201–210 of 254 posts
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?
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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…
> Didn't people make money off internet advertising before the modern surveillance-marketing complex? What happened to it? Non-contextual advertising still exists, but it's perceived as less effective, so there's a lot less money in it. I don't know if that perception is correct, but I do remember back when a common complaint from people was that the ads they saw weren't relevant to them. It's also not just targeted…
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How is fraud handled for TV advertising? Or print? This isn’t some weird new problem. The truth is that ad-tech wants to track you to make your profile more valuable, however, a less valuable user doesn’t mean advertising doesn’t work, it just means the bottom-feeding middlemen get a less profound payday. Why not just flip the model from eyeballs and clicks to actual ad effectiveness? Newspaper car ads have this down…
if you are a publisher and have actual content humans care about, ditch the ad networks and start selling your pixels directly to relevant advertisers. Good luck with direct ad sales, unless you are a large company with a large ad sales team and correspondingly large budget.
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I don't think we'd in practice see people lying one way or the other about a particular name level being "public". If GitHub wants to track people across all *.github.io pages, it can, trivially. It controls the infrastructure, after all.
> If GitHub wants to track people across all .github.io pages, it can, trivially. It controls the infrastructure, after all.* If WebKit fully implements what they're describing here then GitHub should not be able to use their control of *.github.io to track people across those pages.
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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.
A first party is a website that a user is intentionally and knowingly visiting, as displayed by the URL field of the browser, and the set of resources on the web operated by the same organization. In practice, we consider resources to belong to the same party if they are part of the same registrable domain: a public suffix plus one additional label. Example: site.example, www.site.example, and s.u.b.site.example are…
We have mixed feelings about this. Most people could probably figure out that google.com and google.co.uk are owned by the same entity. And probably many people are aware that youtube.com and google.com are related. But some entities own hundreds of domain names with no clear lexical relationship. I doubt a lot of people would expect TechCrunch.com and huffpost.com to be related and would not really expect to be trac…
No need.
Anyone choosing to mix and match also has the resources for some minor duplication of effort.
Or they could just do it all service side.
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That's a very interesting point. But tracking-free services won't really have a major mindshare with the general public because you really can't compete with "free." And there's nothing preventing Google from leveraging Youtube/Gmail/Search to push out other browsers which have tracking protection. Youtube already plays less well with Firefox. Gmail isn't exactly snappy on Safari either.
Yes, competing with Google is still a main challenge. Still, Apple seems to be managing by providing the browser for free as a value-add when you buy their hardware, and by preventing other browser engines from running on iOS. Mozilla's financial dependence on Google is still a major challenge, which they'll hopefully be able to fix before push comes to shove. Microsoft unfortunately did not seem to be able to financ…
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Yes, competing with Google is still a main challenge. Still, Apple seems to be managing by providing the browser for free as a value-add when you buy their hardware, and by preventing other browser engines from running on iOS. Mozilla's financial dependence on Google is still a major challenge, which they'll hopefully be able to fix before push comes to shove. Microsoft unfortunately did not seem to be able to financ…
> Apple seems to be managing by providing the browser for free Plus @icloud.com email service > Mozilla's financial dependence on Google is still a major challenge, which they'll hopefully be able to fix I honestly do not see how. Sticking to Safari for now.
Their approach relies on acquisitions (Pocket) or partnerships/experiments (Scroll).
The language used by them when referring to Google has changed quite a lot in the past year or so.
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> Apple seems to be managing by providing the browser for free Plus @icloud.com email service > Mozilla's financial dependence on Google is still a major challenge, which they'll hopefully be able to fix I honestly do not see how. Sticking to Safari for now.
Mozilla is looking into becoming more independent from Google by introducing paid services, such as ad-free content subscriptions using Scroll, Pocket, VPN... Their approach relies on acquisitions (Pocket) or partnerships/experiments (Scroll). The language used by them when referring to Google has changed quite a lot in the past year or so.
What makes me even more happy is that this helps to eliminate the argument stating that 3p cookies can be replaced with heuristics/non-deterministic targeting. So, instead of assigning resources to just another way of targeting users (e.g. hacks, fingerprinting) a developer/PM can already say that these approaches will be prevented in the exact same way. Any further work in this direction would be pointless.
Ideally, we'd put more focus on contextual targeting, which is arguably more useful, significantly less creepy and less dubious from the ethical point of view.
I just wish Microsoft moved in the same direction with IE. So far they've been more quiet on that subject than Google. That's wishful thinking, I know.