I used to get emails from a particular recruiter which would include a link to a job listing on their employer's website. I'd always remove some extraneous tracking information from it, landing on a single identifier which I believe was unique to me but still showed the job listing.
I believe the job-listing identifier was always unique because I eventually got an email from this recruiter which instead contained a bit.ly link, presumably because it rendered me unable to remove the tracking information. I did not click on that link. That was also the last email I received from that person, cementing the idea in my mind that he was "on to me" affecting their recruitment analytics.
Sometimes I think back on that time and smile, knowing that I caused some difficulty -- however small -- for someone working in business intelligence with my dumb anti-tracking antics. Admittedly, they did successfully track some of my behavior but they had to do it manually with a human thinking critically so I'll call it a win.
Anyway, the point of the story is that I didn't click the URL-shortened link because they're shady AF and often used for the specific purpose of hiding details about the URL. Tracking is a rather benign "abuse" of this but there are other practical concerns with malicious domains.
I think this was mostly just my personal slightly-paranoid aversion to political risk, but it always astounded me that someone was willing to use the Libyan TLD during the days of Gaddafi to build a link-shortening business.
Well, although a rather harsh dictatorship, Libya was at the time one (bit.ly was registered in 2008) of the more stable and prosperous countries of the region, and had been normalizing its international relations for some time. That was just after he had been received in France, erecting his tent on the lawn of the state guesthouse next to the French presidential palace.
I don't think many people expected the dramatical events that occurred soon after.
But it's true, I personally think one should never use the TLD of a dictatorship or unstable country for obvious ethical reasons and for future-proofing a business.
Yes, this is an excellent point. I guess I’m old enough where I primarily associate Gaddafi with “mercurial dictator” than the chaos after he was toppled. And 100% agree with your last paragraph.
fun trick with bit.ly (and bit.ly-hosted shorteners): add a + to the end of the URL to see where it leads. in past times you could also see stats, but they killed that :/
That, or add “.info” at the end, e.g. goo.gl/FOOBAR.info
Many other URL shorteners copied Google and Bitly’s approach so adding “+” or “.info” at the end of short URLs usually reveals the hidden redirection without hitting the final website.
On Firefox you could set network.http.redirection-limit to 0, and check the response headers in F12 for the redirect target (which the browser doesn't load for you).
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that was the case. There was always a redirect to the job posting which had a different identifier in the end URL. I didn’t expect to have an effect on their analytics; it was just gravy that I seemed to.
Hi, I'm the author of this post. I'm curious to hear about your experiences with link fraud and interest tracking, and opinions on how the issues surrounding these techniques should be addressed by the adtech industry.
> Being able to differentiate on interests such as ‘holidays’ and ‘cars’ as compared to ‘fast food’ enables advertisers to weaponize link fraud and provide a similar product or service at different prices to different socioeconomic groups.
Meaning, at cheaper prices to poorer people? Seems good.
"Cheaper prices to poorer people" is the exact same thing as "more expensive prices to richer people".
Even if the item is "kept at the same price" and poor people get a "discount", the market will still determine which price produces maximum profit. In the long run, it will be more profitable to raise the rich man's price than it would have been if they had to raise a price that was paid by everyone. So in the long run they'll converge on a value which means that the rich pay more, not just that the poor pay less.
(And yes, this applies to coupons, sales, and other forms of price discrimination as well. If coupons were made illegal, and having the coupon actually helped the retailer in the first place, the non-coupon price would be too high for maximum profit and retailers would be forced by the market to lower prices.)
The value created by a sale, i.e., the difference between what something costs to produce and what someone is willing to pay for it, can be divided into producer surplus and consumer surplus, i.e., the benefit that accrues to the producer and the consumer, respectively, at a given price point.
Price discrimination is an attempt to convert consumer surplus into producer surplus by charging individuals a price closer to what they are willing to pay. The blue region gets bigger (producer profit increases) and the red region gets smaller.
Price discrimination requires market power in order to set prices higher than the equilibrium price (that is, it cannot happen if there is perfect competition). With market power but without price discrimination, producers maximize profit by charging a "monopoly price" higher than the competitive equilibrium price. So there will already be a wedge on the right hand side of the economic surplus region missing, as shown in this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss#/media/File:Ta... (the labels are for taxes, but the math is the same for monopoly pricing) [2]. Price discrimination may recapture some of that "deadweight loss" (selling to some consumers at cheaper prices than they would with a uniform monopoly price), but again producers will take more of it than they would in a competitive market, and they do not create any value that would not have existed in said competitive market (selling to any consumer at a price lower than the competitive equilibrium point is unprofitable by definition, so producers will do their best to avoid it).
Looked at in this way, it is easy to see that consumers end up worse off overall than they would in a competitive market with a uniform market price.
Some definition of "rich" and some definition of "poor" and if "the rich" can afford the same level of products and services then are they really rich?
It can also mean more-expensive prices to wealthier people, or lower-quality scam products for people too poor to complain (poverty can significantly decrease one's energy and available free time) once they get them.
I believe the job-listing identifier was always unique because I eventually got an email from this recruiter which instead contained a bit.ly link, presumably because it rendered me unable to remove the tracking information. I did not click on that link. That was also the last email I received from that person, cementing the idea in my mind that he was "on to me" affecting their recruitment analytics.
Sometimes I think back on that time and smile, knowing that I caused some difficulty -- however small -- for someone working in business intelligence with my dumb anti-tracking antics. Admittedly, they did successfully track some of my behavior but they had to do it manually with a human thinking critically so I'll call it a win.
Anyway, the point of the story is that I didn't click the URL-shortened link because they're shady AF and often used for the specific purpose of hiding details about the URL. Tracking is a rather benign "abuse" of this but there are other practical concerns with malicious domains.