Are ya winning, son?

The attribution cartel is in Digiday, in a series by Ronan Shields.WTF: W3C’s Attribution API?W3C Attribution API prompts debate over web measurement futureFears of Big Tech bias underpin debates around W3C’s Attribution API

I’m quoted, about the proposal’s biggest privacy problem.

“You get this paradoxical increase in user privacy risks, because the proposal obfuscates and rewards attribution fraud,” he told Digiday, adding the proposal’s current guise actually “creates more incentives to collect more data on more people in order to sneak ads in front of those who are about to buy anyway.”

And so is Angelina Eng, formerly VP of measurement at Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) U.S.

“There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and there is always customization,” she explained to Digiday, urging the importance of the ability to slice and dice data across time periods and portfolios without browser-imposed constraints or privacy budgets limiting combinations.

(The “privacy budget” feature is part of how “structural advantages” to large scale are built in to the proposal.)

So if both the free-range privacy nerd (me) and the adtech measurement expert executive are against the attribution proposal, could that mean that the attribution cartel is doing something right?

Unfortunately, no. The big companies in the middle are just taking such a big bite that it’s unacceptable to both ends.

Adtech people and privacy nerds are on opposite sites on a lot of issues, but fundamentally most members of both groups are proponents of decentralized decision-making. Markets, stigmergic learning, competition, all that good stuff.

The Big Tech companies are approaching the problem differently. In the surveillance oligopoly model, prices—instead of acting as an information-carrying medium—serve only as an output of an ML system that collects data from both buyers and sellers. The operator of the ML system can sit back and collect all the consumer surplus (which is really the only source of revenue remaining that’s large enough to justify all those data center investments, just saying).

meme version of this blog post

There is well-known criticism of economic central planning, but every so often someone predicts that this time it will be different, and central planning will totally work because now we have better information technology for central planning. This time, that supposedly enabling technology is “AI.” The Attribution proposal is not an economic central planning platform all by itself, but it’s a step toward the cartel members’planned economy goal. Instead of a variety of advertising decision-makers evaluating the performance of different ad media for different purposes and different audiences, the cartel will be able to provide one centralized report, which will, of courseback up the placements made by its own algorithms.

My view is that advertising should be an economic signal between independent players in an economy. Cory Doctorow summarizes the other side of the argument as“Facebook has built a mind-control ray out of Big Data, and we can sell anything to anyone”.

So it’s not a surprise that adtech people and privacy people are on the same side on the attribution cartel issue. If the atttribution cartel can be beaten—and it can, the freedom-loving sidebeat the Clipper Chip and the Fritz Chip and this time they don’t even have a chip—then the privacy nerds and the IAB can go back to arguing about cookies and stuff in the context of a market economy. I’m looking forward to that.

Bonus linksLG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps by Brian Krebs. App makers looking for ways to monetize their creations can turn to residential proxy providers, which pay developers to include SDKs that turn the user’s device into a residential proxy node that is rented to paying customers. In the case of LG and Samsung smart TVs, Spur found residential proxy SDKs bundled with everything from simple games like Pac-Man to screensavers and file utilities.Apps targeted at US troops contain Chinese and Russian code by Dell Cameron. The largely unregulated advertising industry that tracks Americans online treats civilians and service members mostly the same—unless there is profit in telling them apart—despite evidence that exposure can reveal troop deployments, unit movements, and the routines of personnel within intelligence facilities and hardened shelters where nuclear weapons are believed to be stored. (Also a risk for defense manufacturing workers, utility repair crews, and first responders:Surveillance risks and the TIDALWAVE report )