Comment by tonymet
2 months ago
"Advertising or behavioral tracking cookies"
Any real business needs to do behavioral tracking for campaign conversions, add-to-cart, customer acquisition, funneling, retention, personalization, etc.
I love how we all hate cookie banners and say they are unnecessary, but are salaries are all paid by apps that do behavioral tracking.
Only hobby blogs can get by without it.
I appreciate the list of reasons to cookies are useful. Despite having worked in technology for 25 years, I couldn't have articulated that list off the top of my head. I have never worked for a website that made money that way.
I think that means not ALL websites need invasive tracking.
> website that made money that way
Some of those scenarios are dubious as to whether they actually bring profit and "make money". They can very well be a net loss and are merely there to justify the job of the advertising/marketing/analytics/etc team, who is conveniently charge of crunching those numbers and obviously would never put any adverse numbers forward.
Same thing in advertising - there's a lot of middlemen in the industry that are happy to take their cut, cook the numbers and look the other way despite no actual impact on sales.
So while I don't disagree these things can make money when in the right hands and done in moderation, the reality is that there's a shit ton of waste and deadweight in the industry. It may very well be that the actual (vs self-reported) profit from ad/marketing efforts is negative and merely covers the paychecks of said ad/marketing teams.
can you give examples of serious online businesses that are not doing those things?
Here are the industries that I've worked in that all did behavioral tracking for the above applications
* gaming
* music industry
* healthcare
* social media
* news
* internet search
* online retail
B2B SaaS
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You don't seem to understand that one can do behavioral tracking without sharing all personal data with Facebook and Google. GDPR is mainly focused on who you share the data with. Performance tracking of core business processess including traffic sources can be done without involvement of Facebook and Google.
It's totally legit to spend a career helping the folks at Facebook and Google to soak up more private information about everyone so the Trump campaign can improve targeting of the fake news advertisements for the presidential election campaigns. But it is not ethical.
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you don't need a banner for shopping carts, or personalisation
the heuristic for whether you need the banner is essentially: is the user deriving the benefit, or just the operator?
if it's the latter you definitely need the banner
> the heuristic for whether you need the banner is essentially: is the user deriving the benefit, or just the operator?
This is just as bogus as the user vs developer distinction in copyleft world.
Of course users benefit from the operator knowing if their design decisions are actually on the right track.
how does the user browsing the site right now benefit from activity tracking?
the specific user right now, not a hypothetical user at some point in the future (if the business continues to exist)
answer: they don't
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There's no _need_ to use cookies for tracking purposes though, it's usually just easier/cheaper/quicker (or requested by the marketing department) to use off the shelf software than actually spend the time to implement these things.
But if you have a cart, you need a cookie banner regardless of any tracking you are doing.
Even the biggest tech companies, with surplus engineering resources, do third party integrations.
"easier / cheaper / quicker" means that will be the solution . You can't tell your boss "let's spend more money, more time, more risk" on getting it done.
You can track conversions exactly without using analytics or cookies, by using promotion codes.
"you can" and no one does.
It's not that uncommon. It's a completely reliable solution to the problem of attributing sales and knowing how much each advertising channel generate individually in sales.
But taking into account that almost all jobs in advertising depend on keeping it "a mystery", it's no surprise that relatively few companies do it.
After all, it looks better if you tell your boss or your customer that they had 40 000 "impressions" thanks to your campaign, rather than 400 definite sales.
It is very convenient when you can point to others for moral absolution when the victims are invisible to you.
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It's a shame this is downvoted. It doesn't make it right, but it is true.
Until the regulation actually gets enforced so that everyone is on a level playing field and does not do such things, you will be at a disadvantage if you're the only one to comply, so the winning strategy is to not comply and engage in such practices just like your competitors do.
> you will be at a disadvantage if you're the only one to comply, so the winning strategy is to not comply
"need" is the wrong word for this. And the comment doesn't talk about it as a prisoner's dilemma, it says "need" unconditionally. The downvotes are not sad.
I wish I had a nickel for all the downvotes I’ve earned for describing things as they are
how meta