@anahata Or maybe it’s important for people to see how horrible they are.

@aral Also 95% is awful.

It's 95% of single-session if the user does something identifiable. You don't get previous sessions of that user, and the majority of users don't convert.

We left the era of single-channel attribution a long time ago, you want to be able to combine display, ppc, email, into a single funnel. This does not do that.

@Eden So you’re saying he’s just a garden-variety douchebag?

@aral Basically, yes. He's bragging that it's a lot more significant than it is.

When I left marketing, the pitch I was trying to get through to companies is that user identification is now a deal you strike with the user.

Make your website worth logging into, so that users are trading their privacy for features.

Marketers would rather do *this*. It barely works, and it's just about tricking the client

@aral I've talked about this a few times, but the traditional ways of doing this have always been stitching together IDs across multiple areas.

What was common was using third and first party IDs as a master key, so that if both IDs changed at different times you could keep tracking the user.

Or emailing a user a link with their user id embedded in it worked well, because you can then tie that session to an actual person, worked well for cross device.

@aral The more nefarious fingerprinting never seemed to take off with anyone I worked with, I think everyone just saw it as a bit weird and a PR issue.

Then a lot more apps took off because the Android ID could be nabbed fairly easily. I wonder if companies will stop bothering with apps now that that ID is harder to use for marketing.

@FreePietje @aral Oh you can be anonymous, but it takes effort, more effort than should be necessary, and more effort that most people have time or willingness to do...

@FreePietje It’s always good when a Martin Shkreli pops up to make it impossible to ignore how horrible certain industries are, yes.

@atridad @aral they’ve managed to completely forget that the “user” is a human being with goals and intent, and instead look at them as just numbers to be converted.

That’s the thing I hate most about surveillance capitalism - it just completely dehumanises people to these fucking…numbers

@rfox @atridad It’s easy to forget people are people when we stop calling them people… and when we have a system that lionises extractive and manipulative behaviour befitting psychopaths.

@aral @atridad oh for sure, just as industrial capitalism reframed “nature” as “resources” we’re seeing the same thing with humans under surveillance capitalism.

The root of the problem isn’t in industry or surveillance. It’s in capitalism.

@datacop @aral "especially top of funnel when those users are almost always anonymous" Referring to people arriving at your site as entering a "funnel"! We just are a stream of liquid from which to squeeze profit from, it seems 🙄

@eluc @Framasoft Take a look at @plausible :)