Third party cookies are surveillance tech. So is FLoC. There is no need to track a person from one web site to another like some stalker. Any tech to stalk people like this isn't a good idea in general.
This is antithesis to multiple business models. I know. But I see no reason to accomodate faulty models. Ironically however, I'm not against advertising. But my experience with targeted ads is that they are useless anyway. I remember having gone to plenty of websites searching for very specific but commonly bought car parts. Google had full transactions as I wandered through various websites. Google searches etc all that data along with time of day. Did they provide useful ads? No. Really? That was with third party cookies enabled. I've been looking for parts and am actively buying parts and yet no useful ads, even from parts competitors? All that tech and I'm still having to dig around for suppliers? What about tools? Nope. Not a single relevant ad. Even with access to my search history. Not even when I have purchase receipts emailed to me. Amazon footprints, emails etc going to gmail. Searches done while logged into chrome.
Can't help the feeling that this stalking actually has little to do with real advertising and is more about authoritarian ideals. Real advertisers would have an advertising arrangement set up with each website. Then just cross reference the first party cookie ids in aggregate. Third party cookies were never necessary. So this leaves us with the third party cookies purely for stalking purposes.
So I gave up. Now I just use ddg and figure that the tracking is purely for surveillance. I have no guilt now in dropping third party cookies.
Perhaps, instead of using surveillance tech, why can't I tell google search I'm doing a project involving cars. And it goes and does its correlation magic to explore what I actually use and need. It could do actual linking. Show me actual suppliers. Affiliate links. I could add additional searches and attach them to the project as well. Eg add a line item for insurance, etc. now google knows I need insurance as well. Show me options. More opportunities...
But that would all be useful. It would help advertising and drive sales.
And this tracking is really about surveillance, isn’t it...?
Anecdotally, the majority of targeted ads I see are for services or products I already use or pay for! That makes no sense to me. It does not drive loyalty, it simply annoys me. I’d opt out in a second if possible. Please give me contextual ads.
That's because underneath there's a primitive Bayesian engine with a simple rule of
P(buying crap on the Internet) < P(buying crap on the Internet|already bought crap on the Internet)
there's nothing intelligent going on under the scenes and a massive tracking setup isn't needed here.
(And yes, the massive tracking by Google, Facebook et al isn't really for advertising purposes. It's so they are prepared to pivot from adtech to the much more profitable govtech, a la China's social credit system. TV advertising is actually much more targeted than web advertising and they do it with practically no tracking at all.)
Whether targeted ads work well from a user perspective is irrelevant to Google and FB. These companies only care about whether their ad tech can drive user engagement in such a way that advertisers think targeted ads work well.
If I was a paying advertiser I'd be angry that customers didn't know about my internet business, especially when the customer buys 10k in parts from a bunch of other suppliers and not me.
Third party cookies are surveillance tech. So is FLoC. There is no need to track a person from one web site to another like some stalker. Any tech to stalk people like this isn't a good idea in general.
This is antithesis to multiple business models. I know. But I see no reason to accomodate faulty models. Ironically however, I'm not against advertising. But my experience with targeted ads is that they are useless anyway. I remember having gone to plenty of websites searching for very specific but commonly bought car parts. Google had full transactions as I wandered through various websites. Google searches etc all that data along with time of day. Did they provide useful ads? No. Really? That was with third party cookies enabled. I've been looking for parts and am actively buying parts and yet no useful ads, even from parts competitors? All that tech and I'm still having to dig around for suppliers? What about tools? Nope. Not a single relevant ad. Even with access to my search history. Not even when I have purchase receipts emailed to me. Amazon footprints, emails etc going to gmail. Searches done while logged into chrome.
Can't help the feeling that this stalking actually has little to do with real advertising and is more about authoritarian ideals. Real advertisers would have an advertising arrangement set up with each website. Then just cross reference the first party cookie ids in aggregate. Third party cookies were never necessary. So this leaves us with the third party cookies purely for stalking purposes.
So I gave up. Now I just use ddg and figure that the tracking is purely for surveillance. I have no guilt now in dropping third party cookies.
Perhaps, instead of using surveillance tech, why can't I tell google search I'm doing a project involving cars. And it goes and does its correlation magic to explore what I actually use and need. It could do actual linking. Show me actual suppliers. Affiliate links. I could add additional searches and attach them to the project as well. Eg add a line item for insurance, etc. now google knows I need insurance as well. Show me options. More opportunities...
But that would all be useful. It would help advertising and drive sales.
And this tracking is really about surveillance, isn’t it...?