> Yet, some how the vast majority of HN comments defend the cookie banners saying if you don't do anything "bad" then you don't need the banners.
There are a LOT of shades of gray when it comes to website tracking and HN commenters refuse to deal with nuance.
Imagine running a store, and then I ask you how many customers you had yesterday and what they are looking at. "I don't watch the visitors - it's unnecessary and invasive". When in fact, having a general idea what your customers are looking for or doing in your store is pretty essential for running your business.
Obviously, this is different than taking the customer's picture and trading it with the store across the street.
When it comes to websites and cookie use, the GDPR treated both behaviors identically.
Realistically, you want to know things like, how many users who looked at something made a purchase in the next 3 days? Is that going up or down after a recent change we made?
Many necessary business analytics require tracking and aggregating the behavior of individual users. You can't do that with server logs.
> Many necessary business analytics require tracking and aggregating the behavior of individual users.
Businesses existed before tracking individuals was practical. Wanting something does not make it necessary.
> Realistically, you want to know things like, how many users who looked at something made a purchase in the next 3 days? Is that going up or down after a recent change we made?
Metrics like this had little benefit sales did not in my experience. And tracking might be acceptable if it stopped there.
Many people want to do many things, problem is do we agree as society it is ok, considering all the implications.
I personally find the commercial targeting extremely poor. I look for things to buy and I get stupid ads which don't fit, or I bought the things and still bombarded with the ad for the same thing.
But data collection can be used by far more nefarious purposes, like political manipulation (already happening). So yes, I am willing to give up some percentage points in optimizing the commercial and advertisement process (for your example, wait for 2 weeks and check for the actual sales volume difference) to prevent other issues.
This isn't even about ads. It's just about basic business metrics.
And no, you can't just "wait 2 weeks and check for the actual sales volume difference". The example I gave requires individual anonymized tracking. Pretty much anything that has to do with correlations in customer behavior requires individual tracking. And that's how businesses improve.
Also, it's not just giving up "some percentage points". There are a huge number of small businesses that can only exist because Facebook ads work so well in targeting very precise customer segments who would never know about their product otherwise. Targeting advertising does actually work, and you'd be putting tons of small business owners out of work if you got rid of it.
Maybe what you say is correct, but without a reference can also be an opinion influenced by your domain of activity.
What I see though is many shops closing, because more and more people buying online. What I hear is people buying crap from Amazon and throwing it very fast, or using fast fashion from the like of Shein. Neither seem to me a great outcome.
I did a cursory look and I found this https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/22/a-look-at... , will quote "The number of high-propensity business applications – those that are highly likely to turn into businesses with payrolls – remained relatively stable between 2009 and 2019,". This for me does not support the idea that of "huge number" that only exist due to Facebook (business exits have also grown over the period, more data at https://data-explorer.oecd.org/), but of course this is an interpretation.
Okay, and why do you need to share whatever info you collect with thousands of random data "partners" if it's just for you to keep track of whatever made up thing you say you need to track? Because in reality that's what GDPR exposed, that random ecomm website selling socks or whatever is sharing everything they know about you with a billion random companies for some unknowable reason.
There are a LOT of shades of gray when it comes to website tracking and HN commenters refuse to deal with nuance.
Imagine running a store, and then I ask you how many customers you had yesterday and what they are looking at. "I don't watch the visitors - it's unnecessary and invasive". When in fact, having a general idea what your customers are looking for or doing in your store is pretty essential for running your business.
Obviously, this is different than taking the customer's picture and trading it with the store across the street.
When it comes to websites and cookie use, the GDPR treated both behaviors identically.