I always thought the Do Not Track option was naive. It did nothing to stop tracking except beg.
The same could be said of robot.txt files.
Adblocking: How about Nah?
21–30 of 549 posts
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#22I always thought the Do Not Track option was naive. It did nothing to stop tracking except beg.
In a sane world, DNT would be opt-out and enforced by legislation.
Legislation doesn't stop criminals. The best way to stop browser tracking online is to make it technologically impossible for malicious actors to track the browser.
Everything else is just a band-aide.
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
JavaScript enabled pop-up ads, it enables tracking, it enables coinminers and other malware Isn’t this like saying atoms are to blame for nuclear warfare? Atoms enabled nuclear weapons?
JavaScript isn't from nature. It could have been designed so that it didn't enable those things, but it wasn't. It's probably more accurate to say the ability browsers grant JavaScript is to blame, but that's just splitting atoms.
It's not possible for a system that can communicate remotely to prevent tracking on some level by using unique IDs and fingerprinting even without JS. It's also not possible to have a programming language that can't also be used as a coin miner, it's just a CPU based operation and there's no way to discriminate between user desired computation and exploitative computation. Your point about pop up ads is valid in that JS does not need to be able to influence the state of the browser in that way, this is the only example that crosses outside of the sandbox.
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#24Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#25Something is different in the arms race this time.
Browser development is almost exclusively funded by advertising. Chrome, in the obvious way. Mozilla is funded entirely by Google. Safari is the only surviving exception.
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a sane world, DNT would be opt-out and enforced by legislation.
Legislation doesn't stop criminals. The best way to stop browser tracking online is to make it technologically impossible for malicious actors to track the browser. Everything else is just a band-aide.
Legislation doesn't stop criminals.
But these are incorporated entities. If proper privacy laws are/were put in place and enforced, they would have to honor DNT. This is as much a failing of these companies to respect privacy as it was the failing of governments to protect privacy of their citizens.
Besides violating privacy, ad networks have also been a proxy for malware. They should have been sued into oblivion for that as well.
I agree that since the proper means have failed, blocking is the best solution. Do people who are not computer savvy a favor and install a proper ad blocker for them. We can do much better than 26%.
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#27I always thought the Do Not Track option was naive. It did nothing to stop tracking except beg.
This misses the real intention of DNT, which was to give browser vendors plausible deniability when advertisers inevitably rejected it.
The one and only reason that browsers (with the exception of Google's) don't block ads out of the box (like they do for pop-ups) is out of concern that ad-supported websites will explicitly blacklist their user agents, driving away their users and causing the browsers to lose marketshare.[1] DNT was the shot across the bow that said "we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way". The obvious outcome was that the ad networks would choose to ignore it, which formed the foundational justification for gradually introducing ever-stricter policies reining in ads by default.
[1] The inverse is true as well: the nuclear option of any browser whose marketshare sinks to the point of unsustainability will be to immediately introduce on-by-default adblockers, since at that point they have nothing left to lose.
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#28Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#29It's somewhat ironic that this page contains the most impressive procession of banner ads that I've seen in a long while. And almost all of them keep changing every thirty seconds or so. Apparently I've been successful in systematically avoiding sites that would torture me like that. They may succeed once but only at the price that they won't see me again.
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a sane world, DNT would be opt-out and enforced by legislation.
There's legislation to stop robocalls. How many have you gotten in the last 24 hours? I've had 3, and it's been a pretty typical day.
Meanwhile I haven't gotten any in many years, because my spam call filter works a treat, and always has.
Though I am thinking of turning it off and putting up a "Hello? Hello? Sorry I can't hear you could you repeat that. Uhha, go on..." recorded message about 5 minutes long, just to waste their resources. That would actually be a promising addition to a spam filter.