You’re right. That one time my employer didn’t pay me for 3 pay circles- it wasn’t theft, it was piracy or copyright infringement. Simply a breach in contract.
I’m in adtech and we manage to do ads in a completely user respecting way within the retail space. We monetize on search traffic without user data, cookies, local storage. The only browser feature we leverage are click events and img tags.
Though I appreciate your frustration, your aggression is a little off target. :)
> The only browser feature we leverage are click events
Do the users want their click events fed into an advertising engine? Did you ask them? If you made this opt-in, how many would say, yes, please track my clicks in order to advertise to me? Even if its anonymized/aggregated.
A huge amount of advertising is enabled by tracking users against their will, exploiting the fact that many users aren't aware of what's going on, don't know how to stop it, or aren't as invested in their preference as the adtech companies are in their revenue. "A man is always right in his own eyes". If you're smart it's easy to justify this stuff to yourself because you're getting paid, but that doesn't make it right.
I should have known my comment would only make you more aggressive. Walked into that I guess.
You are right in that a huge amount of ads leverage user data at the expense of the user.
The point I’m trying to make is that not all involved in the advertising technology are exploitive. We do zero ad targeting based on user data. You make a search for specific products, we take the response and shuffle the order a bit based on vendor campaigns. That’s it. Nothing is associated or even collected from the user. It’s all system metrics.
The greatest harm that my team does is hurting optimized relevancy, which is inherit to advertising but also something we work hard to alleviate.
That misused proverbs quote is a nice touch. Shows a lot of self awareness.
> The point I’m trying to make is that not all involved in the advertising technology are exploitive.
I don't doubt that you're being truthful here. The problem is that the vast majority of adtech is extremely exploitive, and there is no way for a user to tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys". So all adtech must be treated as hostile.
I'm sorry if this hurts your beliefs, but in what way are aggregated and anonymized data exploitative? Every "offline" store does it. How do you expect businesses to make profits if they can't look at what drives their revenue without bothering every single customer with consent requests?
I agree with your point. However, I think I look at it from a slightly different perspective.
When it comes to any code I produce (with the exception of some learning projects), I try to keep it: effective, efficient and simple. In that order.
Effective is essentially what you were saying about correctness and usability from the user perspective. Peter Drucker would say to be effective is to "do the right thing." This is always an outward focused item. Does it impact the user in the right way? Does it solve the right problem? Etc. This is hands down the most important thing. Nothing else matters if you're doing the wrong thing.
In contrast, efficiency is to "do the thing right." Once you're doing the right thing, minimizing your costs, increasing your quality, making it so your code doesn't "consume the whole world" all fall under this category. Poor efficiency can negatively impact the effectiveness of your code. "It does this really cool thing, but it takes far too long to load so I can't use it."
Then lastly, keep it simple. That is not to say ignore the natural complexity of the problem, but rather to keep the solution to the essential complexity of the problem. Keeping things only as complex as they need to be covers a whole lot of dimensions in software. It makes things more explicit and understandable, it helps with code readability, and code re-usability. It decreases the surface area of what needs to be maintained. All good things for the health of the dev and the project.
It's all in that order for specific reasons. They move outside in. As the dev, I'm not the most import person with respect to the code I'm writing. The user is, and so the code needs to be purposeful to them (efficacy). Efficiency is more about the product, making sure it works properly. Keeping things simple, although it impacts efficacy and efficiency, is largely a positive for me and helps me maintain sanity.
I think it's important to note that it's all of these things, not just one of them. We'll approach tradeoffs in a prioritize way, but we're striving for the three of them. Obviously a very difficult task. But I find that approaching engineering this way has helped me grow a lot as an engineer.
Anyway, first time post here. Your comment made me think of this. Thanks for coming to my tedtalk.
