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How We Make Money at Stack Overflow: 2019 Edition: Taking money from Microsoft and Google fingerprinting our users 100+ ways
source: https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/11/15/how-we-make-money-at-s...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have been using uBlock Origin for about three years and I browse the web heavily (4-6 hours/day). In that time it has blocked 13% of requests (10% on mobile). I don't have enough info to quantify the amount of data blocked though.
It's often the case that what is blocked prevented more scripts to be pulled, which scripts could pull even more scripts and so on. Those subsequent waves of scripts are not counted as blocked because they never had a chance to be pulled by the first wave of blocked scripts. I have a tweet in my timeline which illustrate this: https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/934474012377444352
How does uBlock calculate the "blocked since install" percentage?
I just wanted to chime in from Stack Overflow here and let people know: we are aware of the issue. And we're NOT okay with it. We're trying to sort out how to kill the audio behavior now. It's not very straightforward to find where it's coming from, but we are working on it. We've also reached out to Google for their assistance in tracking it down. If anyone can offer advice, we'll more than happily take it. - Nick C…
Perhaps you should stop doing that.
And this is why, even with the best intentions of site operators, my browser will continue to use the best ad-block tools I can get, and my networks will be protected by tools like PiHole.
I just wanted to chime in from Stack Overflow here and let people know: we are aware of the issue. And we're NOT okay with it. We're trying to sort out how to kill the audio behavior now. It's not very straightforward to find where it's coming from, but we are working on it. We've also reached out to Google for their assistance in tracking it down. If anyone can offer advice, we'll more than happily take it. - Nick C…
I would pay for an ad-free version of Stack Overflow. Take my money, please.
Does Microsoft (ad owner) or Google (ad provider) perform the fingerprinting in this case?
integralads is guilty of developing and selling this technology. Microsoft is guilty of buying it and using it Google is guilty of serving it. And why not also StackOverflow is guilty of offering that space to advertisers without enough vetoing of their ads.
After reading about integralads I'm not even sure if the purpose is to fingerprint, it seems to be more targeted towards detecting fraud, which does not require fingerprinting necessarily.
My point is that it's not as easy as pointing to one company and blaming them. This is a problem that concerns anyone on the Ad space.
It's most likely for web scraper detection. State of the art was using video codec availability as fairly reliable data point, and I haven't seen audio being used for this. Quite interesting.
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I think ad blocking is a misnomer. What people are trying to do when blocking ads is prevent marketing people from spying on them. And the performance and resource consumption that comes from that. Personal opinion: Laws are needed to make what advertisers are doing illegal. Advertisers are spying on people to the extent where if the government did it they'd need a warrant.
I disagree. The tech crowd is using adblockers to prevent spying and resource consumption. But majority of people running adblockers just don't want to see ads.
- Chrome is the fast one.
- IE is the one that have to use for some government/old websites.
- Ad Blockers are for safety (akin to anti-virus).
This was from a group that didn’t even know how to install Chrome on the new computers they got this year.
Group knowledge on this topic is largely going to be driven by what they’ve heard in the news or perpetuated by their social circles. And scary things will stick for long after they stop being true.
I don’t get how it can get the fingerprint to be so unique as to attribute ads. Most mobile browsers are exactly the same, you have the same screen resolution and so on. And most desktop browsers when maximized are the same resolution. I mean there must be groups of thousands of users for each combination of fingerprinted features. So it’s not all the way down to the person, right? It’s just correlations?
No, it's not all the way down to the person. Yes, it's just correlations. Even if the fingerprint was so unique and it went down to 1 user, it wouldn't be able to actually identify that person's name etc. The most likely use-case here is ad fraud detection anyway.
I'm not so sure. There's a lot of market value in knowing that User 2341423 went to Site A, then Site B, then bought this item, etc.