Performance Max Preserving Attribution

on AdExchanger: What Happens When The Attribution Cartel Meets Advertising’s Halo Effect?

on the Monopoly Report podcast: Episode 74: The Attribution Cartel: Why “Privacy-Safe” is NOT what it’s made up to be

Previously: a Terminator ending for Google Privacy Sandbox?

In Mozilla’s privacy preserving ad attribution: The future or an oxymoron?, David Fischer writes,

We are watching what Mozilla is doing with interest but it might just become yet another competing standard.

Now that other Big Tech companies have joined the Meta/Mozilla effort and are working on getting “Attribution” (formerly “Privacy-Preserving Attribution”) through W3C, it’s pretty clear that competing standards is the least of the problems here. Besides user harms like the alarming fraud-friendliness, and the fact that it’s based on cranking through extra garbage data (“for privacy”) on data centers in the USA—right at the time that lots of people are concerned about the impact of data centers on the environment and energy markets and the need to stop depending on IT services in the USA (read the room, people) a big question for advertisers needs to be: can this thing ever give an honest answer?

Imagine that “Attribution” does make it into the major browsers, and it does start producing attribution reports. Two possibilities:

• Wow, this attribution math shows that ads work better on legit sites! Jason Kint was right all along, and the zillions of dollars that Big Tech put into systems to drive expensive ads onto the cheapest possible content was wasted! Guess we better shut down Performance Max and Shrimp Jesus!

• Never mind, the attribution data shows that the best place to spend your ad money is on whatever slop the Big Tech algorithms were picking out for you all along. (ICYMI: Google is Robbing You…and You Can’t Stop Them by Collin Slattery at Taikun Digital. The problem with the garbage tranche is that Google has a ton of it, and in order to boost revenue they need to sell it. How does Google sell garbage that nobody wants to buy?)

The answers could end up a mix of the two, but realistically, the “right” answer is the second one. And we already know that the companies behind “Attribution” are willing to make a few tweaks to keep driving up their share of the advertising business. In any data-driven organization, the correct data to collect is the data that shows whatever Management chose to spend money on was a good idea.

If the first cut at “Attribution” doesn’t produce the answer that the decision-makers want, the second iteration will. The backers are the same people who funded the so-called “Epstein Ballroom”, and expect some return on their investment in today’s “crime is legal now” environment.

From the state legislature point of view, it is more important than ever to pay the same amount of attention—or more—to so-called “privacy-enhancing” ad tracking as to the old-fashioned kinds. A tracking scheme dressed up in privacy math can conceal a lot of deception, discrimination, and other harms to people. More: PETs and public policy

Bonus links

Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires are publicly shielding their children from the products that made them rich by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez. As far back as 2010, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs told a New York Times reporter his kids had never used an iPad and that, We limit how much technology our kids use at home. (see Crack Commandment number 4)

Jeff Bezos Is Destroying What’s Left Of The Washington Post To Please Our Dim, Unpopular Autocrats by Karl Bode. Let’s be clear: billionaires like Jeff Bezos don’t want a functioning press. They want the lazy simulacrum of a functional press that caters to their ideology (more for me, less for you) and protects their interests. As with Larry Ellison’s acquisition of CBS and TikTok, and Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, it’s best to view this as a global project to defang accountability for the planet’s richest, shittiest people and corporations.