[HN Gopher] WTF Is Server-Side Conversion Tracking ___________________________________________________________________ WTF Is Server-Side Conversion Tracking Author : marketingtech Score : 20 points Date : 2021-08-25 20:04 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (digiday.com) (TXT) w3m dump (digiday.com) | edoceo wrote: | Oh, I remember this, from like 2000 (in CGI/Perl). Did it this | way for ages then there was this ground-breaking company for ads | called "DoubleClick" (I think) that did it all with cookies and | js. Wonder whatever happened to them. | DaiPlusPlus wrote: | DoubleClick became the world's largest web ad broker and was | bought by Google to shore-up their own AdSense + AdWords | business. | | Due to cross-site "third-party" cookies being disabled in | modern web-browsers and the HTTP Referer [sic] header being | unofficially deprecated the only way for websites and ads to | work together is by either IP address tracking or visitor | fingerprinting. | | IPv4 address tracking is a blunt instrument that is next to | useless when visitors are using ISPs with CG-NAT. But IPv6 | makes every device addressable - and thus - followable. I | imagine that eventually CPE (home internet modem and router) | will offer some kind of IPv6 address randomisation system on a | per-TCP-connection basis, though they'd all share the same | 64-bit prefix (I think?) so it doesn't mitigate per-residence | tracking. | | (EDIT: Ah, so IPv6 does have privacy protection by rotating | autoconfigured addresses on a regular basis: | https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2014/12/ipv6-privacy-ad... | ) | | --------- | | I do believe the end of third-party cookies is going to make | internet advertising significantly less profitable and more and | more ad-funded sites will either add paywalls or shut-down. | | I'm surprised Google went this way, actually - I'd have thought | a less-harmful way of protecting users' privacy with balancing | the need for attribution in advertising could be accomplished | by, for example, auto-nuking cross-domain cookies after | 24-hours. | extr wrote: | I don't know how this shit works. But earlier this month I was | showing my girlfriend a Halloween costume I googled on my phone. | I visited the website for maybe 10 seconds, I did not log in or | create an account. A few days later I got an email from PayPal | offering me a $5 coupon for that website. WTFFFF. It made me want | to go full-nuclear on the privacy front. | nerdponx wrote: | Companies give Google and friends free unfettered access to | your highly specific usage data that can be used to uniquely | identify you, all without your consent or knowledge, and no way | to opt out. In exchange, said companies get metrics on how well | their ads are doing. | | It's ingenious. The incentives are set up entirely against you. | The people who know and care the least about privacy decide | what to do with your data, and they are enticed to hand it over | by the promise of tracking ad spend, i.e. the promise of making | their jobs easier and of making their success quantifiable. | mgraczyk wrote: | Serious question, why is this bad? As far as email | advertisements go, is this worse than untargeted Viagra and | porn? | | fyi I work at Google but not on Ads. | firecall wrote: | Well, even if we cant describe why it is 'bad', we can | observe that it is a form of anti-social behaviour by these | companies. | | People don't like it - people don't like that form of | targeting. It may not be clear why they have issues with it, | but they do. | | At my kids school, if someone is repeatedly doing something | to you that you don't like, then it is classed as a form of | bullying. | Fordec wrote: | 10 seconds is plenty of time to record IP addresses, do pixel | tracking etc. Combine with data from a data broker and you | probably have contact detail attribution. | | heck, the payment processor plugin probably on that costume's | site that's all they needed considering the email came from | Paypal, which I assume you have an account with. an IP address | lookup table internal to Paypal would do it alone. | phibz wrote: | This is nothing new. We were sharing impression data with client | partners from the server side years ago. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-08-25 23:01 UTC)