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Adblocking: How about Nah?

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Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#131

Post by SapporoChris »

amelius wrote: post #55

Did anyone ever investigate what benefits ads have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need; ads make people buy the product with the biggest advertising budget instead of the best product; and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly. Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At lea…

I worked briefly in a marketing department as programmer. Learned the following there. The benefit of advertising is to inform the consumer of products they may not be aware of. "Messa thinks Messa might have Mesothelioma!" Most of the time advertising is a waste of time, and there certainly are better ways of learning about products. However, the function of informing consumers of products they may not be aware of is of mild benefit.

A better question than what benefit is advertising might be, "How can advertising be made more beneficial to the viewers"

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#132

Post by dec0dedab0de »

wybiral wrote: post #67

I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I ma…

Absolutely. If the content creator and the advertiser dont trust each other enough to have the ad be delivered from the same server as the content, then why would I trust them to run whatever code they want.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#133

Post by lstamour »

jefftk wrote: post #119
deanc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I’d go as far as forbidding embedded JS altogether which removes the attack vector for malware within advertising networks. The networks have proved time and time again they are not able to prevent distribution of malware, and this is the primary reason I use an adblocker. Maybe a new tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the adver…

> Maybe a new tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum. How would fraud detection work in this model? How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Without assurance there, advertisers would pay much less, and publishers would earn much less. (Disclosure: I work on ads at…

It seems to me that the problem is entirely of the web advertiser’s making, though. When the web was new and novel, tracking was used to prove or validate specific ad spend. You can still do that sort of comparative analysis but now detection might have to live on and be limited to what can be detected from the advertiser’s own site. And if by the nature of the product or sale, it proves impossible to tell if I’m a human, well, that will be a shared cost or concern that all advertisers would have. If sites were forced to or mandated this new form of anti-tracking ad, advertisers would eventually go along with it because the alternative is not advertising on the large percentage of sites which have adopted it. This would probably make non-web ads and validated human email addresses more valuable unless they too are subject to the same anti-tracking provisions. An email service (or search service) by it’s nature offers more opportunities to tell if you’re human though, and such services would be inherently more profitable to advertise on... (see Facebook profits)

I don’t really see problems here outside of encouraging an entire industry to move on from tracking and/or DRM the way an entire nascent industry moved on from the popup and pop-under ad, or invasive screen takeover and annoying animated ads.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#134

Post by dec0dedab0de »

jefftk wrote: post #119
deanc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I’d go as far as forbidding embedded JS altogether which removes the attack vector for malware within advertising networks. The networks have proved time and time again they are not able to prevent distribution of malware, and this is the primary reason I use an adblocker. Maybe a new tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the adver…

> Maybe a new tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum. How would fraud detection work in this model? How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Without assurance there, advertisers would pay much less, and publishers would earn much less. (Disclosure: I work on ads at…

You would only do business with companies you trust to not cheat. Or just charge flat rates.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#135

Post by jacobobryant »

jefftk wrote: post #119
deanc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I’d go as far as forbidding embedded JS altogether which removes the attack vector for malware within advertising networks. The networks have proved time and time again they are not able to prevent distribution of malware, and this is the primary reason I use an adblocker. Maybe a new tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the adver…

> Maybe a new tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum. How would fraud detection work in this model? How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Without assurance there, advertisers would pay much less, and publishers would earn much less. (Disclosure: I work on ads at…

I don't really care if ads stop being profitable. If ads stopped being a good source of revenue, the tech industry would adapt, and my guess is that the end result would be much more favorable to society. I'm working on an early-stage startup right now, and I'm certainly not going to use ads as part of my revenue model.

Google might not be too happy about an outcome like that, but I'm not overly concerned about Google's wellbeing. :)

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this since you work on ads: are ads actually essential in the software industry, or could we do just fine without them?

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#136

Post by nkozyra »

Waterluvian wrote: post #97
wybiral wrote: post #67

I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I ma…

Remember Gmail ads from like 2006? They were very minimal and on point. I was so optimistic thag the future of advertising was that.

This describes AdSense in general - the original point was some text ads.

But as the article points out, we acclimate to stimulus, so any ad that's welcomed and successful will lose engagement over time. Which is why we get either very creative compelling advertising or advertising that attempts to trick us.

The entire thing is fundamentally broken, of course, and nobody seems to have a monetization strategy beyond subscriptions or the perpetual cat and mouse game of blockers, blocker-blockers, blocker-blocker-blockers and so on.

In an industry full of innovation the monetization aspect is stuck in the newspaper model created 150 years ago.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#137

Post by s1k3s »

frou_dh wrote: post #61

Remember that the formal name for a web browser is a User Agent . This metaphor makes it clear that when there is a conflict of interest between you the user and whatever the server on the other side wants, your Agent should act in your interest.

Not when the User Agent is built by the world's largest online advertiser.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#138

Post by CoolGuySteve »

ikeboy wrote: post #73
amelius wrote: post #55

Did anyone ever investigate what benefits ads have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need; ads make people buy the product with the biggest advertising budget instead of the best product; and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly. Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At lea…

Yes. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016762450... , https://www.jstor.org/stable/3003609

Advertising has also been proven to be bad for your sense of life satisfaction, which is an externality not paid for by advertisers.

"The effect implies that a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That is approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of being unemployed."

https://voxeu.org/article/advertising-major-source-human-dis...

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#139

Post by derefr »

wybiral wrote: post #67

I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I ma…

> small

Heh, do you really think that static ads would be a small portion of the page?

Look at small local newspapers for what a business driven by revenue from non-targetable ads looks like. The ads take up more than half the page!

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#140

Post by danShumway »

csande17 wrote: post #72
danShumway wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JavaScript is really what's to blame for all of this Along with CSS, cookies, external images and fonts, redirect links, referrer headers, browser caches, and IP addresses that don't change over time and that can be linked to physical locations. Javascript certainly doesn't have its hands clean, and there have been some frankly stupid decisions in how it was designed -- but stopping dedicated trackers is more compl…

> CSS, cookies, external images and fonts, redirect links, referrer headers, browser caches Aside from CSS and redirect links, all of these features are fairly straightforward. The consequences of disabling the Referer header, for example, are pretty small and easy to understand: you'll stop sending sites information about what links you used to get to them, but some very picky websites that check the header (e.g. im…

I do think most of these things (with the exception of IP addresses and caching) are easier to solve than Javascript. I disagree that they are trivial to solve or that combined, they are substantially less harmful than Javascript. Let me try to sidestep this debate though and focus on the broader problem.

JS has a few stupid design decisions, but the fundamental reason Javascript is hard to run safely is because it's a turing-complete language that exposes a lot of powerful features.

You can argue that the web doesn't need a turing-complete language that exposes a lot of powerful features. Can you argue that phones don't? Can you argue that personal computers don't need that?

All of the tracking that happens on the web right now also happens on mobile phones and desktops. Users have broadly shown that the "only download code you trust" security model doesn't work (see recent articles on both the Android and iOS app store for reference). Even something basic like adblocking on Android is kind of terrible -- the best app I know of is AFWall, and that's maybe half as powerful as something like UMatrix because it's relying on static firewall rules.

You get rid of powerful applications on the web, and users will go back to downloading apps like crazy just so they can order pizza from their phone. Since currently, all of those platforms are pretty terrible for privacy; it is very hard to argue that a world where people could only download native apps would be more private than the world we have now.

We could also keep the web and switch wholesale to a SaaS model for everything, which is broadly bad for consumers, and carries its own privacy risks (there are some computations like password generation that I don't want to be done on a 3rd-party computer). Switching over to using forms and remote computation for everything on the web would also greatly increase the prevalence of 3rd-party cookies, making them much harder to block.

The point I'm getting at is that I don't see a world where Javascript vanishes and privacy gets any better. In fact, it might even have the opposite effect if the deprecation of Javascript means people download more Android apps. Privacy is a really hard, complicated problem and there probably isn't any single solution.

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