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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

#291

Post by kbenson »

petyrbaelish wrote: post #161
kbenson wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if WaPo makes a distinction between subscribers and non-subscribers for this behavior (I'm not sure if they do or don't), they they are very clearly giving you a choice for how to pay for your content, with your money or with whatever information that can get out of you, and to that end they don't want you to block that because they actually want to get something of value out of the transaction. > I think it's…

When you pay with your money,i.e. subscribe : you enable them to get more information out of you. Tracking becomes almost perfect : no matter how many browsers you change, operating systems, keep deleting cookies, give random data to finger printing : they can track you with your subscriber ID. So paying is a double whammy.

This assumes all tracking is equal. I don't care if they track what I read and engage with on their site, that's how they learn to make it better. That's sort of like complaining that a store owner pays attention to what items you look at in the store. Of course they do that. What we don't want is them following us around when we're out of the store to see what else we like at other places.

The simplest way for WaPo to achieve this without having to deal with any adbockers or trackers would be to use an in-house system served from their own servers. Unfortunately, since they also have a free subscription where they do track people, that would mean two systems which would be redundant, and the in-house one also probably takes a lot of effort and manpower. Unfortunately, that leaves subscribers not knowing exactly what is being tracked and who is doing the tracking.

I mitigate this by using ublock and a container tab for news sites in Firefox. I would prefer to know this isn't needed because WaPo did the right thing, but I would still do anyways, as just because something shouldn't be needed for protection doesn't mean you shouldn't do it anyways if the cost is small enough.

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

#292

Post by zamadatix »

StevePerkins wrote: post #227
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing to keep up with, really. You could very servicably get by with only uBlock Origin's default blocklists and the advanced mode with 3rd party scripts/frames on default-deny. The rest are there because I'm slightly paranoid.

I'm concerned about fingerprinting.

Not much a way to get around that. Removing 99% of fingerprinting identification gives a stronger fingerprint than many defaults.

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

#293

Post by rebuilder »

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.

And what's the purpose of cookies?

I'm saying if a store used ther CCTV systems to track the behaviour of individual customers, and was building a database of that information, and pestered their customers whose apparel foiled their facial recognition, then that would be pretty much exactly what WP are doing here. What the tools used might have originally been designed for doesn't make any difference IMO.

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

#294

Post by rebuilder »

kqr wrote: post #72
adtac wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So lets put it this way instead: As soon as CCTV starts being used for marketing, any employee asking me to remove my sunglasses will have the effect of enforting my desire to wear them indoors.

Would you really be fine with that as long as no marketing was involved?

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

#295

Post by russdpale »

larkeith wrote: post #8

Any time a site asks me to disable tracking protection, it has the curious effect of reinforcing my desire to leave it enabled - that site has made it clear that they are intentionally and unapologetically violating my privacy for a quick buck.

I agree, I always leave those sites and never return.

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

#296

Post by fnordsensei »

laumars wrote: post #231
fnordsensei wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Content owners don't want a standard way because they depend on user apathy, confusion and dark patterns to "trick" users into allowing websites to monetise their consumers data. I say "consumers" rather than "customers" because at this point it feels more like the people buying data are the customers, rather than the actual daily website visitors.

Agreed, which is why it would take legislation for orgs to use it, even if a standard was agreed upon.

If it's uniform and learnable, the possibility to trick people shrinks dramatically.

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

#297

Post by stickfigure »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #288
stickfigure wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't run on telepathy. Some people do rebuy those products. And maybe this is just the best ad (of nothing great) that happened to be available at the time. If you want to have any idea of how well advertising works, you have to approach it from the perspective of an advertiser, not an ad target. Then you can get real data. You are a data point of one.

I'd love to see that data, because my current pet theory is that adtech applies the same morals internally that they do externally - i.e. everyone tries to scam each other, pretending their tools work.

The people buying Facebook ads know if they work. You can track customers through every click to the sale. You can experiment with $10 if you want. Try it.

I built a large print-on-demand apparel marketplace. Most of the sellers were driving traffic with facebook ads. It worked great. Unfortunately (for the sellers) so many people jumped into the game that they bid up the ad rates. Now Facebook makes most of the money in the tshirt business... but you can't say the system doesn't work.

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

#298

Post by nradov »

stickfigure wrote: post #276
nradov wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If targeting works then why do I keep seeing ads for products that I've already purchased and have no intention of buying again any time soon?

It doesn't run on telepathy. Some people do rebuy those products. And maybe this is just the best ad (of nothing great) that happened to be available at the time. If you want to have any idea of how well advertising works, you have to approach it from the perspective of an advertiser, not an ad target. Then you can get real data. You are a data point of one.

I guarantee you that very few customers rebuy the exact same vacuum cleaner or pair of sunglasses within a matter of weeks. You would think that the advertisers would only show products that customers actually do rebuy, like dog food and toothpaste.

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

#299

Post by yuhong »

mike22223333 wrote: post #162
TeMPOraL wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, all of it. Honestly, it's not our job to find a business model that works. It's literally the job of a company trying to make money. Find a way that works. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for cooperating and working together to solve things. But the ad industry is so out of control that there's no cooperating with that. If they find a way to serve ads that are not privacy-invading, do not expose users to malw…

Person with insider info here. It was Google that started the data race. Rest of the industry was forced because Advertisers would not advertise otherwise because they were getting better return on investment buying ads that were targeted using personal data aka Google.

DoubleClick dates far before Google, and they bought it in 2007 I think.

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

#300

Post by conscion »

isolli wrote: post #239
davidgh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I hope someone comes up with a “Netflix for online content”. I’m not going to subscribe to a dozen news sites individually and I also don’t want to make a purchase decision, even if tiny, every time I visit a site. For me a bundle of the top 10-15 high-quality news sites, perhaps letting me choose from different packages at different price points, and allocate the revenue to sites based on which content I read…

Try Blendle: https://launch.blendle.com/ Articles cost between $0.10 and $1.15 (most between $0.20 and $0.50). You can request a refund if you don't like an article, which makes the transaction almost frictionless. The one thing I miss is the ability to share articles without requiring the recipient to sign up for Blendle. Especially since the article can usually be read for free by going directly to the publisher's…

What I couldn't tell from their site, and what really is the "killer feature": Do I need to go through their site to access articles, or can I follow a native link and have Blendle automatically authenticate that I can read the article?
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