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Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

vivaldi.com

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Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#261

Post by jefftk »

bitten wrote: post #259
jefftk wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads

Regarding your "earn to give", I feel like I want to play devil's advocate and ask why not cut your salary in half by working or volunteering on more humanitarian projects and charities? Not sure the pay would exactly be half less, maybe even more, maybe less, but the net positive of what you do may be greater? (I say that, as if we can measure such impacts :p)

I've considered doing directly valuable work, have tried things along these lines in the past, and may try them again in the future. For now though, I think earning to give is a much better fit for me: https://www.jefftk.com/p/earning-to-give-transcript

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#262

Post by jefftk »

btdmaster wrote: post #247
lmkg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Googe Analytics consultant here (not Google employee). 1. Google Analytics' primary identity signal is a first-party cookie. this is not shared between domains. There is no technical way to link identity between domains with different cookie values. 1a. Google Analytics has built-in library functions to allow site owners to share first-party cookie values between a whitelisted set of domains. This effectively lets on…

Interesting insight. Their privacy policy suggests they are able to do this however[1]: "When you’re not signed in to a Google Account, we store the information we collect with unique identifiers tied to the browser, application, or device you’re using." What is stopping, legally, them from taking e.g. HTTP Headers from independent connections and linking them together through fingerprinting? Maybe this is not implem…

> What is stopping, legally, them from taking e.g. HTTP Headers from independent connections and linking them together through fingerprinting?

Setting aside legality, the attack you're describing will be thwarted by network state partitioning: https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6713488334389248

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#263

Post by Jonsvt »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #260
tomc1985 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for big game hunting but taking down Google would be a gutpunch to every Gmail user ever

can't they just advertise based on what's in the email rather than keeping a profile on you? Not a lot of people want to see google go away, we just want them to stop being asses and get broken up.

I do think reading your mail for ads is another level of surveillance-based advertising. It is also quite personal.

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#264

Post by yeahr4579 »

jimbob45 wrote: post #175
kerkeslager wrote: post #86

Frankly, I don't think this goes far enough: "Ban advertising" would be better. Almost every problem with the internet right now is caused by advertising if you dig through the chain of causality. From social media patterns that addict you to conflict and conspiracy, to popups, adware and spam, to constant attacks on our attention even when we're driving and could literally kill someone with inattention, to spreading…

You need some amount of advertising. If you invented the cure for AIDS tomorrow, how are you going to tell everyone about it? Word-of-mouth works, but only so far. Perhaps over time, people will naturally Google "cancer cures" but will your business still be solvent by then? If you want to talk about leveling the playing field, you have to be more strategic with your legislation. Don't ban advertising. Ban spending o…

This made me think of indy games! With zero advertising and through word of mouth alone (And I guess steam reviews!) you can make an amazingly successful game. Minecraft being the biggest example.

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#265

Post by Seirdy »

jefftk wrote: post #217
Jonsvt wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is the FLOC is surveillance as well. You are still profiling users. This has got to stop. https://vivaldi.com/blog/no-google-vivaldi-users-will-not-ge...

I agree FLoC is tracking (though not at the individual level). The question we've been discussing, however, is the effect on competition in particular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27763345

> I agree FLoC is tracking (though not at the individual level).

FLoC significantly increases the entropy in a user's fingerprint (typically by 15 bits iirc). This improves existing individual tracking mechanisms that use a fingerprinting-based approach. FLoC therefore enables further individual tracking, and browsers that take privacy seriously should disable it.

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#266

Post by freediver »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4

Do we have a good proposed legal definition of surveillance-based advertising?

It could be as simple as 'using data that the user did not explicitly opt-into sharing'. Agreeing to terms&conditions doesn't count as it is not explicit.

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#267

Post by freediver »

jefftk wrote: post #125
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4

Do we have a good proposed legal definition of surveillance-based advertising?

I think this is quite tricky to pin down. For example, consider an e-commerce site like Amazon. They know your purchase history, reviews you've given or liked, and products you've viewed or put in your shopping cart but not purchased. Which information about your history would they be allowed to use to show you products you might be interested in buying? They also have lots of information about users in aggregate ("p…

Maybe not by default, but if they asked the users and explained what is this used for, it is likely users would say yes to the use case you described as it objectively improves their user experience when using Amazon (granted, ads/recommendations would need to be meaningful and designed in a way to actually improve the experience of the average user with a way to completely turn them off for a user who doesn't want it).

Problem is when a company use data that the user did not explicitly opt-into sharing with them, to then diminish their user experience of consuming the web by for example stuffing tons of targeted ads on every major site on the web, leading to barely usable sites and intelligence insulting outcomes.

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#268

Post by btdmaster »

jefftk wrote: post #262
btdmaster wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting insight. Their privacy policy suggests they are able to do this however[1]: "When you’re not signed in to a Google Account, we store the information we collect with unique identifiers tied to the browser, application, or device you’re using." What is stopping, legally, them from taking e.g. HTTP Headers from independent connections and linking them together through fingerprinting? Maybe this is not implem…

> What is stopping, legally, them from taking e.g. HTTP Headers from independent connections and linking them together through fingerprinting? Setting aside legality, the attack you're describing will be thwarted by network state partitioning: https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6713488334389248

Am I missing something, or does this not address the fact that https://whatsmybrowser.info/ will always yield the same thing whether a connection is made to GA, Firebase, YouTube or Blogger? That seems to have to do with connection timing and caching, not with what the connection itself leaks.

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#269

Post by jefftk »

btdmaster wrote: post #268
jefftk wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is stopping, legally, them from taking e.g. HTTP Headers from independent connections and linking them together through fingerprinting? Setting aside legality, the attack you're describing will be thwarted by network state partitioning: https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6713488334389248

Am I missing something, or does this not address the fact that https://whatsmybrowser.info/ will always yield the same thing whether a connection is made to GA, Firebase, YouTube or Blogger? That seems to have to do with connection timing and caching, not with what the connection itself leaks.

I thought the parent was talking about using information about the network connection to link users across sites hosted by the same entity?

If you're talking about fingerprinting in general, that is also something that all the browsers are working on. I'm most familiar with Chrome's strategy, which is to first switch APIs that provide a lot of entropy from something you get by default to something you have to actively request, figure out how to provide similar functionality more privately, and then enforce a privacy budget that does not allow collecting enough information to identify users: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#270

Post by kerkeslager »

jimbob45 wrote: post #175
kerkeslager wrote: post #86

Frankly, I don't think this goes far enough: "Ban advertising" would be better. Almost every problem with the internet right now is caused by advertising if you dig through the chain of causality. From social media patterns that addict you to conflict and conspiracy, to popups, adware and spam, to constant attacks on our attention even when we're driving and could literally kill someone with inattention, to spreading…

You need some amount of advertising. If you invented the cure for AIDS tomorrow, how are you going to tell everyone about it? Word-of-mouth works, but only so far. Perhaps over time, people will naturally Google "cancer cures" but will your business still be solvent by then? If you want to talk about leveling the playing field, you have to be more strategic with your legislation. Don't ban advertising. Ban spending o…

> You need some amount of advertising. If you invented the cure for AIDS tomorrow, how are you going to tell everyone about it? Word-of-mouth works, but only so far. Perhaps over time, people will naturally Google "cancer cures" but will your business still be solvent by then?

This example is actually a perfect example of why you don't need advertising for things people really need. Do you really think that one of the largest advancements in medical history would not be on the front page of every major news site? Do you really think that patients with cancer and their oncologists won't research the latest cures for cancer?

> If you want to talk about leveling the playing field, you have to be more strategic with your legislation. Don't ban advertising. Ban spending on advertising above some limit. No one benefits from Coca-Cola showing yet another commercial on TV other than the commercial producers - society certainly doesn't benefit though. Make companies spend their ad dollars wisely.

Society doesn't benefit from Coca-Cola--on the contrary, Coca-Cola is actively harmful, and there isn't an amount of spending on advertising Coca-Cola that would be reasonable. This is an example of why advertising is harmful: it's propping up a business model that actively causes people diabetes, obesity, tooth decay, etc. Without advertising, do you think people would be googling, "sugary drinks"? Probably not: and the resulting bankruptcy of a corporation poisoning us would be a good thing.

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