The depths that marketers will plummet to - 4dw@r3
Adwear
DEF CON 33 (backfill) · Day 1 · Main Stage
In this DEF CON talk, "The depths that marketers will plummet to," speaker Adwear exposes the increasingly invasive and legally ambiguous data collection practices employed by the digital marketing industry. The presentation delves into how a major shift in data privacy regulations and Google's initial (and ultimately abandoned) attempt to phase out third-party cookies inadvertently pushed marketers towards more aggressive and less transparent tracking methods. Adwear, drawing on their background working for a large digital marketing firm, reveals the industry's rapid adoption of **Server-to-Server (S2S)** tracking and the creation of "first-party partnerships" as a means to circumvent privacy legislation like GDPR.
AI review
Adwear brings a genuinely useful insider angle on adtech's pivot from cookies to S2S tracking, and the 'first-party partnership' legal laundering angle is worth hearing from someone who watched it happen from inside the industry. The problem is the talk stays at the surface of most of its technical claims and leans heavily on anecdote where it needs precision — it's more informed journalism than security research.