Comment by Hnrobert42

2 months ago

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.

15 comments

Hnrobert42

Reply
Nextgrid  2 months ago

> 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.

tonymet  2 months ago

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

  • bflesch  2 months ago

    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.