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WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

webkit.org

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Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#121

Post by ferzul »

danielscrubs wrote: post #101
downandout wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google makes $21 on average per US user per month [1], almost all of which comes from advertising. Would you pay $21/mo for your Google services? [1] https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...

I’ve bought zero products via google ads, except the case when I search for a company name and their official homepage is the top sponsored result. Which is insane. And yet, my eyeballs looking at text with less text than a tweet is worth 21 USD. It feels like Google disrupted, but it’s far away from being optimal for companies.

well, I don't see Google ads so I don't know what the content is, but no-one knows that I bought a coke after seeing an ad for a coke at the train station. but it still works. the effectiveness of advertising is an empirical question.

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#122

Post by eecc »

qroshan wrote: post #94
rale00 wrote: post #40

So what is going to happen when Apple succeeds in making it impossible to make any money off advertisements shown to iOS users on the web? I'm currently imagining a future where publishers start to just redirect iOS traffic to install their app, where they can actually make money. Good news for the walled garden, I guess?

Most of HN don't understand that the Advertising ecosystem is what is feeding the tech boom and their livelihood. Just like housing it is an entire ecosystem now with many people's jobs and livelihood is based on. Hit that ecosystem and you get a recession. However it doesn't stop at the recession. Most VCs are funding hundreds and thousands of startups with the hope that one of them is going to get sold to Google or…

We could be working on distributed systems and analytics engines to - say - chew through all the protein mediated DNA/RNA expressions.

That would cost a few pennies in engineering skill and we might even find cures to things that might kill us or our loved ones.

But no, we’re throwing these opportunities away trying to be the next overvalued IRC skin.

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#123

Post by ferzul »

briandear wrote: post #103
rale00 wrote: post #40

So what is going to happen when Apple succeeds in making it impossible to make any money off advertisements shown to iOS users on the web? I'm currently imagining a future where publishers start to just redirect iOS traffic to install their app, where they can actually make money. Good news for the walled garden, I guess?

Ads without allowing tracking networks. You know, like print ads. And sites already annoy you to download their godforesaken apps. See Yelp, Reddit and Quora.

I don't know whether or when God forsook any particular mobile app, but I do know it the preposition "for" used as a verbal prefix with a negative implication, not the word and prefix "fore" meaning in front.

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#124

Post by redwall_hp »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #76
geofft wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't people make money off internet advertising before the modern surveillance-marketing complex? What happened to it? I mean, maybe the answer is that those ads were only profitable because of the novelty factor and now that we have metrics we know they don't work, or at least don't work anywhere close to how much they cost. But I do miss things like the webcomics running their own ad network, Google's textual ads…

From what I can tell, the pre-surveilence norm was businesses having to find a website with an audience they wanted to advertise to, or a website finding a business that might want to market to their users, and then every website having to negotiate contracts with every business that wanted to set up ads. Basically the print magazine model. But as businesses wanted to advertise to larger populations (we want to do a…

It was more profitable, especially for small sites. I used to cold email businesses and ask them if they wanted to buy a static banner on my blog, back in the 2000s. I made a few hundred a month on a site that had 30k views per month.

You're lucky to get a fraction of that now. Advertisers get a much lower cost through AdSense and a ton of metrics.

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#125

Post by floatingatoll »

shandor wrote: post #93
jazzyjackson wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I can tell, the pre-surveilence norm was businesses having to find a website with an audience they wanted to advertise to, or a website finding a business that might want to market to their users, and then every website having to negotiate contracts with every business that wanted to set up ads. Basically the print magazine model. But as businesses wanted to advertise to larger populations (we want to do a…

> Basically the print magazine model. And also TV, as it is still today. Oh, and every other form of advertising basically. If advertising without invading user privacy is so bad (as the perpetrators are rationalizing it), how come all other forms of advertising are still a billion (trillion?) dollar business worldwide? Just makes one wonder.

Broadcast TV, not Internet TV. It’s valid for broadcast antenna and cable TV, because those can’t be tracked, but it’s not valid for smart TVs, smart cable boxes, or almost all Internet TV sources — as those are all generally subject to the same level of invasive tracking using the account credentials.

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#126

Post by davedx »

om2 wrote: post #9
saagarjha wrote: post #5

Actual link to the policy: https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention-policy/ . One thing that I found interesting was these two quotes: > Our current anti-tracking mitigations in WebKit are applied universally to all websites, or based on algorithmic, on-device classification. > If a party attempts to circumvent our tracking prevention methods, we may add additional restrictions without prior notice. These restrictions…

We're willing to do specifically targeted mitigations, but only if we have to. So far, nearly everything we've done has been universal or algorithmic. The one exception I know of was to delete tracking data that had already been planted by known circumventers, at the same time as the mitigation to stop anyone else from using that particular hole (HTTPS super cookies). This is in contrast to Mozilla and Edge tracking…

Thank you for doing this work. I don’t know what effect it has on Apple as a whole but for customers like me it reinforces my loyalty to Apple.

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#127

Post by mstade »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #111
nofunsir wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it NEED to be public? So the bad actors can know how they are being caught and mitigated and can circumvent again and again?

The bad actors just need to open their own website in webkit to check if they are being blocked in some way. They will always know if a particular tracking strategy they are using is not working. So there is no harm in making the list public. The benefit of making the list public is that blocking tech is in some sense of the word censorship. The public needs to know who is being blocked to ensure transparency and to…

Isn't WebKit open source though, including this tech?

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#128

Post by davedx »

peanutz454 wrote: post #55
andykx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not impossible to advertise without tracking users.

For some reason people just have an aversion to paying for stuff they use. Facebook's revenue per user is less than 7$, I don't use facebook, but do not mind paying that little for something I use instead of getting tracked wherever I go. Similarly Google's service that I use like gmail and photos are easily worth about 7$ per month. I would pay if they said they will stop tracking me. I don't know about youtube.

Tell that to Spotify, Netflix, Apple, all the other thousands of subscriptions based businesses.

People are maybe less willing to pay for something they’ve been using for free (with ads) for years.

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#129

Post by dbuder »

Analemma_ wrote: post #46
rale00 wrote: post #40

So what is going to happen when Apple succeeds in making it impossible to make any money off advertisements shown to iOS users on the web? I'm currently imagining a future where publishers start to just redirect iOS traffic to install their app, where they can actually make money. Good news for the walled garden, I guess?

I’m way past the point of caring. Five years ago maybe I’d have been bothered, but targeted advertisement installs spyware on my computer, destroys its performance, and builds a profile on me that is begging to be exploited by hackers and/or the government. May it rot in pieces and to hell with the consequences, and if advertisers are unhappy that I’ve taken such an extreme position, they should examine how their beh…

From my experience, the people making these decisions are incapable of examining their behavior. When many news websites tried to go paywall a few years ago I spoke to someone who worked at one of them and I tried to be diplomatic but eventually said, why do you need 26 pieces of malware to display less than a thousand words and why is the the size of any given page bigger than a Windows 3.1 install? I didn't even get a coherent response, it was basically, oh these guys in a meeting said we need to and we wanted the money so we happily signed up.

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#130

Post by the8472 »

jesstaa wrote: post #106

I expect that tracking will just move to being proxied server side. It will be more annoying for the people setting it up but services will spring up to help. Little will change in the advertising and tracking space.

That annoyance may be enough to keep many actors from just plugging 10 random trackers into their sites, especially when it means running code from less-than-trust-worthy parties on their own servers instead of their user machines.

At the very minimum it aligns incentives better for developers to think about these things.

And with IPv6 privacy extensions IP addresses will also be less useful for server-side tracking.

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