More attribution cartel Q and A

previously: Attribution cartel Q and A

Some more questions and comments on the attribution cartel came up after my AdExchanger piece on What Happens When The Attribution Cartel Meets Advertising’s Halo Effect? ran.

Doesn’t the attribution cartel have better privacy properties than other ways of measuring advertising?

In theory, yes. Attribution cartel proponents claim that their system makes it prohibitively hard to match the person who saw an ad (impression) to the person who bought something (conversion).

But all the big problems with the attribution cartel are still even there if you assume

• the design is perfect

• the design is implemented perfectly in large browser codebases

Designing a system without meaningful protection from fraud creates incentives to do fraud. And adfraud is not a “victimless” problem. The Big Tech companies assume adfraud isn’t a problem, because it’s revenue-positive for them and the costs fall on other players—but in practice, a high-fraud environment means not only that legit sites are under-compensated and advertisers fed misleading data, users are at greater risk. (I covered that problem in The Hidden Dangers Of Privacy-Preserving Attribution – And A Smarter Solution.)

The mathematical properties of this one proposal in isolation aren’t enough to justify a claim that it “provides better privacy.” It has to be understood in context. Like the man said,

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

Put the Attribution proposal up on a poster, award it a math prize, and I’ll give it a round of applause. But don’t put it out on the real Internet where it will cause all kinds of grief. And it could still have design or implementation problems after all that. Remember TURTLEDOVE came out on January 16, 2020 and the “Malicious match key provider attack” didn’t happen until March 24, 2023. (Google “Privacy Sandbox” timeline)

Can organisations the size of attribution cartel member companies really keep so much fraud a secret?

The Big Tech companies love to run yet another season of the layoffs reality show. So, for an employee, inside knowledge of attribution fraud would be like an immunity idol on Survivor, right? Squirrel away one notebook and you’re resting and vesting as long as you can stay quiet.

But it’s not quite that obvious. Complex reporting fraud issues can happen without any one person seeing the big picture. That’s because the revenue-positive bug effect is a thing. Any large software system will have more tickets than people (or bots) can actually fix. Some of those tickets are going to end up in backlog for a long time. And when you’re talking about ads, the bugs that go to the head of the list are those that have a big negative revenue impact. Revenue-positive bugs are low priority.

(update) The Shift: Redefining Value in the AI Era, from Jen Wang, Ph.D. · Staff Data Scientist at Meta, shows how complexity tends to increase until the number of revenue-positive bugs present is impossible to estimate accurately.

The highest-priority and politically easiest bugs to fix will be those that make the attribution cartel reports different from the “Performance Max” or other Big Tech algorithm. Failure to show a halo effect for ads on legit sites (or other stats problems) might not even get flagged as a bug. The best-known example of something like this happening is the whole pivot to video situation, but it can even happen at legit publishers. Gannett had a long-running, likely revenue-positive, bug that caused ads to be erroneously reported as running on the wrong site.

The difference between the Gannett bug and a hypothetical revenue-positive bug for an attribution cartel member is that outside researchers could see Gannett’s.

I don’t claim that the attribution cartel members will be able to do technothriller-level secret-keeping, but they won’t have to. Complexity and incentives will take care of it.

Are obvious cartels still a thing?

Yes, in the USA anyway. Price fixing here keeps getting worse. See Pluralistic: Trump’s fruitless search for a goreable ox (09 May 2026) by Cory Doctorow and Meat Industry Price Fixer Sentenced to Make Money. The attribution cartel does for advertising what Agri Stats does for meat.

More: Think before you click

Bonus links

Chinese solar exports double in a month to hit record high amid energy crisis from Ember Energy. Fifty countries set all-time records for Chinese solar imports in March 2026, with a further 60 seeing the highest levels in six months. Exports to Africa rose by 176% compared to February 2026 to reach 10 GW in March 2026, while exports to Asia doubled to reach 39 GW—both new all time records.

Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want by Elizabeth Lopatto. In the place of problem-solving technology, companies have jumped on successive bandwagons like NFTs, the metaverse, and large language models. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem.

Crypto scam lures ships into Strait of Hormuz, falsely promising safe passage by Jeremy Hsu. MARISKS identified one ship as having potentially fallen victim to crypto scams after it attempted to pass through the strait on April 18, although Reuters was unable to confirm that information. The incident supposedly occurred during a brief window when Iran claimed it was allowing ships to undergo inspection to pass through, but the ship in question turned back after Iranian military forces fired upon it.

This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men by EJ Dickson. A med student says he’s made thousands of dollars selling photos and videos of a young conservative woman he created using generative tools. He’s not alone.