Instead of more palatable user tracking, how about we tell advertisers and internet companies: fuck off, we don't want any tracking? How about we hunt down and eliminate all features that allow cross-site information sharing? How about we treat attacks on user privacy as security problems of the web standards, à la Tor, and build technology that aggressively hides any user signature in any layer, from rotating IP and MAC addresses to user agents, referers and canvas leaks?
But wait you say, how would the very useful internet ecosystem survive without advertising revenue? Well, there is nothing wrong with advertising per se, it's a natural part of a free market economy. It's ok to target ads to the user's search terms or social feed. The problem is that, in the pursuit of advertising revenue, a cutthroat economic competition pushed advertisers to mine more and more personal data simply to stay competitive. It's a low sum game: it doesn't bring much more money in advertising or make the internet significantly more useful, but it destroys the privacy of everyone. A spectacular market failure ripe for correction.
I wrote a long, but low effort comment where my thesis was that I think it’s ok for companies to pay for your attention, but the problem is that they are paying Google.
I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention, but I haven’t thought of better alternatives for businesses to grow or expand online yet.
USPS becomes vehicle for junk mail
Telco becomes vehicle for robocalls
Television a ratio of value to ads that gets smaller and smaller
Internet becomes vehicle for ad revenue
All of these things are companies abusing communication platforms for your attention and we seemingly are never willing to pay more than advertisers are, maybe because by the time that decision happens folks move to the next platform.
The meta thing is that the Internet is a meta platform and we can keep making new communication methods, but we are still stuck with Google.
> On the contrary, users are consistently willing to pay more than advertisers when given the option.
Problem is: there is a huge difference between paying even one cent and not paying. If you ask for $0.01, you will probably get the same result as asking for $0.10 or even a dollar. And if the only thing you have to offer is a mildly interesting blog post, no one will give you a dollar, so, if you want that cent per view, putting an ad is the only option. Micro transactions turned out to be largely a failure.
Another option is to find an editor/platform that gives you a share of a larger subscription. But even then, most people don't want to pay. For example, the usual reaction when I mention YouTube Premium is "why would I pay for something free?". And it gives even more power to large platforms: YouTube can reasonably ask for $10/month given the amount of content, it is much harder for a small player.
So what is the solution? Braved tried something with BAT, but it is still an ad-based solution, and I don't really trust it. Carriers tried it with the equivalent of premium-rate phone numbers. Governments suggested tax-based solutions, none of them convincing.
> I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention, but I haven’t thought of better alternatives for businesses to grow or expand online yet.
I think western society struggles with banning things. But we've shown an aptitude for taxing vices. It's all about the money, right? Rather than banning, would taxing this economy achieve a compromised version of what you're seeking?
The problem is that if you tax it the government becomes incentivized to increase attention selling.
If the money isn't destroyed you will end up in smaller scale corruption. One example that comes to mind is HK zoning fees and the government's increasing dependency there of.
Maybe I'm being naive; I work with some peers who smoke habitually. They pay a hefty tax for their habit. I don't really see the government's incentive to keep them at it to collect more taxes happening. Is it super sneaky and I just don't see it?
I think for certain "unpalatable" vice taxes, the increase in revenue is usually not worth the bad publicity. But one example I can think of regarding cigarette taxes is the increase in smuggling they cause, and as a consequence a lot of "government action" to prevent said smuggling. What ends up happening then is you get to see a glimpse of the thinking not being "lets keep people from smoking" but rather more in terms of "lost revenue" or "tax money stolen by smugglers".
On some level, if the tax is there to "discourage" people, then the fact that they're willing to buy "smuggled" goods to save a bit of money shows you that they're not discouraged enough and they're not your target audience.
Care to share the math? Prevailing opinion in Western Europe is that smokers cost a lot of money to the state and taxpayers due to them usually not dying directly but struggling with illnesses for years, which cost money to treat.
>I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention
I don't think that's either possible or desirable. Attention seeking would simply take on sneakier forms that are indistinguishable from legitimate distribution of information and protected free speech.
Instead of somewhat independent ad funded publications, you would get publications that are owned by product companies (or political parties) themselves. The content they publish would be far more biased. Subscription based publications wouldn't stand a chance against those free and well funded company owned publications.
Advertising is very annoying, but I think it can be more transparent than almost any other form of influencing people.
Tracking for personalised advertising is an entirely separate issue. That's where I think a blanket ban could work.
Your reasoning is accurate; but doesn't most of what you're describing already occur _as well_?
Often progress is about eliminating one large negative externality, only to discover that there are others to handle too.
The 'submarine' type content you're referring to is somewhat addressed by trust networks, fact checking, link reputation, and various other techniques.
One large question is whether we're ready for all of the economically-motivated actors to start shifting into that space.
PS: You make a good point about transparency. It's nice that (at least the most honest) adverts are identified clearly as such.
Could we have similar transparency in content? ("I wrote this because I'd been thinking about it after reading an article by X about Y yesterday, and here is the source)
>but doesn't most of what you're describing already occur _as well_?
I believe it would happen on a far greater scale, because it would be the only way to get the message across and competition from independent ad funded publishers would cease to exist.
Today, it's more difficult for a product company to justify the expense of running their own large scale publishing and influencing operation because it would have to outcompete advertising in terms of effectiveness.
People will always try to get other people's attention for their own gain. Trying to stop this is a quixotic endavour. I think we should regulate to limit the negative impact of this social constant, not try to stop it altogether.
>Could we have similar transparency in content?
Yes, I do think we could. But I also think that people would still prefer high quality if biased company bloggers to paying for expensive subscriptions. Don't forget that most subscription based publications show adverts to their subscribers as well. Without advertising, subscription prices would rise steeply.
> People will always try to get other people's attention for their own gain. Trying to stop this is a quixotic endavour. I think we should regulate to limit the negative impact of this social constant, not try to stop it altogether.
I'm not necessarily advocating either to stop it, or to limit the impacts - just to make it visible. Once the power/influence structures (and the associated leverage they use) are evident, the manipulative ones will be abandoned and the authentic ones will succeed.
One potentially negative unintended consequence: closed systems like Facebook become even more powerful than they already are. Their revenues will dwarf (even more than they do now) any other free digital platform that can't re-create a fully targeted ad product entirely in-house.
Without Google AdX and the mess of disturbing cross-site tracking, I can't see why advertisers wouldn't just spend 100% of their digital budgets in walled gardens. It would just be so much more effective.
Assuming tracking works (I have my doubts it boosts conversion), there has to be an equilibrium price, right?
That is, advertising camping gear on a camping review site (without tracking) still has some nonzero commercial value even if facebook tracking exists and works.
> That is, advertising camping gear on a camping review site (without tracking) still has some nonzero commercial value even if facebook tracking exists and works.
Precisely this. Go back to the advertising model where you place the advertisements in relevant locations. It's like going into the local pizza parlor and seeing an advertisement for a local plumber.
"Joe's Pizza" in Somewhere, NY can still say "I only want advertisers who want their ads shown in 30 mile radius of Somewhere, NY".
Flip the entire thing on its head and go back to camping sites showing camping ads, and auto parts stores showing ads for the latest amazing oil filter. They don't need to know who the user is at all. They are on a camping related site, they probably want to see camping related advertisements.
Tracking definitely works, at least in my experience. That's why Google and Facebook have completely taken over the entire digital ad ecosystem. They just have much better data, and your spend is an order of magnitude more effective than buying directly from publishers.
Take the camping example. If I sell camping equipment, I can try to reach out to blogs directly, but I will have to place hundreds of campaigns for $100 each, track and monitor them all separately, and count on each of the blogs to deliver them accurately in good positions with no fraud. Or I can just buy one massive campaign with Facebook that runs across Facebook and Instagram and targets people who are interested in camping and maybe even expressed purchase intent. That's the better option every time. The transactions costs of dealing with individual websites are prohibitive.
Google (and the other tracking companies) just distribute that same option across the open web. If you get rid of it, Facebook wins absolutely.
I like the idea, as one commenter expressed, that the open web would be better without advertising. But I think the reality of an infinitely powerful Facebook is that the open web would be a wasteland and afterthought.
There is nothing stopping Google or Facebook from offering content-based advertising to advertisers, publishers and users--sidestepping any issues with multiple small ad deals. A regulator could demand it if they wanted, and together publishers and advertisers could too. Individual users just don't have the same power, and resort to adblockers--which is pretty much their only option if they don't want to be tracked when a site doesn't have a subscription option.
Fair point. If you prohibit everyone, including walled gardens, from targeting based on user behavior or user data, that seems like a plausible solution.
It's a purely regulatory solution, though, not technical as the top level comment suggested :)
Opt-in user targeting could still be fine (like offline loyalty programs), and it would be healthier than the current norm of opt-out through ad-blockers.
Tracking is not necessarily about boosting conversion, though definitely an aspect of it, but it's also about trying to prove the value of the advertising spend to begin with.
If I wanted to be generous I could point to the fact that advertiser revenue allows companies to realise a revenue stream other than having to directly charge a customer, be that subscription or increased prices. And so it could be argued that as a consumer you get an indirect benefit from advertising dollars, it's not clear that it's actually exploitive in that sense.
Full disclosure, I run adblockers and used to work for an adtech company.
I have the same reservation about ever more tracking increasing conversion, but I would guess in reality the equilibrium price might come as more people use adblockers vs those who would turn them off if they could be assured they weren't being tracked and only being served some form of a content-based ad.
For a large site like Facebook, adblockers might have a small effect, but for smaller sites seeing 30-50% adblocked traffic, their choices might be direct ad sales, and likely little else. I saw a post about ethical-ad-server recently, and maybe such ad servers should be the ones default unblocked by adblockers.
I think the big thing is that opt-out tracking should be illegal. It's total bullshit that giant partnerships like ad choices and just collect and share tons of info about you with the flimsy veil of an opt out system[1] that NEVER. EVER. succeeds. Like this is big tech you think they don't know how to write an opt out program that actually works, they solve problems in all sorts of domains, I think if they _wanted_ it to work they could do so very easily. Not to mention that in opting-out, you have to agree to let them track you anyway with a different cookie that is supposed to keep you from being tracked.
Profiling has to be done with acording to a privacy assesment analysis and can only be done if the assesment shows no elevated risks and / or the risks that exists are taken into account and contingencys are planed for.
Yes it is quite some work and overhead, but you are extracting information and use it in a way the person could not foresee or conceptualize even exists within the data.
I gave up on trying to maintain forks of web browsers, because their extension API deliberately doesn't allow modifying response bodies. It's just impossible to maintain any fork of any browser because of the sheer amount of features that rely on JS APIs for websites and the amount of commits upstream.
Ad Blockers are just a dirty hack that completely relies on Chromium respecting the Content-Security-Policy headers for all domains. If Google decides to blocklist their own domains for HTTP header modifications, we're fucked. Quite literally.
That's the reason why I kinda started to build my own browser (without a rendering engine for now) that focusses on filtering, parsing, and peer-to-peer offloading traffic and sees itself as a mixture between web browser, scraper and proxy that can be used as a cache for others. It has the idea to act as a web filter service + a webview to render its UI rather than being a render engine and document engine. [1]
I hope that with this market niche there's a way to make this kind of effort sustainable for the future, because all other web browser fork projects I've seen so far are dying off due to no funding and too much work to maintain the codebase.
It's just not feasible to compete in the everday user's browser market. Lots of companies have tried, and lots of companies have failed.
> If Google decides to blocklist their own domains for HTTP header modifications, we're fucked.
I mean, you could just stop using Chrome if this happened, if you haven’t already. All the other popular browsers would be unaffected, and I’m sure projects like ungoogled-chromium would patch a change like that out.
I'm using Ungoogled Chromium. But let's don't kid ourselves, this is just a temporary solution. There will always be the point where it's impossible to maintain patches and keep up with the cat and mouse game upstream.
Also all the other popular Browsers are either based on Chromium or based on Gecko, an engine that has no developers anymore since last year.
When I wrote about sustainability, that's exactly what I was talking about.
You're confusing gecko and servo. Servo is an experimental web engine which was being developed by Mozilla to test experimental tech. Recently its dev team was laid off. Gecko is the production engine that Firefox is based on, and it's still under full steam ahead development by engineers employed by Mozilla.
The Mozilla Corporation receives nearly all of its revenue from Google. As their market share inevitably trends toward zero (iOS defaults to Safari, Windows to Edge, and Android to Chrome), their negotiating power with Google and other search engines will suffer.
Yes, this is a serious issue. However, I wouldn't claim that Mozilla has any negotiating power with Google even today - Google is likely to continue to fund Mozilla in order to stave off potential antitrust action.
Are we counting open source contributors or paid developers here?
Because I think there's a difference in assumption vs reality here. External contributors work in their free time and are, as I'm trying to point out in my other comment, unsustainable as a work model [1] [2]
This cannot happen on an individual level. We need to take the internet standards writing process back into the hands of citizenry. The hacker ethos is long dead and all technical bodies have become negotiating tables where giant corporations divvy up their turf.
If we make the internet standards hand all this power back to the browser users, then Google will clearly just not implement that particular standard. They have plenty of precedent of going their own way, establishing it as the way the web works, and then getting the standards written retrospectively to cover it. (Not singling out Chrome here - most of the major browsers have done this at some point.)
There's nothing wrong with advertisement, but adtech on the internet turned malignant years ago. It's one thing showing me a banner or short text, another to stalk me all over the net, keep all surveillance data forever, and bombard me with megabytes of useless trash each time I want to see some site. The difference between normal advertising and what we have now is the difference between healthy cells and cancer. Instead of taking their part in the ecosystem, they are destroying it.
All it would take is one multimillionaire/billionaire to look at philanthropy through a different lens for this to become a reality.
What we need is a social movement with funding for Adblock work and outreach. The entire advertising industry is a house of cards waiting to fall. Someone with a grudge and the money to back such a movement could singlehandedly wipe out the revenue of places like Google, Facebook, and most of traditional and print media in a year or two. A couple million in investment could wipe hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue out.
I really wish that ads would be targeted based on server side information. As in what website you’re on, or what search term you put in. I really don’t think ads based on my past behavior are useful to me or my purchasing tendencies.
That's not enough. If anything, it can make tracking more pervasive and harder to control.
The server fingerprints the user and shares this info with an ad network, fetches and injects a personalized ad. Same result, zero accountability: no way to delete server side PII, no way to know what information was collected, no way to know how it was actually used. Even worse, the server gets to read the ad delivered to you, which may leak even more information.
There is no purely technical solution which can replace regulation.
I think "server side" distracted from my point. I'm not offering a technical solution, only that I really wish ads would be targeted solely on what you're looking at. Similar to how magazine and newspaper ads are targeted.
> there is nothing wrong with advertising per se, it's a natural part of a free market economy.
There is plenty wrong. Even Adam Smith's purely theoretical concept of "free market" requires buyers and sellers to be purely rational actors and be fully and correctly informed.
Advertising has one goal: making customers less rational and more biased towards a given product.
While that is true to some degree, the primary motivation of advertising is to close the information gap, to make sure customers know about your product.
Because you can't both trust and not trust websites at the same time.
The web is built around the model that websites can create a session with remembered state (well ever since cookies were invented). You can't have that feature without also trusting the website with that shared state.
At least not with the level 9f interactivity expected. Maybe lynx could manage it, but you'll never get all the side channels out of an attack surface the size of a modern html5 browser.
I think we should disable local-storage entirely, all of it. 99% of the websites out there don't need cookies. And for the 1% that do need it, how about we build tech around a central authority issuing "cookie issuing" licenses that the browsers respect. Have it become a process and trust-chain similar to certificates so that we can block/ban root certs that allow tracking en-masse.
But until then, please developers stop putting the damn shopping cart in cookies and local-state, just persist it on your damn DB and only allow me to have a cart after creating an account with you. That is your damn consent for you to track me, not your stupid GDPR popup that you spam me and every other visitor to your site.
That would fall under the 1%. They get a cert or whitelisted or something such that browsers would "allow" them to request the browser to store cookies. Perhaps the type of data to be stored is also restricted in the certificate itself so the site can't deviate from the storage they've been granted.
I don't know, it's just a random thought and not fully fleshed out. I'm sure there are millions of much smarter individuals than me that could figure out the details and nuance. Point is that we need to think outside the box if we are to fix the web. But doing it incrementally with "input" from ad-companies such as google is not going to work.
So you want the ability to be a modern website held by a centralised authority? The world is not a world of static websites anymore; it is a world of applications accessible by a web browser. That would be a huge and unjust centralisation of power.
The most should be a consent popup, similar to how websites request to use the camera.
You are just opening up yourself to abuse. Sybil attacks are one of the biggest problems in computing and tracking helps us mitigate it. A truly private internet can't handle bad actors and such will be unable to scale.
You can tell them what you want, if people are stupid enough to continue to download and use Chrome, they lost their free will on the subject to the almighty google!
But wait you say, how would the very useful internet ecosystem survive without advertising revenue? Well, there is nothing wrong with advertising per se, it's a natural part of a free market economy. It's ok to target ads to the user's search terms or social feed. The problem is that, in the pursuit of advertising revenue, a cutthroat economic competition pushed advertisers to mine more and more personal data simply to stay competitive. It's a low sum game: it doesn't bring much more money in advertising or make the internet significantly more useful, but it destroys the privacy of everyone. A spectacular market failure ripe for correction.