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Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in Safari

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Re: Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in Safari

#151

Post by MagerValp »

nevon wrote: post #148
mikestew wrote: post #27

Were there a publicly-traded company that manufactures small violins (preferably the one that makes "world's smallest"), I'd go long on their stock right now. I mean, who do they expect to persuade with this? Is there anyone not tied to the adtech industry shouting, "Damn you, Apple, and your assault on open web standards!" 'cuz me, I'm thinking, "without even reading the article, if the ad industry is upset about it…

I work on a checkout product that is implemented as a third-party iframe. We set a cookie so that a user can have their information remembered for the next time, so that if you've shopped at merchant A, you won't have to fill out your information again when you want to shop at merchant B or C. We don't use it to track you or profile you, it's literally just to make it easier for you to check out (which makes our merc…

While that sounds user friendly and genuinely useful, to me it's acceptable collateral damage in order to stop the rampant abuse by ad networks. As a user I'm also not sure it's a huge loss, since at least the browsers I use can auto-fill addresses and credit cards.

Re: Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in Safari

#152

Post by nasredin »

dredmorbius wrote: post #133
NicoJuicy wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how would websites earn money? Is everyone going to pay 3$ / month every website? Apple should have fixed that first, but is now blocking everyone because their own iAd failed. I think a lot is going to blow up, eg. Apple users requiring membership for websites + a subscription. What if those companies suddenly require an email to read more content, then their backend syncs all the required data. ( yes, we will su…

Ad Tech is the problem. There's a tremendous amount of media scholarship which says that advertising itself is also the problem. See: Jonathan Albright: "Who Hacked the Election? Ad Tech did. Through “Fake News,” Identity Resolution and Hyper-Personalization" https://medium.com/@d1gi/who-hacked-the-election-43d4019f705... Robert McChesney, Communication Revolution (an excellent history of media failures): http://www.…

Am I the only one here who actually clicked on an ad... no more than a handful of times?

The last ad I clicked was an image, organically hosted and relevant to the web site.

It seems this is not about commerce - selling goods and services - but about malware, scams and PR by giant corporations for "low information" people.

Cue the ad industry apologists: how would I know about their great products? I would research something I NEED (not WANT) WHEN I need it.

Re: Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in Safari

#153

Post by [deleted] »

gaius wrote: post #149
proofofstake wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is probabilistic vs. deterministic cross-device tracking. Deterministic assigns a unique device identifier to each device and then uses more data to connect device IDs to an individual. Probabilistic cross-device tracking uses machine learning algorithms to match up devices and identities. For this they can use basically any data that you happen to give them, including behavioral data (you check a website both…

Probabilistic cross-device tracking uses machine learning algorithms to match up devices and identities Is there any application of machine learning that isn't evil? Genuine question. It seems to be exclusively used to exploit people.

[deleted]

Re: Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in Safari

#154

Post by pavel_lishin »

Rumudiez wrote: post #56
pavel_lishin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think brands are the ones doing the exploitation. They just want me to buy their new doodad. AdTech is doing all the exploiting here, it seems to me, on both sides.

In house marketing can be just as aggressive as third party, so I don't think we can fault one more than other.

I disagree, we absolutely can. Bounty and Charmin don't aggressively shove cookies onto my machine, or execute arbitrary javascript on anywhere near the same scale that ad networks do.

Re: Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in Safari

#155

Post by msla »

scarface74 wrote: post #128
oliwarner wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Make compromises that are reasonable. When it's so easy to use a community-vetted Linux distribution, I think "reasonable" gets shunted down a layer. It's not all or nothing. Every reasonable step counts.

"Community-vetting" didn't stop the HeartBleed bug to linger for over a year.

And we have no idea how many bugs worse than HeartBleed haven't been found yet in closed-source software.

Re: Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in Safari

#156

Post by PeachPlum »

dredmorbius wrote: post #136
PeachPlum wrote: post #10

The Law of Unintended Consequences may yet have the next laugh.

Expand?

I'm posing the question: Will the cure be worse than the disease?

They won't just roll over and say "oh well".

Re: Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in Safari

#157

Post by PeachPlum »

flukus wrote: post #113
PeachPlum wrote: post #10

The Law of Unintended Consequences may yet have the next laugh.

I fear you're right. There are already techniques like canvas fingerprinting ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_fingerprinting ) on top of what the browser already shares ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint ). You aren't safe from tracking unless you disable javascript entirely. The only winning move is not to play.

Even without JS, my browser scored "only 5 browsers out of the 481932 observed browsers (0.00 %) have exactly the same fingerprint as yours."

https://amiunique.org/fpNoJs

With JS turned on https://amiunique.org/fp I got :

"your full fingerprint is unique among the 481933 collected so far."

Re: Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in Safari

#158

Post by astrodust »

dredmorbius wrote: post #130
abiox wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i feel like this is just shuffling concerns rather than addressing them, but i'm open to being shown otherwise.

Suppose you suspect compiler A or CPU X. Recompile on compilers B and C and compare results. Or on CPUs Y and Z. In reality, there will almost certainly be differences (different compiling algos, different CPU instruction sets), but if you can pinpoint behavioural distinctions or encoding distinctions which are not explained by known compile or instruction-set distinctions, well, you've got something interesting to e…

It's going to be really hard to compare binary A vs. binary B and determine functional differences. clang and gcc emit entirely different machine code, but they do their best to be functionally identical, at least as far as their respective specs are concerned.

Re: Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in Safari

#159

Post by astrodust »

msla wrote: post #155
scarface74 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Community-vetting" didn't stop the HeartBleed bug to linger for over a year.

And we have no idea how many bugs worse than HeartBleed haven't been found yet in closed-source software.

It depends on the development process. Some companies aggressively re-visit older code, others never look at it.

Open-source is not inherently better or worse, it's all a matter of motivation on the part of the developers.

Re: Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in Safari

#160

Post by Spivak »

gaius wrote: post #149
proofofstake wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is probabilistic vs. deterministic cross-device tracking. Deterministic assigns a unique device identifier to each device and then uses more data to connect device IDs to an individual. Probabilistic cross-device tracking uses machine learning algorithms to match up devices and identities. For this they can use basically any data that you happen to give them, including behavioral data (you check a website both…

Probabilistic cross-device tracking uses machine learning algorithms to match up devices and identities Is there any application of machine learning that isn't evil? Genuine question. It seems to be exclusively used to exploit people.

I think you're running up against the fact that ML is a tool that can solve classification problems, which just like search in years past, has the potential to be very political.

We've mostly gotten used a world with search -- in the past it was a big political controversy that powerful groups could scan huge volumes of data for advertising, tracking, or criminal activity. There were jokes in chatrooms about using the word bomb because the FBI would pick up on it. Or that your search queries and web history would be scanned for keywords and used for ads.

Now there's this new tool that allows people/things to be grouped and classified very precisely by imprecise rules. Combine the hype about the different problems this new tool will help people solve and the inexperience that people have with the ethical ramifications of the things they build, with the crudeness of the initial implementations and it's easy to get the sense that ML will be a net bad for society -- just like search.

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