Reading headlines like this my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened
31–40 of 191 posts
Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened
#32I have a campaign with a UTM link, once the user lands on our page we save this UTM as cookie and then we persist on our db at sign up. Is this complaint with GDPR and will it still possible in the future?
IANAL
GDPR is about consent, not cookies, storage or anything. If you track a user then you need consents. Nothing about GDPR is tied to cookies. They are just one way to generate and keep PII (a tracking ID).
Now if the UTM only identifies the source (user coming from X, FB, ...) and does not identify or reveal the user then you are probably fine. It should even be fine as a cookie, although there have been talks about storing on a users device without consent. Not sure about the current exact legal status, so you might want to set it to never persist the browser close.
It might get a bit more complicated at sign up. You probably would want to disclose that you track and keep this information. But at this point GDPR is active for sure as you have a somehow identifiable user.
Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened
#33Can I voluntarily register somewhere and profile myself for the purposes of ad targeting? I'd really hate to just get completely random ads everywhere.
The "random" ads you are getting are quite likely already targeted ads.
Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened
#34Can I voluntarily register somewhere and profile myself for the purposes of ad targeting? I'd really hate to just get completely random ads everywhere.
It's not that bad. For a long time ads could only be targeted based on correlations rather than personal information. Ads weren't completely random. You would read a travel magazine targeted at men and there would be advertisements in there about flights to some location or recreational activities or male-coded razor blades, whereas a travel magazine targeted at women would have advertisements in it about flights to the same location, different recreational activities and female-coded razor blades. You would take a train to work and there would be advertisements about local restaurants and banks offering home loans in your area. You would exist and you'd get advertisements about an American soft drink.
In the early days of the internet, few enough companies wanted to advertise on the internet - advertisers viewed it already as targeted at a certain segment of society - so advertisements were generally very low value i.e. crap. Tracking technology let advertisers know that they could actually find the people didn't realise were using the internet. But nowadays we all know everyone is on the internet, and we tend to use the same sites regularly, so you could get adequately targeted ads (as a set of eyeballs - not necessarily as an advertiser) just by using the internet.
Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is in the same league as advertising cookies. If I visit a website, I want to read or interact with that website, not with Google. Trying to shove Google into my face will meet the same reaction as trying to shove ads in my face. Getting blocked.
> Trying to shove Google into my face Unless you always browse with the network inspector open I don't really see how that would be the case.
It is really not very complicated. It is actually very simple. When I visit a new website, I check what it requests using uBlock Origin. Then just block those unwanted stuff.
If the website does not work without something like Google fonts or tag manager or whatever other bloat, it means, that it is shoddy-made, by an either uninformed or ignorant entity. It probably is illegal according to EU law as well, since I never gave consent to being tracked by third parties. I do not use that website. Browser tab closed.
In the cases, in which an external entity forces me to use crap websites, I isolate them in browser profiles and/or container tabs.
In cases, in which the content is only available on that website, I can try reader mode. Or try to find some other frontend, like Invidious for YouTube.
So in most cases I can do something to reduce the toxicity of the cocktail, that modern web development practices have cooked up for me.
Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened
#36Can I voluntarily register somewhere and profile myself for the purposes of ad targeting? I'd really hate to just get completely random ads everywhere.
The "random" ads you are getting are quite likely already targeted ads.
That's the crux of the issue: 99% of companies wanting to sell me something doesn't have a product I want. Of the remainder, I already am a customer in 99% of the cases.
Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I still have no idea if the decision was hurtful to the business, or if it did not move the needle at all, or if it even was a net positive, all things considered It's incredibly hard to tell. For us the goal of eliminating Cookies was important given the stance we have on privacy so everything went from there. The folks working in marketing for sure were not happy with the directive as it makes their job much hard…
The same stance on privacy that somehow makes it okay for you to scan all your users' code for AI training without consent?
Could you elaborate on what they are doing?
Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened
#38I'm not a developer and have no use case for your service but thanks for the forward thinking, experimenting, transparency, and efforts to improve one of the things that enshi*ified the Web.
Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened
#39Can I voluntarily register somewhere and profile myself for the purposes of ad targeting? I'd really hate to just get completely random ads everywhere.
Are people downvoting because they think that no targeting means no ads? It just means worse ads and MORE ads because the ones that are there are less valuable. Ironic.
Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is in the same league as advertising cookies. If I visit a website, I want to read or interact with that website, not with Google. Trying to shove Google into my face will meet the same reaction as trying to shove ads in my face. Getting blocked.
> Trying to shove Google into my face will meet the same reaction as trying to shove ads in my face. Getting blocked. You will have a hard time browsing the web, including this site ;)
Not really. I block all occurences of google tag manager and a lot of other ad related services and I have 0 issues.