Post by Aardvark on Jan 12, 2024 18:03:14 GMT 1
....and what do we gain or lose if we allow them?
I have always firmly believed they are one of the many evils that we have to put up with while surfing the 'net but never really understood how they work. The following was copied from tech site that explains it in an easily understood way.
"It comes down to how digital advertising works. When you visit a website with ads on it an auction happens in fractions of a second to determine which ads you see. Companies that want to show targeted ads set up bids in advance, saying how much they’re willing to pay to reach certain demographics, say, up to $1 for a man between 25-30 in Chicago who’s demonstrated an interest in buying a car. This interest is gained by tracking his movements from site to site and then collating the results. So when you load a webpage, a call goes into the advertising system and says, “There’s a guy here, these are the details we know about him. Now who wants to show him an ad?”
Cookies are one of the primary ways that information is collected and shared on the web. Without cookies, it’s hard for websites to tell the ad system much more than “there’s a person here reading this article.” Advertisers aren’t willing to pay as much for random internet users, so every time the page loads for a cookieless browser user, it’s bringing in less money than it might have before."
It then follows that Google for instance being the most popular search engine has been refining this technique for decades and the products and services that are offered by them are tailored to enable this data harvesting.
And Google is only one player in this game.
I have always firmly believed they are one of the many evils that we have to put up with while surfing the 'net but never really understood how they work. The following was copied from tech site that explains it in an easily understood way.
"It comes down to how digital advertising works. When you visit a website with ads on it an auction happens in fractions of a second to determine which ads you see. Companies that want to show targeted ads set up bids in advance, saying how much they’re willing to pay to reach certain demographics, say, up to $1 for a man between 25-30 in Chicago who’s demonstrated an interest in buying a car. This interest is gained by tracking his movements from site to site and then collating the results. So when you load a webpage, a call goes into the advertising system and says, “There’s a guy here, these are the details we know about him. Now who wants to show him an ad?”
Cookies are one of the primary ways that information is collected and shared on the web. Without cookies, it’s hard for websites to tell the ad system much more than “there’s a person here reading this article.” Advertisers aren’t willing to pay as much for random internet users, so every time the page loads for a cookieless browser user, it’s bringing in less money than it might have before."
It then follows that Google for instance being the most popular search engine has been refining this technique for decades and the products and services that are offered by them are tailored to enable this data harvesting.
And Google is only one player in this game.
