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Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

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Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#101

Post by notatoad »

jacquesm wrote: post #15
chewxy wrote: post #6

I don't really like this. I work in the advertising industry and retargeting is honestly one of the most exciting things to come out. Sure there are ways of cookieless retargeting, but it is a hassle. I mean, everyone's heard of Samy's Evercookie right? Then there are TCP stack signatures, and other companies like a few European DSPs that use cookieless tracking to track a person (IMO it's quite easy to use a GET pix…

Personally I can't stand retargeting, if there is one turn-off I have when visiting websites it is being hounded from site to site by an ad. That signals to me to never ever buy that product. That it is 'exciting' to those in the advertising industry is a signal all by itself. Once a while ago I googled for a bit around the time I was buying a car. For weeks afterwards I got hounded by car ads for some brand. Needles…

My biggest annoyance with retargeting is also buying a car. I don't remember seeing any car ads leading up to my purchase, but ever since buying the car (over a year ago now) my browser is littered with Ford Focus ads. It's not going to do any good to show me ads for a Focus, i already bought one. It's just a waste of your ad buy to show me more ads. Retargeting seems to be, at this point, one of those technologies that has a high potential value but needs a lot of work to realize that value.

Or it could just be that the people who sell fords aren't very smart. Three days (!!!) after i bought my car, they sent me an email promoting a trade-in event they were having, telling me what a good deal i could get on a used toyota at my local dealership if i traded in my car.

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#102

Post by belorn »

chewxy wrote: post #6

I don't really like this. I work in the advertising industry and retargeting is honestly one of the most exciting things to come out. Sure there are ways of cookieless retargeting, but it is a hassle. I mean, everyone's heard of Samy's Evercookie right? Then there are TCP stack signatures, and other companies like a few European DSPs that use cookieless tracking to track a person (IMO it's quite easy to use a GET pix…

Third party cookies are not banned, they are turned of by default. In the same way you are asking users to make active choices about their information, a change in default is asking ad companies to only track users that want targeted ads.

I constantly see people on HN commenting that they like targeted ads. Those should be your customers. I and others who do not want targeted ads should be left alone. We did not ask for your data to be sent to our machines. We did not ask for your code to be run on our machine. We did not ask to be tracked and sold just because we happened to read a website. We are not your target audience, so stop trying to force us in taking up defense against you. We should not be forced to turn of all cookies, have anti-spyware installed, and going through settings to enable no-tracking cookies.

The advertising industry really need to grow up and start focusing on customers that want their services. With all their current data about who click on ads, this should not be such a hard move forward.

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#103

Post by maxerickson »

eksith wrote: post #91
maxerickson wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more correct to say that the ways to opt out are esoteric. Something like RequestPolicy allows the user to opt out of everything.

It's more correct to say that the ways to opt out are esoteric. And it's also disingenuous. If the default is opt-in (and that's never OK, regardless of your rationalisations) and opt-out is hidden somewhere on the 8th subpage of a company you've never heard of or will likely never know about without view-source. I can count on one finger the number of times I've seen the source of a targetted ad... the middle one. S…

You are incorrectly pigeonholing me here.

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#104

Post by ryanhuff »

amastilovic wrote: post #77
ryanhuff wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does blocking third party Javascript prevent the sites that you mention from monetizing?

It lowers their income by forcing them to succumb to non-targeted advertising which is less effective and brings less money. I'd love to see your ideas of a free and secure web without marketing money flowing into content provider websites.

Striving to maximize revenue is great. However, I don't see this particular issue as black and white as you present it. This will certainly make some websites less profitable, but I doubt that it would bring an end to the free web. In fact, aren't there are other ways to do retargeting?

Given Google's relationship with Mozilla, if this move would negatively impact Google, i would be very surprised to see it happen.

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#105

Post by icebraining »

chewxy wrote: post #6

I don't really like this. I work in the advertising industry and retargeting is honestly one of the most exciting things to come out. Sure there are ways of cookieless retargeting, but it is a hassle. I mean, everyone's heard of Samy's Evercookie right? Then there are TCP stack signatures, and other companies like a few European DSPs that use cookieless tracking to track a person (IMO it's quite easy to use a GET pix…

The sites I visit are private information. How exactly can I not submit that?

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#106

Post by icebraining »

chewxy wrote: post #76
moxie wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in the culture implications of your willingness to comment on a story like this and openly admit that you work in this area of the advertising (surveillance?) industry. Certainly, I don't think anyone would feel comfortable commenting on a story about SPAM mitigation techniques (without using a throwaway account) with text like "This sucks, I'm a spammer, and I'm really excited about it. Don't like SPA…

I did agonize for a bit when people say things like "the best minds of our century are working on people to click on ads", but I've made peace with myself. I chose advertising instead of finance because I deemed it to be less scumbaggy than finance (not really, online advertising is a shithole filled with mines and there are many many faces of online advertising ranging from the very clean to the very dodgy) I thankf…

I chose advertising instead of finance because I deemed it to be less scumbaggy than finance

What about everything else?

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#108

Post by magic_haze »

jedberg wrote: post #60
moxie wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in the culture implications of your willingness to comment on a story like this and openly admit that you work in this area of the advertising (surveillance?) industry. Certainly, I don't think anyone would feel comfortable commenting on a story about SPAM mitigation techniques (without using a throwaway account) with text like "This sucks, I'm a spammer, and I'm really excited about it. Don't like SPA…

I never use an ad blocker either. I know that a lot of the web is only possible because of ads. That being said, I'm pretty adept at using my brain for ad blocking. I didn't even notice when Facebook rolled out sponsored posts.

Agreed, but the problem is, it has been overused to the point that they have become nuisances. I really don't want to be a parasite, so I usually go disable abp on sites that I trust (which, ironically, makes all those "thanks for not using adblocker" messages on reddit rather counterproductive.)

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#109

Post by magic_haze »

freshhawk wrote: post #32
chewxy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a general rule of thumb that a person has to look at/interact with/be cognitively aware of an ad at least 7 times before any action can be taken. Showing ads across sites is just one more way to do that. In fact I would rather have relevant ads show up than irrelevant ads. I will admit that many companies out there do overdo their retargeting campaign though. That's what the company does that is mistaken, no…

> That's what the company does that is mistaken, not the technology The technology of low level internet surveillance in order to facilitate advertising? And you wonder why people don't like it? I worked in advertising for quite a while and no longer do, I understand why you love retargeting and why you are sad to see it go. I'm sure that you were sad to see popup blocking become mainstream as well, popups and popund…

> and why you are sad to see it go.

not the GP, but I highly doubt it's going to go anywhere. Mozilla's decision is just going to accelerate the arms race into more and more esoteric ways of tracking you... I'd heard about evercookie, but tcp-level analysis was news to me.

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#110

Post by dfgonzalez »

I don't like this, beyond the discussion if 3rd party cookies are good or bad, these measures are always for the worst.

Not long ago IE set DoNotTrack by default. What happened? Every single company that respected the user decision for DoNotTrack, stopped doing so since it wasn't the user, but a browser the one who decided that.

Long story short: All the effort done with DoNotTrack was wasted.

With this story, cookie tracking is far from perfection. It might be great for ad companies, might me useful for retailers and might be creepy for some users, but IMO is the safest way there's to date to keep the equilibrium. There are choices to be protected from cookie tracking and there's plenty of information.

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