Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LA Times and ads

nelsonslog.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 192 posts

Re: LA Times and ads

#81

Post by wjossey »

tedunangst wrote: post #64
wjossey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I whipped together https://getcovert.com to help address this problem for me. Currently it's a chrome plugin that allows me to generate a unique obfuscated "proxy" email address for sites I want to sign up for but don't want to expose my real email. If they ever sell it, redistribute it, or I want to shut them down, I just block that proxy email. It's barely an alpha project and needs a ton of work to be functional,…

I mean, I run my own mail server and client, so I can deal with the problem in a variety of ways... I've done novelty addresses in the past. My current approach is to call such companies out and hope that nobody ever gives them another email.

In a lot of ways, that doesn't really hurt them hard enough. Unless you use a unique email address on every site, you're inherently leaking information about you.

[1] Advertisers can then use that data to cross-track you between sites more effectively. [2] Marketers can re-target you without any sort of pixel tracking because facebook, google, twitter, etc., all can identify you by that email address you provided. [3] None of us have a loud enough voice to dramatically damage a company in a meaningful way b/c they were a bad actor.

In my mind, by obfuscating the email address, we take away its power. It loses a lot of its value when it's randomized per site, per user. It now is truly only useful for sending you an email, and if you get fed up with how they use that email address, they're shutoff forever (and have no way of tracking you).

Re: LA Times and ads

#82

Post by manigandham »

I work in adtech. The reason this happens is because of poor dev knowledge/resources by most publishers (although shouldn't be a problem with LA Times) and because the ad industry has perverse incentives combined with absolutely no oversight or enforcement.

99% of these companies are in business by running as many impressions/clicks/whatever "engagements" as possible regardless of user experience so we end up with this tragedy of the commons.

Re: LA Times and ads

#84

Post by andai »

lelandbatey wrote: post #74
NelsonMinar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi I'm the author. I did the naive extrapolation. 5 * 2 * 1440 = 14,400. Perhaps this number is not entirely accurate. The fact it is any larger than, say, 10 is the problem.

For the reference of others, I opened the LA Times on my computer and left the front page open for 10 minutes, and in that time it downloaded 48.7 MB of data.

I opened a random article, it caps out at 19mb after the first 5 minutes (reached 12mb in 30 seconds).

Re: LA Times and ads

#85

Post by mos_basik »

megous wrote: post #68
rinze wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this solution similar to putting "+unique_string" before the @ part in (for example) Gmail addresses?

That's no good. You're still sending your primary address, before the +. They can remove or modify anything after +, and you'll still receive the email. I'm slowly transitioning for having a random 20 char generated alias email for every service/use and there's no chance anyone will hit a real mailbox by chance. If alias leaks, I can either abandon the service and block it, or change the registered email for the serv…

That sounds great, but the problem I see with the n-address approach is when you do actually want to search for a received email but you don't want to remember what inbox it went to. I can see workarounds - like feed them all to a gmail box and filter them into their own folders. Or load them all into a native email client as separate accounts.

I felt that way about using a password manager and generating random passwords (what if I want to log into something and don't want to remember which password I used) but eventually realized that password managers are literally designed to make this as painless as possible and I should relax more. Now I use KeepassXC, random passwords and life is good.

Are email managers a thing, like password managers? How do you solve this problem?

Re: LA Times and ads

#87

Post by ssheth »

mahyarm wrote: post #73
bunnybender wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Mailhero in many places, works great! See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781361 or https://mailhero.io/

I want something like mailhero combined with a paid email provider like proton mail. Everything sent to $name@$spamkey.$mydomain.$tld would act like a mailhero address and forward to my personal address.

Try spamgourmet.com

Re: LA Times and ads

#90

Post by danbruc »

But how many users would actually be willing to pay for the content they consume in order to get rid of ads and tracking and excessive data volume consumption? And how much would they be willing to pay? It seems like they would have to be willing to pay at least an amount comparable to the average ad revenue per user and page view, whatever that actually is.

Just blocking ads is certainly justifiable in the current situation, but it also certainly not sustainable if the ad blocker installation base keeps growing. And buying subscriptions for all sites is not really an option either. It becomes quite expensive pretty quickly, especially if you want the see only a few articles per month on each site but do so on many sites.

Post reply on HN