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

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

#261

Post by jasonlotito » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 2:47 PM UTC

runn1ng wrote: post #50

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.

Washington Post have a secret, hidden "Premium EU Ad-Free" subscription that removes all the ads. You have to go specifically here and click on the third option - but NOT when you have a subscription already (you need to cancel it first) https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/ Despite "EU" and "GDPR" in the name, it works outside of EU too

Did you actually try to sign up with it? It does not work outside the EU.

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

#262

Post by thelasthuman » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 2:48 PM UTC

I guess privacy will be destined to become a purchaseable product. I guess that's just a inevitable conclusion considering our economic system.

But it's okay so long as it is a corporation doing it to us and not the government right? Never mind how corporations have grown to be bigger and more powerful than some nation states.

On the internet, humanity can be it's true self, and we are ugly. Marketing has been ugly forever (or at least since the introduction of psychology to the field post WWII).

It makes sense that marketing on the net is malicious to the point of attacking the user. That's who we are deep down inside.

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

#263

Post by satyaaa » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 2:57 PM UTC

Good thing I couldn't be bothered reading anything on that trashy blog anyway.

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

#264

Post by UncleMeat » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 3:14 PM UTC

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.

That's already existed. In many iterations. Even specifically for newspaper websites.

Why aren't you already using one of the many options?

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

#265

Post by 6d6b73 » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

bonsai80 wrote: post #251

I get why companies feel they need to do this (although I personally find the tracking to never be OK). I'd suggest a modified approach to these "please turn off" notices: Show a form asking for alternatives and also having users enter how much money they would pay for the site to remove all ads and/or tracking. A step further could even be to allow people to enter what they'd pay for 1yr along with payment info. If…

Problem with that is that they will still be able to track you as you will need to login to get the subscription, and now they will have all your information.

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

#266

Post by munchbunny » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 3:17 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #98

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…

> Maybe not at those exact numbers, but you'd probably be willing to pay some substantial amount more, because that strategy (retargeting) works measurably better for converting an ad view into a purchase. I do believe that, but I also wonder... Retargeting, i.e. ads of particular product stalking you everywhere you go, is the single method that so far guarantees I just won't buy the advertised thing, out of pure spi…

I'm sure it does have an effect, but retargeting is also so common that I don't think anyone is able to remember all but the most egregious cases.

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

#267

Post by ummonk » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 3:18 PM UTC

Any site that does this should be marked as a spyware site and blocked by the browser. Enough is enough.

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

#268

Post by behringer » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 3:33 PM UTC

AsyncAwait wrote: post #244

Reason077 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy protection laws are a good thing. But “cookie consent” pop-ups are stupid and pointless. Pop-ups do not improve privacy, and they make the web worse.

But that's a bad implementation on the part of the site, under GDPR you should have the option to opt-out as well.

Why? If I'm a site owner that wants to track where you come from and where you're going, even within my own site, then I have the right to ask you to gtfo if you don't like it.

GDPR allows for this.

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

#269

Post by bogomipz » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 3:36 PM UTC

marmaduke wrote: post #176

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.

> 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…

>"I simply disable JavaScript. It's incredible how much faster the web is without it, and how much smoother, and how much less cluttered."

I'm curious is there any practical fallout turning JS off completely? Do you just switch it back on for things like e-commerce, web UI's etc? I always find the context switching to the settings menu a bit of a pain. Do you have some recommendations for things that make JS-free web browsing practical or seamless? Cheers.

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

#270

Post by stickfigure » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 3:38 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #135

TeMPOraL wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a cliché about "the internet killed newspapers." No, internet ad companies killed newspapers by falsely convincing them that an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper, so they have to make up the difference by harvesting everyone's data. I think it's a little bit of both. Internet commoditized newspapers and unbundled them, allowing us to peruse individual articles wi…

Then again, were they wrong? The model works. I think you're mistaken there. If the model worked, then thousands of newspapers wouldn't have closed, downsized, or worse. We'd be back in the 80's when cities like Cincinnati and Chicago had FOUR real daily newspapers, and just about every single radio station had its own news department. What happened is that the internet ad companies convinced newspapers that an ad th…

$1,000 for 1,000 people to see in print

What happened is that now advertisers can measure the impact of their ads and realize they just wasted $1000. If advertising was worth $1k, ad companies would still charge it. The people getting screwed in the old system were the advertisers.

The world only sustained thousands of newspapers because physical delivery made them inherently local. The internet made the market for news national, if not global. Consolidation is natural.