261–270 of 352 posts
Instead of more palatable user tracking, how about we tell advertisers and internet companies: fuck off, we don't want any tracking? How about we hunt down and eliminate all features that allow cross-site information sharing? How about we treat attacks on user privacy as security problems of the web standards, à la Tor, and build technology that aggressively hides any user signature in any layer, from rotating IP and…
Instead of more palatable user tracking, how about we tell advertisers and internet companies: fuck off, we don't want any tracking? How about we hunt down and eliminate all features that allow cross-site information sharing? How about we treat attacks on user privacy as security problems of the web standards, à la Tor, and build technology that aggressively hides any user signature in any layer, from rotating IP and…
Shouting is easy, doing so isn't. I gave up on trying to maintain forks of web browsers, because their extension API deliberately doesn't allow modifying response bodies. It's just impossible to maintain any fork of any browser because of the sheer amount of features that rely on JS APIs for websites and the amount of commits upstream. Ad Blockers are just a dirty hack that completely relies on Chromium respecting th…
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Using an adblocker is like stealing candy from the store... They can handle some theft, but if literally everyone stole their candy, the store would close down and nobody can have candy.
I'm not stealing anything by instructing my computer not to run code against my consent. No one is entitled to my CPU time. Least of all are advertisers. Also, the store isn't freakishly stalking me and noting down all my habits whilst sharing what it has collected with its friends, or indeed anyone who will buy the data. Besides, candy is impossible to replicate in the same way that data is. Theft of physical object…
I suggest you are incorrect to assert that "no one is entitled to my CPU time." I agree, however, that advertisers do not have that moral claim right.
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One potentially negative unintended consequence: closed systems like Facebook become even more powerful than they already are. Their revenues will dwarf (even more than they do now) any other free digital platform that can't re-create a fully targeted ad product entirely in-house. Without Google AdX and the mess of disturbing cross-site tracking, I can't see why advertisers wouldn't just spend 100% of their digital b…
Assuming tracking works (I have my doubts it boosts conversion), there has to be an equilibrium price, right? That is, advertising camping gear on a camping review site (without tracking) still has some nonzero commercial value even if facebook tracking exists and works.
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One potentially negative unintended consequence: closed systems like Facebook become even more powerful than they already are. Their revenues will dwarf (even more than they do now) any other free digital platform that can't re-create a fully targeted ad product entirely in-house. Without Google AdX and the mess of disturbing cross-site tracking, I can't see why advertisers wouldn't just spend 100% of their digital b…
Assuming tracking works (I have my doubts it boosts conversion), there has to be an equilibrium price, right? That is, advertising camping gear on a camping review site (without tracking) still has some nonzero commercial value even if facebook tracking exists and works.
Precisely this. Go back to the advertising model where you place the advertisements in relevant locations. It's like going into the local pizza parlor and seeing an advertisement for a local plumber.
"Joe's Pizza" in Somewhere, NY can still say "I only want advertisers who want their ads shown in 30 mile radius of Somewhere, NY".
Flip the entire thing on its head and go back to camping sites showing camping ads, and auto parts stores showing ads for the latest amazing oil filter. They don't need to know who the user is at all. They are on a camping related site, they probably want to see camping related advertisements.
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Your question assumes that transparent, behavior-based, cross-site user interest tracking is somehow essential functionality for the web and we just have to find the right way to do it. I think most people who are criticizing FLoC would challenge the idea that this class of functionality needs to or should exist at all.
Content creators want to get paid as much as anyone else and it's either through direct payment by the consumers or by embedding advertisement in their content. All this FloC, third party cookies, etc. are efforts to make that advertisement route more efficient. So my question is what are the critics proposing instead? Get rid of ads and just ask the audience to pay per view or make everything a subscription? Not pay…
Your daily paper didn't have a list of your interests yet succeeded in making money through advertising. Why can't they now?
While FLoC does sound like a bad idea, I think it would be helpful if critistism was coupled with counter proposals. What do the critics see as ideal solution here: making all of the free services paid? having just more content-based ads? or something different?
Contextual advertising. Flip the entire thing upside down and let the sites declare to the advertisers what niche they fill, and let them get relevant advertisements.
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I'm fed up with all the ads and tracking and it saddens me that even Apple does this shit. I want none of it. This shouldn't exist in your operating system at all.
When I first got my iPhone, I searched for Youtube on the app store. The first result I got was tiktok - an ad that takes up a third of the screen. Its a terrible UX and confused the hell out of me. I seriously thought Apple was supposed to be user-friendly and anti-advertising...
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> FLoC enables ad selection without sharing the browsing behaviour of individual users. Nevertheless it seems a formidable addition to a browser user fingerprint.
The idea with this proposal is to avoid browser fingerprinting. Cross site cookies are going away and there are essentially two possible paths for ad networks to compensate: a common approach like FLoC is adopted, or ad networks will continue to do ever more advanced fingerprinting based on things that are identify you individually and hard to obfuscate like graphical rendering and audio quirks. The proposal is if Go…
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If I must have ads, I'd prefer not be tracked by hundreds of untrustworthy companies, and I'd also prefer not see irrelevant ads... This therefore seems like the best bad option...
I strictly prefer irrelevant ads less likely to influence me. I really have enough projects, TODO lists, interesting things to buy to last for lifetime of 250 years. Why I would want ads likely to influence me? There is basically no chance that ad will show me useful, worth using object or service to buy that I would not discover anyway. It would be just another scam more effectively targeting me.
But in reality, ads are always "relevant to seller/advertiser". Seller is almost never interested in selling you anything but what makes most profit from you. Eg. A decathlon might be better cost/benefit ratio wise, but you will always get an ad for Nike, because Nike is paying for the ad, not decathlon.
Such is the lie that was fed to us, and most of us accepted it. Tragedy of the commons indeed.