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Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

theintercept.com

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161–170 of 179 posts

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#161

Post by smichel17 »

ggggtez wrote: post #160
rtkwe wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure and there'll be tons of die hards like you who won't stop using blockers. This still makes a lot of sense if it keeps new people from installing a 3rd party blanket ad blocker and eating into ad revenue from Google's own platform.

Based on the article, I didn't see any evidence they are shutting down chrome add-ons. I'm really lost on why people are getting the impression of that. When Google made Google+, they didn't block you from visiting Facebook, why would this be different

Google already has a history of banning extensions and apps. For example, ad blockers are against the Google Play ToS.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#162

Post by mnx »

PrivWeeble wrote: post #88
russdpale wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google will never be able to pry uBlock Origin from me! Stay away!

And if Google takes steps to prevent third-party ad blockers from working in Chrome? Or renders them worthless through exceptions to the filtering API? Even if you ignore Google's Funding Choices and its potential to increase adoption of view-ads-or-pay (a lose/lose for privacy, btw) you are very vulnerable if you use Chrome and/or a Google controlled OS. The Coalition for Better Ads won't be helping you by keeping G…

Would it be hard to maintain a minimal fork, with enough changes to allow an adblocker, and nothing else changed? I would pay a couple bucks for that.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#163

Post by Klockan »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #133
Eridrus wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google does a lot of different things, but people with an axe to grind often like to label Google as something specific that they dislike. In this case they call it a data mining company, which is both meaningless due to how vague the term is, but also slightly menacing sounding. Does Google do things that would fall under a reasonable interpretation of data mining? Definitely. Is it their primary activity? Not by a…

> slightly menacing sounding As it should be. They are aggressively capturing and selling people data from phones and browsers, as proven by large amounts of evidence. This is pretty factual, please don't call it "bias".

> They are aggressively capturing and selling people data from phones and browsers, as proven by large amounts of evidence.

I'm interested, where can I go and buy some user data from Google?

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#164

Post by Klockan »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #154
pgeorgi wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace "that sells personal information to advertisers" with "that uses personal information to match consumers to advertisers". Unless Google really sells personal information somewhere, in which case I'd like to know the price tag on the file about me that's supposedly for sale. My understanding is that such a product doesn't exist. (Disclosure: I work at Google but on Chrome OS, ie. client hardware. No idea what…

The only practical difference here is that Google isn't giving away their main value proposition. Why give people the product when you can charge them for it over and over? Either way, at the end of the day, Google is still selling our data.

They are selling data but they are not selling personal information, big difference. If I can't pay them to lookup information about a specific person then they don't sell personal information.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#165

Post by jerrycruncher »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #116
nostrademons wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just the facts" journalism was always a myth, because journalists inherently choose which facts to report. IMHO The Intercept has been pretty up-front about their POV: they're supposed to be the publication that speaks truth to power, meaning that they're opposed to basically all big institutions (Google, Facebook, big corporations, establishment media, both political parties, the government, all governments, etc.)…

I think journalism itself should go away in its present form (and in the form it has been for the past centuries). Because as it is today, it's held to ridiculously low standards. I mean, consider how would you handle any kind of factual investigation that actually matters to you. Say your production server suddenly overloaded and died, and everyone in your company is trying to figure out what happened. Would the sea…

Most reportage deals with those pesky humans, and not a "production server(that) suddenly overloaded and died," or with something that is similarly deterministic, in a forensic sense.

While one could certainly attempt to create a "fact database" about a busted server, trying to do the same about an event involving humans, each with their own undiscernable motivations and varying degrees of willful duplicity, is often impossible.

Instead you get stories about the life decisions and bias of the actors involved, because that's what a person who's been trained to tease out the facts from a myriad of fallible sources, any of whom may or may not be lying or trying to advance an unstated agenda, does.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#166

Post by marcosdumay »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #157
marcosdumay wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that thing loaded by javascript, and why is it on a different domain from the site (with www vs. without it). It took way too many steps for me to get to see the sponsor message.

Troy's sponsor message isn't loaded by JavaScript. Someone blacklisted the div id on the list several ad blockers are using.

The div is static, the sponsor name is dynamic.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#167

Post by partiallypro »

ucaetano wrote: post #147
partiallypro wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be true, but what is untrue about the article? How is it ok for a company to be the largest ad company in the world, while controlling the most popular browser on the planet and just announced a service that will kill off its competitors (as if they have many at all?) That's monopolistic behavior. Ask yourself, if Microsoft did this or something similar, would they get hit with anti-trust? Yes.

No, it isn't monopolistic. Look at ad prices continuously going down. "Monopoly" isn't a buzz word that you throw around randomly. It doesn't even have to do necessarily with market share or control or the market. There is no monopoly on the ad space, not by very, very far.

Microsoft was brought up on anti-trust charges because it packaged a browser with its operating system.

Google controls the majority of ads on extended networks, it controls almost all publisher ads (even Microsoft network sites run Google ads.) If publishers have no where to go but Google, how is that not a monopoly? Ignore search, ignore Facebook and Twitter, those are first party. Google has 0 competition on extended network sites, and this ensures it never will.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#169

Post by dragonwriter »

deprave wrote: post #97
dragonwriter wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have that backwards; the move was to allow higher risk ventures to go forward with the chance of visible failure without harming Google's brand reputation which, contrary to your description, is actually quite strong.

The premise that visible business failure harms brands is false. It's your opinion and it sounds like it makes sense, but it's not supported by any data.

> The premise that visible business failure harms brands is false.

Maybe, but it's a popular belief in business anyway; moreover, however true or false it is in general, I think it's pretty clear that Google, specifically, has a problem (whether rational or not) in some potential customer sectors with service/product discontinuations reflecting negatively on perception of other services/products under the Google brand, even if that is a sui generis effect rather than a reflection of a generally-applicable effect of product failure on brand image.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#170

Post by TeMPOraL »

jerrycruncher wrote: post #165
TeMPOraL wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think journalism itself should go away in its present form (and in the form it has been for the past centuries). Because as it is today, it's held to ridiculously low standards. I mean, consider how would you handle any kind of factual investigation that actually matters to you. Say your production server suddenly overloaded and died, and everyone in your company is trying to figure out what happened. Would the sea…

Most reportage deals with those pesky humans, and not a "production server(that) suddenly overloaded and died," or with something that is similarly deterministic, in a forensic sense. While one could certainly attempt to create a "fact database" about a busted server, trying to do the same about an event involving humans, each with their own undiscernable motivations and varying degrees of willful duplicity, is often…

Still not buying it. I don't feel like journalists are trained to tease out facts, they still tease out stories.

For pretty much any newsworthy event there are lots of facts that are concrete and objective, and frankly, that's what matters most of the time. Life decisions and motivations and biases make for a fun reading, but are otherwise irrelevant.

A politician said something, or did not. A company is going forward with a project, or is not. The proposed law implies a consequence X, or does not. Those are ground facts. I'm not saying they're always easy to establish, but the media sources are not even trying.

I recently stumbled upon an interesting site that tries to run Bayesian analysis on various pieces of information and media reports, to piece out the actual reality. See e.g.: https://www.rootclaim.com/claims/what-caused-the-chemical-ca... What I want to point out there is not their analysis in particular. Just how it's structured. It seems that establishing some objectively verifiable summary of a "messy" real-world story is not impossible.

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