Viewing profile — davidfischer

Nowadays, somebody can just ask claude to build them a scraper/bot that hooks into a proxy network and all of a sudden they can easily send 20k+ reqs/min from hundreds or thousands…

I built EthicalAds ( https://www.ethicalads.io/ ) for exactly this reason. No tracking. No cookies. No behavioral targeting (targeting based on stuff you've previously done). Every…

They absolutely do. Every sponsorship you see on a podcast or a youtube video or a streamer is a contextual ad. Many open source sponsorships are actually a form of marketing. You …

Founder of EthicalAds here. In my view, this is only partially true and publishers (sites that show ads) have choices here but their power is dispersed. Advertisers will run advert…

My employer, Read the Docs, has a blog on the subject ( https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse... ) of how we got pounded by these bots to the tune of thousan…

I'm not the poster you're responding to but I'm one of the founding team of EthicalAds. We're a small team, focused exclusively on marketing to devs, and really trying to show high…

My employer, Read the Docs is a heavy user of Cloudflare. It's actually hard to imagine serving as much traffic as we do as cheaply as we can without them. That said, for publicly …

There's a few ways first party cookies can track you. Probably the biggest single way is Google Analytics which by default uses only first party cookies. Even without cookies at al…

I edited to make my comment more clear but polyfill.io sends dynamic polyfills based on what features the identified browser needs. Since it changes, the SRI hash would need to cha…

SRI generally won't work here because the served polyfill JS (and therefore the SRI hash) depends on the user agent/headers sent by the user's browser. If the browser says it's anc…

Keychain Access has not been "fine". It's had multiple unaddressed data loss bugs. For example, Keychain lost all passwords from all Keychains after the Catalina update[1] and this…

I can't confirm if the price is the same or not, but their terms[1] specifically mention that the price can be different. > Prices for Offerings you order for delivery or pickup th…

While I agree with you to an extent, this is not a very good way to check actual in-store prices. Most grocery stores charge a different rate for products that are delivered or eve…

I'd just like effective privacy laws in the US generally.

Ya, other types of retargeting like this are also likely. The jump from visiting a website to an advertiser does physical mailings isn't a big one (political advertising uses this …

Healthcare providers and insurers in the US are bound by HIPAA privacy rules, but data brokers (mentioned in the article) and the ads industry generally are not. For example, if sh…

Zillow's estimates are definitely questionable and I don't want to be seen as defending their precision. However, unless you're referring to an actual house addition or something l…

This isn't as crazy an example as you think. People and companies who bought properties before prop tax increases were capped in 1978 are paying almost nothing in property taxes. I…

I work on ads, but not for Google and FWIW, I've only been able to reproduce a few of these malvertising reports. However, I wouldn't be surprised if there were additional targetin…

Off the shelf privacy and tracking analyzers run against large and small search engines to see what they are doing with your data.

We're already on the EasyList (a big blocklist) so it should already be blocked.