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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

#201

Post by adrianN »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #189
andai wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is, the people who shape the web, of which some are on HN, will soon notice that people are just switching off JS to evade their tricks, and will make sure websites are unusable without it. Now the opposite is true, but some already implemented loading loading the text via JS, so you can't just read an article without turning on JS first.

I just close tabs that don't load without JS. There is so much content on the Internet that I don't mind going elsewhere.

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

#202

Post by jnky »

fnordsensei wrote: post #191
andai wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe the consent workflow should be abstracted and standardized, and put into web browsers. Rather than everyone rolling their own workflow (most which are horrible), the browsers could offer a unified way to do this, and a central place to revoke consent. Though it would probably take legislation to make orgs use it. The current workflows have a lot of dark patterns, despite GDPR.

Hasn't this been tried before? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P

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

#203

Post by makomk »

speedplane wrote: post #91
hakfoo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that per-article adds a lot of friction. If I buy a newspaper, I don't have to buy it by article or section. Nobody wants to think about "this is 3 cents to read the article linked on HN" and they also don't want a surprise $80 bill at the end of a month. However, the newspaper style "every article from today" or even "monthly access" still focuses around the thought of "you've picked one, or a very na…

NYTimes is $16/mo Washington Post is $10-15/mo WSJ is $15/mo Seems like the price range is $10-25/mo for many periodicals, so a bundled plan of $20/month might be a bit low. But I can imagine a $50/mo plan for including two national newspapers, a local newspaper, and a news weekly (e.g., economist) being pretty popular.

The New York Times subscription price that they show everywhere is also only for an initial introductory period of one year. I can't actually find the real, non-introductory price anywhere, and I know others have commented that it's really deeply buried. It's amazing how sleazy the billing practices of the big publications are.

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

#204

Post by muraiki »

asknthrow wrote: post #46
paulgb wrote: post #40

What infuriates me about WaPo is that even though I pay for it, their site is pretty much unusable without an ad blocker. The text jumps around as I scroll to make room for dynamically loaded ads. And then there are the bottom-feeding Outbrain (or whatever vendor they use) ads at the bottom of the article. It's a mess.

Have you considered voting with your wallet?

I briefly subscribed, was astonished that the site was still covered in ads and even crashing on mobile Safari, and canceled. I had just assumed that of course a paying account would have no ads, but I guess I'm crazy!

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

#206

Post by makomk »

mirimir wrote: post #13

I see the same behavior (v52.8.0). Damn. Also, from a German IPv4: > The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: > We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking “I agree” below, you c…

There's been no GDPR enforcement so far and it seems to have basically failed. All it's done has kill off a bunch of smaller websites, games, etc that aren't making enough money to justify the risk of being found noncompliant, whilst the big companies whose business models rely on tracking people have carried on regardless.

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

#207

Post by KozmoNau7 »

sticazzi wrote: post #167

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

Ditch Adblock and ABP, and get uBlock Origin instead.

Cookie Autodelete, Ublock Origin, Decentraleyes, Don't touch my tabs!, FB Purity, First Party Isolation, google-no-tracking-url, HTTPS Everywhere, Link Cleaner, Privacy Badger, Smart Referer and of course uBlock Origin in advanced mode with all 3rd party scripts and frames blocked by default.

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

#208

Post by makomk »

reaperducer wrote: post #133
munchbunny wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in ad tech for a number of years, so maybe I can address this one. Ads that are annotated with tracking/targeting capabilities are in fact substantially more valuable. There's the obvious aspect (targeted ads in general) but there's also the ability to measure whether your ads are actually working. Analytics requires tracking too. This is an oversimplification, but let's say you're buying ads at 10 cents per…

there's also the ability to measure whether your ads are actually working. This is not unique to online advertising. It's possible to tell is ads are working in paper/radio/television, as well. Companies have been doing it for literally hundreds of years. The only value online ad tracking adds is near real-time feedback, and granularity. Which is useless to 99% of companies, since the process of making large ad buyin…

What is probably unique to online advertising is widespread fraud by sites. If you run an advert on TV, radio, or in the paper, then their circulation will have been audited by third parties to ensure that they're actually reaching the audience they claim to be. There's no real equivalent to that online that doesn't involve tracking cookies. Without the real-time feedback, you have no idea if the ad you just bought is being shown to real readers, robots, or some hidden iframe on another site entirely.
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