Podcast: ft. Rob Armstrong - Cookieless: Part 2 - The Problem With Cookies

Brian Jones:

It's funny, though, because I actively go into project management software every day where all of our projects are and I pull them out and put them into my text file so I know what to work on that day.

Rob Armstrong:

I think it means our brains have pretty good RAM, ultimately.

Brian Jones:

Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. I mean that's probably the real answer to the project management software debate, is you need to understand what needs to be in your long-term storage and then RAM, and once your RAM's maxed out, you got to hire a new person.

Rob Armstrong:

Yeah.

Brian Jones:

My RAM manager in my brain, though, is really loud and really anxious. It's not also written down on paper. He's like hollering and screaming and running around in circles all day.

Rob Armstrong:

Needs a hard reset.

Adam Kerpelman:

What was that thing you thought of this morning? Hey, everybody. It's The Data-Driven Marketers sponsored by NetWise. I'm Adam.

Brian Jones:

I'm Brian.

Rob Armstrong:

Hey, I'm Rob.

Adam Kerpelman:

Welcome back for another hang in the data basement. Thanks for joining us. And special thanks to our guest this week. I think our first returning guest-

Brian Jones:

Yay.

Adam Kerpelman:

... Rob Armstrong, SVP of product at Iota. And this is also, I think, our first second episode in a series, so I will link to the previous episode where you can really get the 45 minute rundown on Rob's background and why he's here to talk about the topic today, which is cookie-less and cookies and the state of cookies in the world, and what's going on with them that you keep hearing about them all of a sudden? Yeah, Rob, thanks for jumping on for round two.

Rob Armstrong:

Yeah, this is exciting. Groundbreaking.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. So, just really quickly before we jump in, assuming that some subset of people won't have listened to the previous episode and never will, you mind giving us a quick rundown on your background and why you're the one that we tapped to talk to us about this stuff?

Rob Armstrong:

Sure. Happy to. I've been in ad tech and product roles for the last 13 years, and a number of those roles building data products directly off of cookies. And have had a great relationship with the NetWise team through a number of companies and over many years. I've studied this quite a bit. At Iota, we have a front row seat to the rollercoaster ride that is the privacy shifts. Iota [inaudible 00:02:44] having a lot of roots in Europe, rode right through GDPR and advised a lot of the industry and their partners on how to interpret the laws as they were coming out, and so we have an opportunity again to help lead the industry as we find our way into a cookie-less future.

Brian Jones:

You are definitely the brain we go to with any sort of industry direction, strategy, shifts in policy, and tech integrations. Industry-wide, you are just always so deep in the weeds with this stuff. It's super helpful to know you and have you share your wisdom with us.

Rob Armstrong:

It's not a boring position to be in, that's for sure. Where should we get started? I mean, we're not talking about chocolate chips. Right? I mean-

Adam Kerpelman:

No.

Rob Armstrong:

[inaudible 00:03:32] a cookie.

Adam Kerpelman:

No, we're not talking about delicious morsels. So, yeah, last time I think we just barely ended with actually talking about what is a cookie rather than the history of this stuff and how we got up to cookies. So, yeah, I think that's the place to start. What it is a cookie?

Rob Armstrong:

Yeah. So, as your browser interacts with web pages, those are hosted by servers, the interaction creates a state challenge where the server doesn't necessarily know when you're coming back or whether the same person or session is maintained., And so a cookie is a way for the server to immediately connect to data that is collected and attach it together. So, for example, if you're on an e-commerce site and you start to fill up the shopping cart, your power goes out, you can go back to that site and, like magic, those things that you've added to your cart are there again. And there's many such examples of ways that cookies can be used, but effectively, it's a code file that's stored on your device and allows for that entity to recognize you later.

Rob Armstrong:

There's a big difference between first and third-party cookies. Right? So, third-party cookies allow for connecting that identity across different sites, and when we say sites, we're talking about top level domain like facebook.com, netwise.com, iota.com, et cetera. So, one entity could have a cookie that's the same cookie that gets updated as you traverse those sites. A first-party cookie would be something that lives only under the specific site. In those three examples, one of them may have a whole lot of data, even though it's a first-party cookie, in fact, far more than a third-party cookie, than the average third-party cookie would. And so, at the same time, an importance of perception is when I'm on a site and I get a cookie from the site, I know where the cookie's coming from because I'm on the site, whereas a third-party cookie, I've no idea who is dropping it and where it's coming from, and that creates the spooky factor that has, in part, led us to where we are today with the cookie crumbling.

Brian Jones:

Yeah, because you kind of implicitly are giving permission for a first-party cookie. Right? You went to that domain or you clicked that link on purpose to go there. That site, that server that you're accessing could allow any third-party cookie to come on now and you don't necessarily know if you're not watching.

Rob Armstrong:

That's right. Yeah.

Brian Jones:

And [inaudible 00:06:14] any judgment yet on anything, but that's [inaudible 00:06:17] what's going on.

Rob Armstrong:

Because I know everybody does this. Right? Every site you visit, you immediately go to the privacy policy and you read about how they're handling your data. So, legally, that presence of policy gives the air cover for the first-party cookie to be this thing. That's very transparent about what it's doing. A third-party cookie, you don't necessarily even know whose entity it is, where to find their privacy policy, so legally, that's a bit of a challenge in the world of regulation.

Adam Kerpelman:

Do we know why it's called a cookie?

Rob Armstrong:

That's a really good question. If we had the Joe Rogan guy that does research live, that would be-

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. As soon as I asked that. We can ask Jamie to look it up for us real quick. Yeah. So, we could Google it, but I guarantee you the answer is just it was a clever name from some... Probably Brandon [inaudible 00:07:13] or something, inventing JavaScript, but I think it comes from the idea of leaving crumbs behind, ultimately. Right? A trail of crumbs?

Rob Armstrong:

And it's a friendly term.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. It sounds... Well, but it's a friendly use case. I do not want to have to re-log in every time I open a new tab on Facebook or whatever.

Brian Jones:

Wait, I want to show them the reason. I'm not going to fact check those real time. I'm just going to trust this site. But it says it's derived from a larger term, magic cookies, that is coming from the idea of a fortune cookie, and so it's a cookie with an embedded message. So, it's like a secret little thing that gives you magic information inside.

Adam Kerpelman:

Does that make it sound more or less creepy?

Brian Jones:

If only our cookies all came with lotto numbers, as well.

Adam Kerpelman:

But the point, either way, is it's not creepy from a computer science, "Let's code up an app," standpoint. Right? You have to use local storage for things to make any app work, especially an app talking to something across the network. Even just to read a webpage, it's compiling it and building a thing on your device in the browser based on the code that it's pulling onto the site. Right? The idea of the cookie is essentially just, we need a place to put a chunk of code so that we can know that you're still logged in or your cart's there, whatever. Right? Like you said.

Rob Armstrong:

That's right. And the industry, for a long time, has made a very red line drawn around what could be against a cookie, and this is where some of the GDPR laws have blown up the concept, or clearly changed the concept, of what is personal data? But anytime in the last seven, eight, nine, 10 years, the cookies being built in the industry for use by anybody, there's no name, phone number, email address that's readable attached to it that's then transacted upon or sold to others, and that's pretty important. So, the technical term is pseudonymization where that cookie does represent somebody, a person, an individual, but it's not an identifier that can trace back to Brian Jones.

Rob Armstrong:

So, the cookies of an Iota are 123456 and you could see that file and you would have no idea what exactly is that. If you came behind the walls within an Iota or other type of business that has audience data, you would see things like auto-intender, or male or female, or interested in shopping, or potentially what industry you work for. So, fairly benign information. There are concepts that we probably don't want to get into like [inaudible 00:10:15] anonymity and things where if you combine a bunch of these together, you might be able to find an identity, for example, a job title at a very specific company in a specific location where you could back into that form of identification. But ultimately, cookies are IDs and they're pretty benign that way.

Rob Armstrong:

I think the biggest challenge, and this is the heart of the matter, is they're completely unfettered and unconstrained by browsers, until recently with Firefox and Safari, in the sense of how cookies interact with each other, and the problem, the great problem of building commerce off cookies, which is for everyone who creates a cookie, their ID is going to be different for the same person. Whereas, if I'm looking at someone's hashed email address, which is irreversible, a bunch of gobbledygook, a string of characters, that preserves uniqueness, but can't be brought back to the email address as it was, so you can't really ever email the person or discover their identity. That's hashing. Or something like a mobile ID, those... or CTVIDs now, like your Samsung ID. To everybody else, every party in the ecosystem, your ID is the same. So, if I have data about this ID, I can share it with someone and they can use it. They have the same ID.

Rob Armstrong:

When it comes to cookies, everybody has a different ID, and so what do we do? Well, then, it creates this whole pixel party on the page where if I want to share my data with LiveRamp and Oracle and Trade Desk, I have to bring and invite their cookies in to then create a cookie on the user. And then at that point in time in milliseconds, we exchange information, we say, "Okay, I call it 123, you call it ABC. Great. And now we have a connection where when I send you data, I can send you data on the same... We're lining up apples to apples for each individual." And so, that has created such a problem because that is a huge cascade. There's literally now hundreds of cookies that get culled just for the purpose of sharing information and doing commerce, and I think that spooks people.

Brian Jones:

This was an unbelievable discovery for me when I started realizing what was going on here. Because if you think of it from like a, what is a good technical solution to... If as an engineer, you went back and you're like, "I'm going to invent something in the world for us to be able to all track and run ads," this is so far from what you would build. It is such a congested, complex, mish-mash. It's astonishing technology that so much can happen so quickly behind the scenes for all these companies and servers and systems to exchange information and track people. It's this weird, distributed, browser-enabled database for exchanging and tracking information. It's such a silly technology for something that... Maybe we'll get to this later, or maybe in the next episode, but what the future could be if this were designed to properly and transparently. It's crazy what's going on.

Rob Armstrong:

Right.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah, like I often say, the idea of the cookie makes sense. You need to have that function to make the web app work the way that we want it to work. We have built it into this just cluster F mass of trying to achieve this other thing with it that we realized we could do as we started to piece the things together, but now it... Like you said, Brian, it's crazy that once you realize what's happening and why it's happening and how it's happening, all creepiness aside, it's just not the best solution for what we're trying to get done. And so, we're going to talk, I think, in the next episode about what those solutions are. But I love that you, you called it a pixel party.

Brian Jones:

That was great. Great phrase.

Adam Kerpelman:

It's the thing that happens when people, you install an ad blocker and the ad blocker, to make its own point... because they have their own agendas, it's an app and they make money, they have a counter for how many trackers were blocked. And you go and you load Twitter and it's like 89 of them, and you're like, "What could that possibly even..." And I think that's the thing that's creating this public perception of like, "Why do you need 89 things on your..." Every time I load the New York Times, I go, "What do you need 112 trackers for?" But the reality is, they're just probably just loading the one or two ad networks, but then there's this piggyback cascade of just everyone piles in their trackers so that they can link up this distributed network that you talked about. And like you said, Brian, it's a stupid solution.

Adam Kerpelman:

We talked in a warmup episode for this series that's already come out, I think we called it the ID Challenge. There's a very real thing they're trying to solve here, which is, there's a subset of stuff that I can't do unless I know that you are you. And the way to think about that, it's just... We have driver's licenses because there is a context where I need to make sure that you're you against some sort of database. And there's a lot of that on the web, too, where... It's not they have to know that it's me, like Adam, but to be able to faithfully send me the next thing that I requested, you need to know an address and a this or that or another thing. Right? That is just a computer science problem that ultimately we're trying to solve with the cookie.

Adam Kerpelman:

But it's also critical to how the web works, and I think the cookie system that gets us to the question of, "Well, why does this hot mess really..." We've talked about the technology of why this hot mess exists. I think we have to, in this chunk of the series, talk about why it has propagated so much. Right? Which is ultimately, it's an ID solution that is more or less open, which is why the web is free, as long as you pay an ISP for your downstream. Right?

Rob Armstrong:

It's exponential in the sense of, again, that whole connectivity. There's so much interlocking exchange of use cases and capabilities, and so in the simple example of having a DMP, a marketer's data first-party, their DMP enriched with third-party data, a DSP to target new users, and a publisher that originates users, there's at least five entities there that are creating cookies. That's not five pixels, that's five times four because each one has to sync with each other in order to exchange between. I think with the math there is right. Someone will check that. Maybe add it to the comments. But the whole idea is that it's a great workaround and it's not been the best for a couple of reasons. We've talked about pixels and also the latency they bring to pages, which is not good for anybody.

Rob Armstrong:

The other thing about cookies is they're pretty unstable. If I'm in the middle of loading, I get impatient, I leave, well, some folks are going to get a cookie, some aren't, and then that connectivity is lost. There's resetting of cookies, which happens through the browser at times. And oh, by the way, every single device you have with every single browser you have, that [inaudible 00:18:32] of combination, each of those is a different cookie. So, it's very common for a population that's active online to see many more cookies than people in the population because of that proliferation. There's no understanding of when they expire, like when did it get dropped by the user? There's no like, "Hey, I'm leaving now. Bye-bye, ecosystem," it just... And then maybe one of the favorite things is like, what's the solution for... The industry has tried to wrangle this in through like a universal opt-out. What does a universal opt out do? It sets a cookie.

Brian Jones:

Well, that gets to a really fundamental aspect of the whole thing. Right? And you run into this with GDPR when you're trying to be compliant. You have to store information about the person who wants to be removed so you can make sure they're removed all the time. With these privacy and ID and tracking conversations, you start to hit up fundamental limitations of reality. Right? If you exist, you're there, you're being dragged in the universe.

Rob Armstrong:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

Right. That's a little bit what we talked about in that other episode, which is... And we pulled it back in that conversation all the way from not even in the digital world. Right? ID is a challenge just out in the real world, and that's why we have government sponsored ID systems because it's necessary to be able to prove somebody's identity. And it's just, in the real world, it becomes easy past a point because you're standing in front of me and so I know that you didn't change to someone else in the split second in between. But in the digital space, we don't know that for sure, and I don't mean like personal identity, but I logged in, I'm part of a session, it's a button click away from swapping that with something else, theoretically. Right? So, it is a considerably more difficult challenge than just like, "Oh, well we need a universal ID system that's just like driver's licenses but for the internet." It's sort of like, "It's not even that simple because we've got to put a thing there to enable persistence." And now we have another layer of complexity.

Rob Armstrong:

Yeah. The point on GPR is a good one [inaudible 00:20:55]. I've seen this a couple of times and it's quite remarkable. A business that creates cookies, is known to create cookies will get a request for discovery of what data do you have on me. You have my personal data. So, it'll be an email. And in order to make that request, they have to verify their information. So, suddenly, now we have like a passport image and we have all this detailed information about your address, your full name, date of birth, and then it's like, what data do you have on me? And we have no idea unless you take all these steps to find your cookie ID, and at that point, now we have... You've just given us the keys to know you really are, and now we'll fulfill your requests and delete it, but [crosstalk 00:21:44].

Adam Kerpelman:

[crosstalk 00:21:44] nebulous blob of anonymized just crap, and you just tied that to a whole host of personally identifiable information that is legitimately problematic if you're not a company equipped to house that kind of information on your server, for example.

Brian Jones:

Yeah. It's just-

Adam Kerpelman:

I never really thought of that. That's hilarious.

Brian Jones:

It's such a funny space with technology because on one hand, this stuff is so... The consuming public of all of these technologies are so aware of it because it's become so effective at doing its job. Right? I don't think anyone was worried about ad tracking and web tracking until retargeting of purchases from big retailers started happening. And when all of a sudden every... I remember, I don't know if this this was like five, six, seven years ago, but everyone all of a sudden was like, "I was shopping for shoes and I saw those shoes on the next website," and it just was like, it's swept everyone. I remember having that conversation with everyone I knew.

Brian Jones:

And it feels so personal. It feels like everyone's looking into my life, but the nature of the technology is just so vast that it can't be other humans looking at you. It can't be humans being like, "You were shopping for Nikes. I'm going to go take this post-it and put it over on the next website you go to." It just can't work that way. And so, it truly is this weird situation where it is all this information attached to you, but just not in a way that anyone knows or will ever see or will ever do anything with in a personal sense. So, it almost is like the universe knows that you're buying shoes, but the universe doesn't care. Right? The universe isn't going to do anything about that.

Rob Armstrong:

Yeah. It's quite benign. I mean, in the building of these products and maybe two times in life I even remember actually trying to trace what a cookie specifically was doing and that was because we thought it was a fraud related or robot related incident. Almost 99 point some percent of the time it's looking at aggregated stats and directional information because it's such a huge, vast surface area, to your point. I think mobile has a bit of a different conundrum, and there's this story, actually, quite recently, of a priest who was outed based on his use of Grindr. If you trace a mobile ID and its locations down to very specific GPS points and you can find out the apps installed on the device, I mean, that can get pretty damaging in a very real world example. Ironically, though, cookies, they don't have that precise location, so you can't really do that to identify someone very easily.

Rob Armstrong:

I think one other thing to talk about with cookie is it's an important is, that whole pixel party, another thing that comes behind it or within it is this unfettered increase of data exchange. And a couple of things within this, one is that for a publisher, I mean, forget about control, it's not even about the tech they install, which they will look at one time before they enroll it out and they have no idea what might change behind the scenes. And they can add tag monitoring. There's more solutions now than ever about that.

Rob Armstrong:

The other thing is like the ad slot itself. I mean, the ad slot is rendered on the page within an I frame, it can also create a cookie, and guess what? It can bring with its own pixel party. And so, an advertiser, a smart one, in the old days, some systems are more controlled on this now, could just be jamming in collection techniques against the ads they're serving so that they're actually growing their own audience. So, in all of this, publishers have had very little control and have lost out, they call it, the data leakage problem, but this has led to, I think, a serious challenge. And then, the big one that, I mean, having been in this wild west and riding different waves and doing different forms of innovation, and all the way building above board audiences that no one would ever look at and say, "Well, that's problematic," I've always been skeptical about what's so wrong with all this other than the publisher stuff?

Rob Armstrong:

And then I came across a couple of articles in doing some research around an expecting mom who had a miscarriage, and she's still getting ads about having a baby soon or that she had the baby. That's terrible. And she can't turn it off. That's tragic. And so, I think there are absolutely ways that we could be improving this situation. The challenge as an industry, it's ironic, we are so good at reaching the consumer but we have no idea how to engage them. Our industry is so complicated. I think it makes it very difficult. There's been efforts... The ad choices icon where every ad would have an icon, but it just gets very complex very quick.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. Let me take a crack at this because I think I have like five different post-its for points here, but I think it actually all threads together in everything that you've just been saying. And it starts, I think, from the publishers and a point I made earlier, this applies with TV, too. Right? The reason that TV is free is because the television programs draw your attention so that you can watch the ads. Right? But we're not sketched out by the idea that we keep seeing the same Coke ad on every football game that we watch because the human brain can process the idea that somebody is out there saying, "Okay, it's a football game, probably the same people watch it." It's contextual. Right? It's most likely the same demographic's going to be watching this. I'm in that demographic. Yeah, it's football, of course they're going to show me Bud Light ads. They're not creeped out by that. Although, technically, that ad is following you from football game to football game, but it also isn't saying, "Hey, Brian." Right? But it's for sure identifying you as somebody who's likely to enjoy light beer because of your behavior, which is fairly personal.

Adam Kerpelman:

When you carry that over to the internet, you don't have the big four networks and so you don't have clusters of attention behavior. Instead, you have thousands of blogs. And we all want those thousands of blogs to exist so that we can have the granularity of community and content and everything that everyone waxes poetic about on the internet. You can go find your people. But those communities can't continue to exist unless we come up with a better solution for advertising. Like they either have to charge you money or we have to do advertising in a slightly different way because you can't just place a running bet that you're going to be on this mommy blog site and so we can put diapers there. I mean, that does work, but doesn't work well enough to support that blog.

Adam Kerpelman:

So, we had to build a bigger internet-wide sweeping system to be able to provide an ad-powered solution that could pay for the open web to continue to exist. The problem is the size of that system ends up brain breaking. What Brian was talking about, the idea that without it being creepy, I thing can follow you from site to site through retargeting, it does feel creepy. Because in the real world, if somebody keeps popping up weird places and going, "Hey man, you want to buy some shoes?" That's creepy. Right? And so, it's one of those things it's like when you jump to the digital version of that, it's really hard, I think, for people to understand that, actually, it's not creepy because they don't really know who you are and they don't know what you're doing, and it's just this big algorithmic soup of nonsense. And, in fact, the cookie's not even that great at its job so the data's not even necessarily that great all the time.

Adam Kerpelman:

But then people see that and, like you said, they get creeped out by it, and then you kind of end up with this situation where now there's this public awareness and you're starting to get weird legislation. But then the system is so big that you can't even monitor it so you can't go to the publishers and say, "We have to stop doing this creepy behavior," and they go, "Man, I'm just putting a tag on the website." And then stuff happens. Millions of requests happen so fast. It's not like you could even say, "Well, you're the request monitor. You sit here and you watch every request." That wouldn't work. So, you end up needing to have software to monitor the thing that's monitoring the thing, and it just ends up being like a turtles all the way down in situation where you just can't...

Adam Kerpelman:

I mean, it's kind of maybe a perfect segue into the next episode, but we got to build some new stuff if we want to solve some subset of these problems so that we can have transparency, so that we can have an easy way to shut off the problem you were talking about with the expecting mother and that kind of stuff. And then, ideally, to build it in a way that doesn't break everyone's brains so they can feel safe because, like you said, right now, we just have this giant net that's so... It's unfathomably large, so to even try to think about it, I got to use the weird philosopher part of my brain, not like the counting stones part of my brain that's, "Oh, 10, 12, 14."

Brian Jones:

Yeah. I just want the conversation around things like this to be functional and practical, I think in just the way our world works. Right. Businesses do things and they do whatever they want until people decide they don't want them doing it anymore, and then you need public buy-in for the government to do things. And that's what happens with big, lucrative industries that are innovating. But there are really important things here, like the examples that you gave, Rob, like real applications of where people's lives are being affected really negatively because information about them that shouldn't necessarily be out got out in a way that it shouldn't. And then there are broad implications for the economics of how the internet works and how media works, how news works, and those things need to get addressed.

Brian Jones:

But what really bugs me in a space like this is when we all get whipped up into a false narrative around what's wrong, and what's wrong is not that Amazon can continue to sell me whatever I was looking at earlier later in the day. That's sort of representative of something. Right? And I don't even necessarily think privacy is exactly what the problem is either. I think that's also made up narratives in a lot of ways because it's easy to get people mad about that. I hate when tech is made to be the enemy when it's how we use it that's the problem. A negative way that we're using something as the problem. I just want to be productive. Right? I want more competition. I want better knowledge sharing on the internet. I want economic models that work better for people who produce media and enable the internet to be. Right? This super valuable, gigantic global consciousness that allows us all to communicate and be in community together.

Rob Armstrong:

That's right. And so, when we come back to that whole first and third-party situation, it's a real tough one, there's a lot of publisher entities that own many different websites, but they're each a different domain. Then you have the Facebooks and Twitters and LinkedIns that are one domain, and based upon the registration of user, the terms of service, the data being sucked up there is ginormous and it puts a lot of the publishers, smaller businesses that are at a real disadvantage, even though the data itself that they're collecting at a third-party scale doesn't compare.

Rob Armstrong:

There's a lot of story left to be told. We'll touch on some of the crystal ball components of, for example, the fact that cookies are under attack. Right? So, they're very likely to go away. I think there's some degree of skepticism on that, but I think it's a safe bet that they will, even though we got the delay from Google. Their timelines are very specific now at privacysandbox.com. So, it's an exciting time being in an industry that relies on cookie for commercial use. It certainly is a rollercoaster ride. And I'm just excited for the day when we can all wake up and we all look forward to the future and for the next decade forward, we see something that is going to be stable and widely used and standardized. That'll be a really exciting time.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. So, I think the last thing I was going to bring up that I think is a good way to wrap this one up is, spent the last 20 minutes talking about why cookies are a hot mess and, like you said, why there's stuff on the horizon that we'll talk about in the next episode in the series, but I think there's some real talk things to bring up before we get to that stuff that is like why? Yeah, the hot mess is a little bit of why cookies are going away, but mostly, cookies are going away because there are walled gardens that are currently dumping lobbyist and otherwise money into "solutions" that actually are just blind to power grabs. Right? If the cookie goes away and all of the open stuff that I talked about, it ends up degraded, it's really good for Facebook. And if Google can lock it off and make it a Chrome walled garden situation, that's great for Google, but not good for the open web. Right?

Rob Armstrong:

This is a big battle between companies that have bigger revenue than the GDP of not so small countries, and I think the whole idea of that creepy person looking in, Apple has done a phenomenal... They have a great ad agency. They create great messaging around their privacy and... Let's be honest, the iPhone doesn't have the most exciting features, and the cost keeps going up, so why not take a sledgehammer to privacy and play up that drum? They've done it very well, but it is very self-serving.

Brian Jones:

Yeah. And it's okay to be self-serving and do things that you think are right. I don't want to always hit on these big businesses, but this is such an interesting space where it's so obvious how the big companies are using the situation to benefit themselves and hurt their competition. Right? Apple's play is to hurt Google, which actually is worse, in my mind, than just doing something that helps you from a big picture, make the world better through capitalism kind of way. So, it's just complex.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. I mean, I point that out I think mostly just so people understand the landscape of the conversation, but also, so anyone listening that is not deep in the marketing world and stuff understands that part of the reason you know about this right now is because Apple is running clever ads about the pixel party. It's not because it's actually messing with your life on a day-to-day basis and you should really call your Senator about it. Right? This public awareness is currently being driven by corporate entities that have a vested interest in you thinking, "Oh my God, this cookie mess is untenable." Yeah, there is a hot mess, but you'll notice, none of the hot mess we discussed, and really we would have pushed it if it were an important part of the conversation, actually has to do with any sort of concern that...

Adam Kerpelman:

Like you said, the thing with the priest that was a very specific circumstance and it takes a lot of effort to do what those journalists did, and that's one of those things where I tend to be like, "They could have done that anyway if they wanted to. They would've just hired a private investigator and creepily followed them on the street." They just didn't have to leave their desk to do it because modern technology is what it is. But the reality is, this doesn't matter to most people. And even GDPR was a hot mess as a solution to try to fix it in a way that, again, I get that the European Union is trying to be out ahead on consumers protections.

Rob Armstrong:

What's funny there is, as the UK pulls back from and becomes independent, they're now talking about removing some of the cookie banter function.

Brian Jones:

I saw that today. Yeah.

Rob Armstrong:

And I think that points to, there's a couple other examples here of ultimately consumers will decide, and we have to be honest that even though there are big corporations and it's easy to gang up on them representing small companies, there are still some people who are very, very passionate about privacy. And that's great. We welcome their voices. They are loud voices at times. But, ultimately, consumers are somewhat lazy, and I'm one of them.

Rob Armstrong:

So, for example, when I go to search for something, I don't like having to manually enter my location each time. I want the browser to know my location. I want the search engine to know my location. It's nice that the search engine knows what other people are searching around me because that makes it more relevant. Apple has a hide my email feature. It is really frustrating to use because as soon as you use it and send it out, then if you have to respond, well, who are you now? Because you're responding with... And what's your email if it's customer service? I don't know, it was a gobbledygook message from Apple. I have to go find it. I think, ultimately, simplicity will win the day and this whole retargeting idea is like, sometimes it's nice to remember what I was shopping for yesterday because I forgot, and I remember it was kind of interesting. I think there's a lot of promise and hope here. It's up to us in the industry to figure out.

Adam Kerpelman:

And that sounds like a great place to wrap this one up because next episode we're talking about all of the hopeful, possible solutions and all that kind of stuff. So, if you want to catch that next one, like, subscribe, follow us wherever you found us in the first place if you've made it this far in this episode. Or first I should say, thanks for joining us, Rob. This was great.

Rob Armstrong:

This is fun. Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

Awesome. And yeah, thanks everybody for listening. This has been the Data-Driven Marketer sponsored by NetWise. I'm Adam.

Brian Jones:

I'm Brian.

Rob Armstrong:

I'm Rob.

Adam Kerpelman:

Take it easy, everybody.