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Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

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Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#171

Post by beefield »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #132
beefield wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A monthly flat fee that gives access to practically all paywalled websites, video services and amazons digital bookshelf. The fee is divided to content creators based on time spent on content, not clicks. No ads, no other tracking. (You may need some time multiplier for different types of content.) I would imagine you could count me in with significantly larger monthly fee than what I currently spend on digital media…

> no other tracking What other tracking could there possibly be once they're tracking everything I view on every site that monetizes its content?

Sorry, bad formulation. I meant that the tracking for this would not be used for any other purpose than distributing my payments.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#172

Post by bkor »

mackrevinack wrote: post #168
sticazzi wrote: post #167

I have AdBlock, AdBlock Plus and DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials. Anything else to recommend for Firefox?

maybe get rid of adblock and use ublock instead. its open source and anytime I hear adblock being mentioned its usually something bad check out https://www.privacytools.io as well or the subreddit for more discussions on that type of thing

Make sure to use Ublock Origin instead of Ublock. Solely "Ublock" you want to avoid.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#173

Post by mikekchar »

fyfy18 wrote: post #106
mikekchar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't offer to give you access in exchange for consent to use your data. By not granting access at all, they are complying with the GDPR. However, as always, it's important to point out that you don't ever have to ask for consent with the GDRP. If the data you are gathering necessary in order to complete the service, then people can't even object to it. If the data you are gathering is a legitimate interest (for…

> If the data you are gathering is a legitimate interest (for marketing, or whatever) Calling marketing a legitimate interest is a bit of a grey area. The ICO says that by relying on legitimate interests (i.e. not gaining consent) they need to be weighed against the impact they have on the user's privacy and own interests.[0] So if you are showing first party ads and you aren't collecting more data than is necessary…

Yes, I totally agree with that assessment. In this context, it's hard to think of a legitimate marketing purpose. Potentially you could do something like record the IP address and if the person comes back put up a banner saying, "I've noticed you were here before. If you pay $X per month, you can skip all the third party ads". That would be legitimate interest I think (you would still have to do something to allow them to object like putting on a button that said, "Never show me this again"). I can't think of any legitimate reason for passing on personal data to a third party, as you say.

Edit: Now that I think about it, the Guardian does exactly that... Probably why I thought of it LOL.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#174

Post by air7 »

Bud wrote: post #47
bscphil wrote: post #30

Why are different organizations taking such an affront to Firefox's tracking protection? I don't have this problem at WaPo with uBlock + uMatrix. As far as I understand it only takes effect by default in private browsing mode. I think it's more crucial than ever that everyone use adblockers and refuse to support sites that retaliate with anti-social behavior. Yes, news orgs need funding, but there's no requirement th…

I tend to agree with you. But do you have an alternative model ready? And if not, how much of the news media are you willing to let die off completely before you would relent?

Good point. News is not like other business sectors in that it (ideally) plays a critical role in maintaining the balance in a democracy so it's in everyone's best interest to have a strong honest and free press.

If the news sector dies, or becomes 100% government sponsored we'd be much much worse off compared to the current issue of privacy invading ads.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#175

Post by _puk »

adtac wrote: post #62
rebuilder wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like the clerk asking you to please take your hat and sunglasses off so their CCTV facial recognition system can identify you and keep track of your movements in the store.

So WP is afraid I'll shoplift articles? Because the purpose of CCTV cameras is security, not marketing.

You sure about that?

Facial Recognition systems are out in the wild, busy profiling [0]

0: https://twitter.com/GambleLee/status/862307447276544000

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#176

Post by marmaduke »

andai wrote: post #160
johnchristopher wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how things happened. First they came with the blink tag. Then they added animated GIFs everywhere. They came with the pop-up. Then they put the pop-up under the main window. Ad-blockers' first usage was to make the Web readable. Then years later privacy concerns took over.

At this point, ads are just one of many problems. Newsletter popups, cookie consent (10x worse since GDPR), auto-playing video, in-browser crypto mining..? At this point, basic self-respect demands I simply disable JavaScript. It's incredible how much faster the web is without it, and how much smoother, and how much less cluttered.

> how much faster the web is without it, and how much smoother, and how much less cluttered

I know HN has some JS, but I realized that I usually click on comments link for HN stuff since I know it's going to load super fast and not have a ton of useless crap on the page. If the comments are interesting I might read it, but most of the time there's more information in comments than the article itself. Or people quote the interesting parts. Maybe this is lazy or just the parent-of-two way to ingest tech info over morning cereal

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#177

Post by dagw »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #79
Bud wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree with you. But do you have an alternative model ready? And if not, how much of the news media are you willing to let die off completely before you would relent?

I will wait till we get a micro-transaction system built directly into the browser (same system for every browser) that allows me to pay 1 cent per news article - maybe 5 cent for a super duper long essay. I am poor but I am willing to pay as much as 5 dollars a month. My personal information is not for sale or distribution and I refuse to allow any computations on my computer that enable someone to gather it.

Sounds like you might like blendle.com. Although article prices are an order of magintude more that what you're hoping for.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#178

Post by Freak_NL »

bscphil wrote: post #140
blub wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how WaPo does this, but all newspapers I've tried including NYT and The Guardian and The Economist have a lot of tracking in their apps even for subscribers. So it's a crap deal.

Yep, this is what really makes me mad. You can't argue that alternatives to tracking don't exist when no one is actually trying the alternatives. You can't choose between paying and getting tracked; it's get tracked regardless and hear them nag you to pay them for the privilege.

> You can't choose between paying and getting tracked […]

Well, you can of course pay and use an ad-blocker. I have a subscription to a Dutch newspaper (on actual paper even), and use their site as well, but not without protection.

The ads in the paper newspaper are usually fine. Rarely do they affront or annoy; and they are tailored to the general profile of the newspaper's readership.

But whenever I use a clean browser profile to verify some piece of behavior in a website, or to see if a bug on it was caused by the use of uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger, I am acutely reminded why I choose to shield my brain from the repetitive onslaught of internet advertisements with all their tracking and insulting attempts at trying to put me into a specific profile.

I don't mind internet advertisements as such though. There is a certain social media site that starts with an F but is not Facebook (and quite empathically and by design the opposite in terms of prudishness) which serves ads that are vetted by the website's advertising department, and are shown to users at random without the option of narrowing the reach to users with specific interests or demographics. These have never bothered me, and sometimes even serve to introduce me to a business that sells products I am interested in. Like my paper newspaper, advertisers only know the general profile of the site's members.

More sites should consider that option. No tracking, no tailoring beyond 'people that visit our website', and vetted by the site itself. Newspapers in particular have the knowledge of how to acquisition advertisers for this; they already do it in their paper editions.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#179

Post by anoncake »

witten wrote: post #58
mandevil wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a paying customer, they don't (source: am a subscriber, never seen this). If you don't pay for a subscription, they need to monetize you in some other way- like by showing you more valuable ads. You can get a very cheap online-only subscription if you have Amazon Prime, strong recommend.

New York Times solicits paying subscribers to disable their ad blocker (on mobile).

If you don't pay for the product, you are the product.

If you pay for the product, it shows that you have disposable income, making you an even more valuable product.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#180

Post by marmaduke »

michaelmrose wrote: post #144
tomc1985 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the institutional infrastructure that allows journalists to do their jobs with some measure of job security and editorial integrity? (not that there's a whole lot of that left... but its still better than getting news from facebook and youtube vloggers)

The integrity lies in the people and connections between same none of that lies in the building or the dead weight.

sure but that integrity may become a scarcer commodity as it becomes more difficult to earn a living.
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