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New browser signal could make cookie banners obsolete

dataprotectioncontrol.org

221–230 of 269 posts

Re: New browser signal could make cookie banners obsolete

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's easier to just call them "surveillance companies" and be done with it. Regardless of whether they're collecting, storing, or processing surveillance data, they're all in the same business as Equifax, Google, Lexis-Nexis, and NSA.

I don't think it's useful for analysis or activism to group Equifax, Google, the NSA, the New York Times, Humble Bundle, Twitter, Airbnb, Walgreens, etc. under a single term. The flattening of this mess down into "adtech" is how most of them have avoided scrutiny, and relabeling that "surveillance" doesn't make the relationships between them any clearer.

Like all paradigms, it makes some things clearer and other things less clear. This one helps me keep my head straight about easy to ignore aspects of my relationship with the ones that would otherwise appear as being tamer, especially for instance Google.

The ones that seem out of place on your list are because their main business is something other than surveillance. Saying that Walgreens "patronizes the surveillance industry" does make more sense than labeling the whole company as doing that one thing. Although labeling the marketing group requesting all the trackers be added to their website as the "surveillance department" makes sense.

I think "surveillance" is a much better term than "ad" because the latter seems like just some harmless annoyance in line with American business values, whereas the former more accurately captures that the systems these companies are building are offenses against freedom and humanity.

Re: New browser signal could make cookie banners obsolete

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who defines what "privacy" means? You? Why? Can you point me to the place where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights talks about cookies and FLoC? The UCHR is not a blank check for banning anything you want in the name of "privacy". There are a lot of angry people in this thread stating what they want, but none have offered an argument for why we should structure society around their whims. Sorry, but "you shoul…

There's nothing in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights about privacy regarding medical records, but various jurisdictions agree that it's worth protecting. > Sorry, but "you shouldn't be able to collect information" isn't an argument. How about "private entities shouldn't be able to collect my information without my explicit consent". > It's a wish. Nobody is under any obligation to indulge the wishes of random…

> How about "private entities shouldn't be able to collect my information without my explicit consent"

Keeping a diary or a phone contact list would be forbidden under a strict reading of that rule. Even remembering the name of a person you met at a party would be forbidden unless you ask for explicit consent first. "Hey, Joe. Great to meet you. Mind if I make a mental note connecting your face to your name?" Real people don't think like this.

We all have a natural freedom to record facts we perceive in the world around them. Taken to its logical conclusion, privacy advocacy is about mandatory forgetting. No, thanks.

Re: New browser signal could make cookie banners obsolete

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They want you to associate them with privacy, and conclude that privacy laws are pointless and should be repealed. This is a sentiment expressed surprisingly often even here on HN.

A huge proportion of posters either work at adware companies or are big time owners of adware stocks. And as the Sinclair adage goes, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

I am completely outside of adtech influence and even I can recognize that the costs may outweight the benefits of the current state of government-attempted adtech regulation. Most arguing against these laws are either more libertarian wrt tech, or take umbrage with the specific nature and enforcement of the law.

Almost everyone wants privacy limits, they just don't agree on the current measures (or their previous ones, or the ones before that, or doubling down on continued failed policy approaches in the future).

Re: New browser signal could make cookie banners obsolete

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. This is also why I never feel "ashamed" when sites ask me to please disable my ad blocker because when I block ads they'll go out of business. Or why I'll always decline even "user respecting" ads on sites. We're fighting the ad and tracking industry here, the internet equivalent of a gang member with a shiv and a length of pipe. I'm not going to fight nicely. I'll deny you any chance and any method I g…

I agree that we should not feel shame at blocking ads. I remember when the web was new and "pop-up blockers" became a thing. Ad companies and everyone using them have long ago burned any and all good will we might have had towards them and deserve nothing but our contempt.

Then Google came along promising no intrusive banner ads or popups. They would make their money from quieter personalized ads that knew what you wanted because they had more data about what you were doing. People loved the idea. It was going to save the internet from the horrible advertising industry.

Re: New browser signal could make cookie banners obsolete

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what are the actual harms The kind of question can only be asked by someone who has never been abused by a domestic partner, never been on the wrong end of debt collectors, the law, disgruntled employees, doxxers, or other real and persistent threats that are enabled by the data collection and aggregation that is the foundation of interest targeting.

Do abusive domestic partners, debt collectors, random employees, or angry doxxers have access to targeted advertising interest data? The "harm" you're discussing is hypothetical and extremely unlikely. I'm asking for concrete examples.

Debt collectors are huge data broker clients. (And sellers too - junk debt can go both ways on these markets.) Disgruntled employees leak a fair bit too.

Re: New browser signal could make cookie banners obsolete

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They want you to associate them with privacy, and conclude that privacy laws are pointless and should be repealed. This is a sentiment expressed surprisingly often even here on HN.

A huge proportion of posters either work at adware companies or are big time owners of adware stocks. And as the Sinclair adage goes, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

By this reasoning, you must be a Google shill since the GDPR has been great for their market share: https://globaldatareview.com/competitionantitrust/study-gdpr...

Re: New browser signal could make cookie banners obsolete

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a small reminder for people using Firefox and ublock origin: you can remove almost all cookie prompts by enabling the annoyances filters in the addon settings

Anyone not using Firefox/Ublock; you can use NoScript to block the banners, and a lot of other adtech (including some paywalls such as Bloomberg) as they are all JS-powered. It's quite surprising to see how many JS plugins are in operation on a typical consumer site, and satisfying to know they were all blocked unless expressly permitted :)

Keep in mind, however, that you will end up enabling all the "Please enable Javascript to view our website (even though our website works well enough for your casual visit without it)" banners, that are enabled in the HTML by default and hidden by JS :)

For example, one particular maroon-headwear-related Linux distro's bug tracker has a particularly egregious blinking bright red banner, asking you to enable JS for the website to "function correctly", even though reading bugs on said tracker works fine without it.

Re: New browser signal could make cookie banners obsolete

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ad industry is not monolithic, though. Some people want to genuinely move on to less privacy-invasive business models; others not. I have been to industry conferences where the advice was "well, if you do not like the Do Not Sell link on your site, maybe it's time to stop selling and start changing your business model." What is different this time around compared to P3P, DNT, and other earlier mechanisms is that…

Thing is, how is regulation supposed to ever keep up with the rapid advancements of technology and advertising and the lobbies that come with all that revenue? Capital and technology need not respect sovereign borders and laws as long as they can keep one step ahead of enforcement and still get enough revenue. The laws and lawmakers are fundamentally slower and weaker and poorer; by the time CCPA et al have an actual…

Simple the law should be written in a technology agnostic way. Something along the lines o f"Services shall not track user behavior beyond what is necessary to render service, and user behavior shall not be sold to, shared with, or otherwise made useable by third parties without user consent" Then it doesn't matter what technology you come up with in the future it is covered.

Re: New browser signal could make cookie banners obsolete

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that we should not feel shame at blocking ads. I remember when the web was new and "pop-up blockers" became a thing. Ad companies and everyone using them have long ago burned any and all good will we might have had towards them and deserve nothing but our contempt.

Then Google came along promising no intrusive banner ads or popups. They would make their money from quieter personalized ads that knew what you wanted because they had more data about what you were doing. People loved the idea. It was going to save the internet from the horrible advertising industry.

Actually, I seem to remember that these ads were contextual at first, not related to any profile they would have built for you but only related to the content of the page.

Which is entirely different. Ads are still manipulative (by design), but at least purely contextual ads don't track you.

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