Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 428 posts

Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal

#41

Post by sokoloff »

croes wrote: post #28
lordnacho wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I dabbled in ecommerce and while it wasn't a roaring success, people definitely did click the ads and buy the product, and I made a tiny bit of money. My guess is if someone actually knew a few more things than me they could make it work properly.

It's not about effectiveness of ads but if it's more effective as previous methods and are the huge data collections necessary for the effect.

For a lot of small businesses starting out in digital advertising, the only previous method they had experience with was buying a website or Shopify store and waiting/hoping. We shouldn’t discount “this is a lot easier and actually reaches people” as being valueless.

Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal

#42

Post by kbos87 »

Dma54rhs wrote: post #21
jqpabc123 wrote: post #4

Hello advertisers. You are being manipulated and abused just like the consumers you are targeting. There is very little evidence to show that invasive digital advertising is actually effective. When was the last time you clicked on one of these ads and actually made a purchase? Bad for consumers and bad for advertisers. Why continue with this opaque, profit sucking charade that mainly enriches those selling the ads?

You're tricked if you think so yourself, all the small businesses measure it and that is why FB and Google are so rich. Its like saying you're been tricked to think computers are useful for your productivity, it's insanity. You can argue if big corps spending just to keep coca cola on in front of your eyes is useful or not. To what extent but that's entirely different conversation. When was the last time you died? De…

Agree completely. The sentiment that this is all a shell game and advertisers are being completely manipulated always seems to come from people who don’t have much domain expertise.

I’d be quick to throw digital advertising to the wolves but the reality is that it’s extremely effective. Is there a level of opacity? Yes. Are there tranches of junk traffic and ineffective tools put forth by the ad networks? Absolutely. But these are problems at the margins, and don’t invalidate the fact that advertising on Google and Facebook in particular are very effective, and measurable to enough of an extent that it makes sense to keep doing it and growing your level of investment.

The majority of advertisers both large and small get that they can’t let the quest for perfection in advertising attribution be the enemy of progress.

Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal

#43

Post by aasasd »

> Re: forced Chrome logins. Don't need cookies if you own the browser!

(https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145209451374118912...)

The swindle with FLOC was pretty obviously tied in this, but people still went in circles discussing whether it's private or not, and downvoting those who said FLOC is a trap.

Let's consult the plan, nothing is even secret about this:

- Google disables third-party cookies, crippling competitors to its Analytics, and thus their data for ads.

- Google throws them the FLOC bone to avoid being sued, dressing it up as a privacy measure. Meanwhile FLOC is controlled by Google's code in the browser.

- Google itself continues to vacuum up users' stats for all sites through the browser, never needing the cookies or FLOC.

So, if this is not a case of Google using its monopoly on web services (email and video) and the monopoly on the browser to prop up its monopoly on web ads, then I don't know what is.

The baffling part, really, is: with Goog already being ahead of the rest of the planet by having surveillance in The Browser, why don't they chill the hell out and stop right there. It's almost like someone inside decided to set up a multibillion-dollar morality performance and demonstrate what happens when a company is being too greedy.

Also, we probably need to remember that even if Goog is told off and has to dial its appetites back, it still sits on a database of surveillance data on people through the web, the browser, the services and Android. Which database, for example, is used by the US police for location->people requests, of which folks by definition only some are potential subjects of investigation (see e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/technology/google-sensorv...).

Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal

#44

Post by sokoloff »

csee wrote: post #30
echelon wrote: post #5

When can we send the leadership to federal prison instead of slapping them on the wrist with paltry fines? This has been used to inflate and extort advertising dollars. It has utterly trashed the web, gutted Mozilla, created a corporate tech monoculture controlled by platform giants, and led our social media engagement crisis. Break up these companies and send the leaders that approved of this to jail.

Yep, jail sentences. Fines are good but don't work that well, even if they're large, because of agency conflict of interest. It's mostly the shareholders who are paying the price. The execs already saw their call option paid off with their 10 years of comp while they were running this scam (among others).

The shareholders reaped a lot of benefit along the way. It doesn’t seem outrageous to have the company (the shareholders in aggregate) pay fines related to the behavior.

Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal

#45

Post by jstummbillig »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #4

Hello advertisers. You are being manipulated and abused just like the consumers you are targeting. There is very little evidence to show that invasive digital advertising is actually effective. When was the last time you clicked on one of these ads and actually made a purchase? Bad for consumers and bad for advertisers. Why continue with this opaque, profit sucking charade that mainly enriches those selling the ads?

> There is very little evidence to show that invasive digital advertising is actually effective.

Ignoring the "invasive" (being a matter of definition) there is an absolute mountain of irrefutable evidence for google-type digital advertising being "effective", in the sense that an advertiser can spend 1$ to make 2$, measurably.

> When was the last time you clicked on one of these ads and actually made a purchase?

The answer is: It doesn't matter. Ads being clicked and thus stuff being sold is not a matter of personal opinion or observation. Spending and tracking online ad money works. Of course, on an individual level you can still lose money while advertising for a myriad of reasons.

By the way, this is by no means an argument for advertisements (online/offline, "invasive" or otherwise). Advertisement as an industry does not create value. It's steering attention while sucking up money and there is also no reason to assume that it provides an inherent bias towards better products (the opposite likely being true).

Also Google/FB could be defrauding their ad customers to an absolutely mind boggling degree. Being the deliverer, and also reporting on deliveries, it's insane that they can operate basically unregulated.

Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal

#46

Post by corporateshil1 »

Expect some 'cosmetic' change and back to the norm. The personal data hoarded is too valuable to the surveillance apparatus for us to stop it now. You wouldn't want a Chinese/Russian company taking over these industries, and the West seems capable of only one flavor, the current status quo. Seems like FAAMG is here to stay, they are probably already one with the government, it will be spelled out more obvious in the future, since we need a judge to give us truth, but honest judges aren't in demand

Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal

#48

Post by Closi »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #4

Hello advertisers. You are being manipulated and abused just like the consumers you are targeting. There is very little evidence to show that invasive digital advertising is actually effective. When was the last time you clicked on one of these ads and actually made a purchase? Bad for consumers and bad for advertisers. Why continue with this opaque, profit sucking charade that mainly enriches those selling the ads?

> When was the last time you clicked on one of these ads and actually made a purchase?

Also how often are the metrics inflated by people who were going to purchase anyway? I was booking a holiday yesterday and knew the company I wanted to book from - I typed in their name and clicked on the top result as that was the company I wanted.

When I clicked back I noticed that they had the top two results - the first was an ad and the second was the organic link.

I wonder if things like this really inflate the calculations companies do on how many acquisitions they get through the ad and their spend on the ad. I went back and clicked on the organic link instead and then checked out - but still wonder if somehow that counted as a “sale” from an “advert” in google analytics rather than me just wanting to find the company and book through them.

Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal

#49

Post by draw_down »

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #27

I remember in 2nd grade, a kid brought a note from his parent which was written in a few dozen tiny Post-It notes. The teacher was furious about the improperness of the format of the message. That just came to mind seeing yet another too-fucking-long Twitter thread.

Come on

Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal

#50

Post by JustFinishedBSG »

The most "surprising" thing for me as a mathematician is that Google publishes a lot of top notch research on bidding and pricing theory.

But it's all rigged in the end.

So Google pushed the perverseness as far as basically creating a fake research lab to cover it all.

Post reply on HN