

In Online Privacy Plan, the Opt-Out Question Looms - schan
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/business/media/06privacy.html?hpw

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dadkins
The new FTC privacy report is certainly worth discussion, but this hit piece
smells like a submarine. Had anyone ever heard of the Interactive Advertising
Bureau, subtly brought into the article about half way through?

~~~
earl
Anybody who works in the industry has heard of them -- they're the IAB in IAB
standard ad sizes, etc.

What do you mean by submarine?

~~~
dadkins
<http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

Article supplied by industry group or PR firm, passed off as original
reporting.

edit: Compare it to this article in the new york times,
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/business/media/02privacy.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/business/media/02privacy.html),
three days earlier, which contains the FTC perspective, as well as comments
from Google and Mozilla (and a note that Apple declined to comment).

------
earl
Wow. If your goal is to butcher display advertising, this is how you do it.
Retargeting, demographic targeting, and predictive targeting would all be gone
-- you'd be left with top shelf inventory sold by salespeople, and remnant
inventory at remnant prices. Because every other type of ad tech is really
about better calculating the value and hence price of so-called remnant
inventory. The same tech is applied to top shelf, but it's not as critical.

On the other hand, this would be an enormous gift to fb -- they'd be the only
company standing with demo targeting, because they know your demos since you
told them, no history tracking or prediction involved. Similarly an enormous
gift to G because I'd bet their adwords / adsense still work pretty well in
the absence of any history tracking. Though performance might degrade over
time if you can't even tie eg search terms back to downstream conversions --
it's unclear just how far a no tracking proviso goes.

I do think many publishers would be forced to require visitors to allow
tracking or pay money. And it would certainly be strange to see the US with
more stringent privacy requirements than the EU.

Honestly, if people are concerned with this today, they should disable 3rd
party cookies.

Worth noting, this would also be an enormous gift to TV and cable -- if you
look at the ratio of ad spend to time, it's enormously skewed in favor of
cable/tv at the expense of online. The massive influx of dollars to online
advertising is just those ratios rebalancing themselves and people figuring
out how to do online advertising properly.

edit:

for tools: my opinions are mine and mine alone. They were neither vetted nor
approved by any employer; past, present, or future.

edit2:

I work at an advertising company you've heard of. I'd rather not say the name
here not because it's a secret but because I'd rather it not be easily
googleable by people who want to make my thoughts out to be representative of
anyone else.

