advertise to replace lost traffic) and so on. They still make north of 95% of their income on ads with all their supposed innovation. I don't trust them at all. On anything. I wonder what Google Search "Quality" has in store for 2013th fourth quarter.

I don't believe most of these claims, but I am linking to this:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3891677&cid=44076497

An important information from the "confidential" studies here for example would be what kind of monitors were tested.

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