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daniel:// stenberg://

Ads on the web don't actually *need* user tracking. Browsers don't *have to* cooperate with those who want to surveil us.

111 comments
Comb 🍯

@bagder As a general rule, corporations will do anything in their power to hug the limits of what they can do as much as possible, legally or not. That's the sad part - morals are out of the window

THRILLHO

@bagder "this advert was served 30 thousand times and sales increased 7%" is more than good enough, and more than enough for most businesses. Certainly the ones I've worked with.

You get that from your metrics

The rest is weird bollocks for the sake of weird bollocks for the sake of a problem that doesn't exist for the sake of the people who've grown fat off this bollocks.

groxx

@jspc @bagder weird bollocks and frequently an outright scam, because ad platforms have every incentive to cheat - they have all the information.

THRILLHO

@groxx @bagder well quite.

"Come use our platform because we can match you to an exact* audience on non-specialisised and social media websites"

Is their pitch, but like... that's not actually a problem that exists.

On generalised websites, like your social media, the operators have that data and can match their ads accordingly.

On specialised websites, like industry news, you only really want to show relevant ads anyway that fit your brand.

Émilio Gonzalez

@bagder Isn't that a similar line of thinking than saying: "Corporations don't actually need to make a profit" (as in: they can just break even)?

People hate paying for services more than they hate ads. If the ads are not profitable enough, websites go out of business, including stuff critical to our democracy like news sites. What is the solution if not ads that are good enough to actually give enough money to those sites?

AMS

@res260 @bagder These days there isn't anyway to give money that is not more invasive tracking than ads you can block.

Émilio Gonzalez

@AMS @bagder do you mean your news sites don't have donation buttons, or that donation in itself tracks you too much?

AMS

@res260 @bagder That putting a CC, legal name, and address is incredibly invasive to link to what you read, much less comment.

daniel:// stenberg://

@res260 I don't think so. They want ads that work - but ads without tracking have been used already for well, at least a hundred years. We know they can work.

I'm not saying that backpedaling what has already been given away is an easy task.

I believe it is still worth pondering over.

Émilio Gonzalez

@bagder if you take TV or newspapers for examples of ads that worked without tracking, these are two examples of services where ads were not the only source of revenue. An online news site, it pretty much is these days, except donations, or its behind paywall :/

daniel:// stenberg://

@res260 are you suggesting those with paywalls would remove them if they could just do user-tracking ads? That sounds bizarre.

Émilio Gonzalez

@bagder I wouldnt presume, I don't know enough about the financial inner details of news outlets. But the fact that revenue fell drastically for news outlets in the last decades is, in my opinion, a much bigger problem than ads that track you (and I trust mozilla much more than google to do it while balancing privacy than google or meta) and it's a problem that can't be solely blamed on media themselves

ocdtrekkie

@res260 @bagder All the ad companies are the ones stripping journalism of money. Google and Facebook both scrape the important bits of the news, and host them on their own site with their own ads, instead of linking people to the sites themselves so the news outlets see the ad revenue. The issue is the ad companies becoming so greedy they are now focused on cutting out the content creators from the deal.

Dan Veditz

@bagder @res260

That happens already! There are sites that I see regularly with a "turn off your ad blocker or subscribe" pay wall. Sometimes they just want you to log in to a free account (so they can track you, and sell that to data brokers correlated by email)

Aroop Roelofs :verified:

@bagder A popular Dutch news site has:
- A paywall for their "premium articles" (which constitutes most of their articles).
- Tracking as-is (CDN resources + Google analytics).
- Tracking ads.

@res260

Émilio Gonzalez

@bagder and even though newspapers made most of their money with ads, when the more performing ad systems came (ie tracking users), advertisers fled these services which caused media having such a hard time surviving online

Sheogorath 🦊

@res260 @bagder May I add that there are independent public media in the world exist and work well. However, when it came to written articles (at least in Germany) the ad-driven commercial media companies claimed unfair advantage and limited public media's ability to publish news stories in text format.

Émilio Gonzalez

@sheogorath @bagder Yes it's a common topic here in Canada as well with CBC/Radio-Canada being partly financed with ads and the other news outlets saying "well we're struggling and the public company is taking our ad money".

Bradley

@bagder @res260 yes ads work when relevant to the content just fine. So much time/money/effort/privacy wasted on "personalized" ads.

Émilio Gonzalez

@bradley @bagder The point is not if they work or not, it's if they work as well as user-tracking ads, which many billion dollars into user-tracking ads from millions of people seem to indicate they don't. That, or it's one of the biggest scam in modern history.

News sites have been running ads that dont track users for decades on the internet, yet they pretty much all (those who are still here at least) transitionned to user-tracking ads

For many news outlets, this has not been enough to survive. But for some, it's what allows them to pay journalists

@bradley @bagder The point is not if they work or not, it's if they work as well as user-tracking ads, which many billion dollars into user-tracking ads from millions of people seem to indicate they don't. That, or it's one of the biggest scam in modern history.

News sites have been running ads that dont track users for decades on the internet, yet they pretty much all (those who are still here at least) transitionned to user-tracking ads

Bradley

@res260 @bagder I'm just an interested outsider but I may be in the one of the biggest scams camp. Remembering how Facebook convinced many news orgs to pivot to video, look at all these views. Turns out the made up the views and cost many news orgs a lot of money/staff.

Jack Yan (甄爵恩)

@res260 @bradley @bagder Contextual worked as well IMO, and the online ad business is a giant scam. Who does well online? The Financial Times. Why? You have to buy ads directly from them at a rate which was the norm in the late 1990s, and they donʼt use any of the dodgy ad companies that are all over the web who cut into their share of the money.
Bob Hoffman covers the scam in his books, e.g.:

amazon.com/ADSCAM-Advertising-

@res260 @bradley @bagder Contextual worked as well IMO, and the online ad business is a giant scam. Who does well online? The Financial Times. Why? You have to buy ads directly from them at a rate which was the norm in the late 1990s, and they donʼt use any of the dodgy ad companies that are all over the web who cut into their share of the money.
Bob Hoffman covers the scam in his books, e.g.:

Kg. Madee Ⅱ.

@res260 @bradley @bagder yeah, it's the latter. Facegle have a duopoly on the tracking ads market and are ripping their customers off pretty shamelessly. And that's on top of Facebook's efforts to capture their audience

Petherfile

@res260 @bradley @bagder I thought the point was, regardless of how well tracked ads work, browsers and users don't need to bend over for it. It is not on the consumer to provide companies with what they want. It is the other way around.

If all users didn't support tracking from their end by choice, advertisers are left with only non tracked ads regardless of their preference. Advertisers, in theory, would still spend the dollars on ads without tracking, if that's all they could get, because it will be better than no advertising.

I thought the point also was, it's not very nice to sneakily add something to a browser that tracks you and turn it on without giving users any notice. Something that users clearly often don't want. Double so when you have features added in the browser reasonably recently to specifically avoid tracking. Erosion of trust there.

Some companies seem to get narky when some users support tracking and some don't and said companies base charging and revenue models on invalid assumptions that all do support it. The real problem here, as I see it, is the invalid assumption and nothing else. All involved need to understand that the tracking isn't always avaliable and work that into their systems, not try and sneak more tracking in users back doors.

Yes, I am mixing two different sorts of tracking here. I think the bend over and back door things apply to them both.

@res260 @bradley @bagder I thought the point was, regardless of how well tracked ads work, browsers and users don't need to bend over for it. It is not on the consumer to provide companies with what they want. It is the other way around.

If all users didn't support tracking from their end by choice, advertisers are left with only non tracked ads regardless of their preference. Advertisers, in theory, would still spend the dollars on ads without tracking, if that's all they could get, because it will...

🔶Mark Nicoll 3.5%🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧🇪🇺🇺🇳

@bagder @res260 oh yes. Studies have shown tracking doesn't really improve the effectiveness of adds in terms of sales, half as much as it can amplify a negative opinion.
But it does generate a lot of data that can then be sold by google and other add hosting companies.

anlomedad

@duckwhistle @bagder @res260

That's the point of user tracking. Precisely.
The claim in #1 is incomplete or wrong because it implies ads were the sole use for tracking.

Collecting and selling the user profiles to political parties for analysis and micro-targeting for example. Also harmful for democracies.

Evan 🫠 🔜XOXO Fest 🦈❤️🚀

@res260 @bagder Personally I feel like a world where corporations don’t *need* to make a profit and just break even (while still paying all the workers livable wages) sounds great

Émilio Gonzalez

@evn @bagder I do too, but I see no path to achieve this in my lifetime, so I consider this a nice thought experiment because if I don't I feel I won't actually make things better

robin

@res260 @bagder

I believe purely context-based ads perform just as well while avoiding hundreds of the downstream negative consequences for society.

The fine-grained user tracking is mostly there so that the big platforms can *market* themselves as having some ad targeting superpower which there's actually scant evidence for.

These over-complex ad systems are actually worse for the advertiser because their complexity makes them opaque and unpredictable.

Émilio Gonzalez

@nottrobin @bagder So you think everybody who advertises on facebook and such are fooled by some scam by Big Ad? And that Cambridge Analytica had worthless data and that all the political parties are wrong thinking they gain an advantage microtargetting users for their political ad?

Imo the idea that "tracking users for ads works, actually" is much much more plausible.

robin

@res260 @bagder

I'm not aware of any persuasive evidence that Cambridge Analytica had much of a political impact. If you have some please send it my way.

I agree, microtargeting would be most useful in politics - much more than commerce. Of course political campaigns would want to use anything claiming to microtarget.

But my understanding there also is that the verifiable impact is minimal and the most standout campaigns rarely if ever cite Facebook as the differentiator.

ClickyMcTicker

@nottrobin @res260 @bagder
First link on a search engine:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambri
The section is titled Elections, and from there you can scroll the subsections by country.
There are dozens of references if you’d like to check sources.

robin

@ClickyMcTicker @res260 @bagder How stupid of me not to read the very first most obvious thing 🤦

</joke>

If you delve into those sources you'll notice they're all about the scandal, the invasion, the secrecy, the widespread spying on millions.

I've yet to find a source on that page that gives any evidence for political impact. I've also heard a fair amount of sceptical expert opinion on this.

Article titles like amp.theguardian.com/news/2018/ *imply* impact but don't actually show it.

@ClickyMcTicker @res260 @bagder How stupid of me not to read the very first most obvious thing 🤦

</joke>

If you delve into those sources you'll notice they're all about the scandal, the invasion, the secrecy, the widespread spying on millions.

I've yet to find a source on that page that gives any evidence for political impact. I've also heard a fair amount of sceptical expert opinion on this.

Jack Yan (甄爵恩)

@res260 @nottrobin @bagder It works on big social because of the data points, but for the rest of us trying to make a living through publishing with regular sites, I donʼt see tracked ads having some superior power to the old contextual ones. Most of the ad companies that contact me are full of opaque jargon and canʼt give me any reason to run with them.

robin

@jackyan @res260 @bagder I'm still not willing to take "it works on big social" as self-evident. And I've yet to see convincing evidence.

Luna Lactea

@res260 @bagder Simply charge more for ads. Lots of people are using this service! Lots of people are seeing these ads! This is premium ad space!

Émilio Gonzalez

@jackemled @bagder That would work if supply and demand wasnt a thing. If facebook or google could charge 50x what they currently charge they for sure would

Luna Lactea

@res260 @bagder augh I accidently exited & lost what I wrote

There will always be demand for ad space & the supply is never going to change. If ad placement companies like Google & Amazon really wanted to they could collaborate with other ad placement companies to raise prices, similar to how gasoline companies raise the price of gasoline. Someone is always going to buy that ad space no matter what because they want to advertise. If money is low they can cut pay to people that make way too much anyway. I'm sure the guy that sits in an office all day & comes up with horrible management decisions isn't worth $100,000 a year & that his pay can be reduced to maybe around $35,000 a year, enough to still live comfortably but not less enough to really matter to him. If I was that guy I would be a little sad at making less money but I wouldn't care too much since I would have enough saved for multiple lifetimes already & still be making enough that I don't have to spend it.

@res260 @bagder augh I accidently exited & lost what I wrote

There will always be demand for ad space & the supply is never going to change. If ad placement companies like Google & Amazon really wanted to they could collaborate with other ad placement companies to raise prices, similar to how gasoline companies raise the price of gasoline. Someone is always going to buy that ad space no matter what because they want to advertise. If money is low they can cut pay to people that make way too much anyway....

C.Suthorn :prn:

@res260 @bagder

Then why are the sites with the most ads the sites that are most dangerous to democrathy, and the sites with no ads are most important to democrathy?

Do sites that love ads hate democrathy on principle?
Do sites that love democrathy hate ads on principle?

Jack Yan (甄爵恩)

@res260 @bagder Ads are OK, but contextual ones worked fine, and publishers made more money from them. These tracked ones mainly enrich Google. The online ad ecosystem looks like a huge con to me, with intermediaries working to take their share of the loot. The group that loses out: publishers.

Daniël Franke 🏳️‍🌈

@res260 @bagder

news sites are being killed despite ads already... I don't think that's as good an example as you think it is.

Tc001

@bagder 🤔 I wonder how effective even is it to know the previous times the user has seen an ad on before clicking on it. It seems like such a useless metric that doesn't really even help targeting.

Maybe that's their 4d play, somehow push all ad networks onto the almost useless metric and then block all the other options

mort

@bagder Sadly 2/3 browser vendors are primarily ad-funded T_T Google through being directly ad funded, and Mozilla through being Google funded

Mek101

@bagder They really have to in order to keep profitability up

Eduardo Sánchez

@bagder Correct. Advertiser pays website for ad space on it. No further variables or parameters are really needed.

Wayne Werner

@bagder let's go back to physical newspapers 😭

tasket

@bagder That depends on whether or not you think users should be subjected to advertisers' intense distrust.

That is the reason tracking was created.

If they can't function without the distrust, then we distrust them back and block them.

Arapalla

@bagder

I don't know how effective "targeted" advertising is.

Everyone I know who is open to being tracked hates advertising popping up when they talk about particular items.

I am leaning towards this being another collateral debt scam.

Businesses seem to be paying for a service that doesn't actually do what they want. A bit like AI.

I see a house of cards and am waiting for someone to turn the fan on.

snosrapkungfu

@Arapalla @bagder it really is so much this. Yes. The emperor has no clothes, it's turtles all the way down...

crazyeddie

@bagder A browser that keeps you from being tracked exists but it's actually pretty tough to use, and to use in a way that won't get you tracked anyway. That's the TOR browser and it has to jump through a bunch of proxies, disable a bunch of features most people expect, and you still need to avoid maximizing the window and shit. It's an arms race and the fact that most people are like, "I'd rather gmail work than have privacy," makes it a losing battle.

Michael Kohne

@bagder I can't say I know much about the ad ecosystem, but I really suspect that if they didn't have ANY data beyond 'yep, served that one 20K times', the ads would be no less or more effective. It's not like the targeting is working now, judging from what I see.

Scotty Trees

@bagder I'm STILL going to use Firefox over Chrome dude.

Parienve

@scottytrees
Chrome is horrible.
Firefox is mediocre (unless you change a bunch of configuration).
Librewolf is great.

Why settle for mediocre?
@bagder

Zorro Notorious MEB 😡

@bagder

The reality is, however, this:

1. The technology involved is lawful, and has been shown to either increase revenue, decrease costs, or both.

2. Mozilla and other browser makers are trying to do the impossible - compete with three of the largest for-profit corporations in the world: Google, Microsoft and Apple. That is an effort doomed to failure.

3. When I run across a site that doesn't work with Firefox but does work with Edge or Chrome, I have no leverage. My only option is to use Edge or Chrome. I can't get the site to fix their server or front end code, and I can file a bug report against Firefox but have no guarantee of a fix.

Mozilla will say with no sense of irony, "If a website doesn't work with Firefox, the website is broken." Firefox is still my main / default browser, but it is inevitable that enough sites will stop working with Firefox that I will be forced to switch.

@bagder

The reality is, however, this:

1. The technology involved is lawful, and has been shown to either increase revenue, decrease costs, or both.

2. Mozilla and other browser makers are trying to do the impossible - compete with three of the largest for-profit corporations in the world: Google, Microsoft and Apple. That is an effort doomed to failure.

Adrian Morales

@AlgoCompSynth @bagder I use the Samsung Internet browser made by overworked, underpaid South Korean IT engineers. 😑

mcc

@AlgoCompSynth @bagder "1. The technology involved is lawful" this has not been demonstrated to my satisfaction

3dcandy

@AlgoCompSynth @bagder you also have to throw in that most/majority of websites are throwing more and more ads at the user these days, with the option to reduce or get rid of them totally with payments....

Zeborah

@mildpeach I think there are things where cookies are sensible. Eg user prefs. Or: I built myself a page to check my local real-time bus API and I wanted a way to store my frequently used bus stops as favourites. There's probably other ways but cookies was most lightweight.

I think the problem came when people stopped thinking "What data should the browser remember about the website?" and started thinking "What data can the website (/3rd-party advertiser) remember about the browser?"

@bagder

nicod_

@bagder In saying this, are you advocating Mozilla's recent experiment in Firefox?
I mean PPA API: support.mozilla.org/kb/privacy

DELETED

@bagder

Extreme capitalism dictates that companies do all they can - no matter how enshittified the user experience/product is - to make the most money possible.

Yeah, you're right - they don't need to but they can and will and do and will continue to.

Ethical capitalism is what we need - that which also accounts for morality keeping the user and customers interests at heart.

Zach Nation

@bagder sadly the browsers that people actually use are mostly made by or funded by those who want to do the tracking, though.

gary

@bagder we have a subconscious need to comply and cornform - jeff has 30k webpages, this is not a coincidence, there is a feedback loop

DDR

@bagder Newspapers ran ads just fine without it.

Jack Yan (甄爵恩)

@bagder Very well said. Contextual ads worked just fine, and advertiser and publisher could make money—arguably more for publishers to keep things afloat. Tracked ads largely enrich Google. Why so many are complicit in giving Google more money is beyond me.

Punnamaraju Vinayaka Tejas

@bagder Ethical ads is a company attempting to put ads on webpages based on the content of the webpage itself, exactly like ads used to be on cable TV. No specific user-tracking, simply "if you are looking at python documentation, you may like this python course"

kasperd

Yeah, browser developers should always be on the users' side.

שִׁמְעוֹן Ⓐ :polyamory_flag:

@bagder That's true, but one of the biggest developers is an ad-company - Google. :/

david_chisnall

@bagder In the distant past, Google Ads launched. They had two key features:

-

They were text only, so they didn't slow down the page, were not annyoing, and were not a vector for malware.


-

They were selected based on the content of the page.

The first was great. I didn't mind seeing them anywhere. They replaced animated banner ads ('punch the monkey!') and were non-invasive, but they were visible. A lot of folks excluded them from ad blockers. I didn't block ads at the time, but I did block Flash and that meant that Google ads were about the only ones I ever saw.

The second was also very important. Ad targeting works on either some profile that they've built of me or the thing I'm currently looking at. These are the only options. The problem with the profile is that it's always a trailing indicator. If I'm looking at review sites for washing machines, there's a good chance that I want to buy a washing machine now, whereas nothing in my ad profile is likely to tell you that (unless it's harvested some post I made saying the washing machine broke down this morning, but if so it may have to act very quickly).

I believe the push to profile-based ads was driven by Amazon because they do work in specific categories. If I've bought a book by a particular author, I am quite likely to want another one. If I've bought two books by an author, there's a good chance I want to buy all of their books. The books I buy are probably correlated with the books people who bought some of the same books as me will buy (the down side is that Amazon didn't know which books I already owned and so would recommend pages and pages of books I owned).

It works far less well in general. Just because I bought a 128 GB USB flash drive does not, it turns out, mean that I want to be shown hundreds of ads for other USB flash drives. If you could show me those ads before I bought one, that might be useful, but afterwards it's a waste of everyone's time.

I clicked on quite a few of the old-style content-based Google ads. I even bought things as a result of them. In the (roughly) 20 years since the DoubleClick acquisition and the move to profile-based ads, I haven't clicked on a single ad. No matter how much they heat the atmosphere to build a model of me, the model remains too much of a trailing indicator to be useful.

Advertisers know this, which is why they're increasingly focusing investment on 'native advertising' - ads that are directly embedded in relevant content so that you read / watch the promotion while consuming some content that's actually interesting / relevant to what you might want to buy now / soon.

@bagder In the distant past, Google Ads launched. They had two key features:

-

They were text only, so they didn't slow down the page, were not annyoing, and were not a vector for malware.


-

They were selected based on the content of the page.

The first was great. I didn't mind seeing them anywhere. They replaced animated banner ads ('punch the monkey!') and were non-invasive, but they were visible. A lot of folks excluded them from ad blockers....

Tony Finch

@david_chisnall i like to make a distinction between advertising and direct marketing. web “ads” are almost all direct marketing

another problem with web “ads” is how appallingly wasteful they are, running so much code in the browser and doing a real time auction (!!!) content-based ads can be chosen ahead of time so there’s no need for client side code and most server-side processing can be amortised

Neil Madden

@fanf @david_chisnall I think you hit the nail on the head that profile-based ads are direct marketing. Should be subject to the same legal framework — ie must establish user consent first.

adrinux

@bagder the bulk of browser development is funded by advertising money. So it's not something they can walk away from easily, Mozilla included.

Snug

@bagder I understand the need for some services to fund themselves through advertising so I accept adverts... unless the particular advert is tracking in me, in which case it gets blocked. Funny thing is, I can't remember the last time I saw an advert on the internet.

Ryan Germann :verified:

@Snug @bagder I DON'T understand. The entire "ad model" is what has got the world to this place: clicks and ad views "at any cost" has led us to the point where enticing mis- and dis-information that increases engagement but lowers social discourse.

Google and the other ad companies profit of all of this while everything gets burned down.

Goverrnments need to make sites responsible for the content they post, and not allow them to be treated like "carriers" any more, because they're making profit off of the provocative misinformation, plain and simple. They're not simple carriers if their profits are tied to engagement.

@Snug @bagder I DON'T understand. The entire "ad model" is what has got the world to this place: clicks and ad views "at any cost" has led us to the point where enticing mis- and dis-information that increases engagement but lowers social discourse.

Google and the other ad companies profit of all of this while everything gets burned down.

Ryan Germann :verified:

@bagder some sites have DOZENS of trackers on a single page. They use YOUR computer processing power to execute, and user YOUR bandwidth to send the data back to their masters.

Use a browser like Brave or Firefox, install blockers like NoScript and Ghostery, and you can probably just click away from sites that don't work without all these trackers enabled.

Bryce Belcher

@bagder Also, websites shouldn't host ads that redirect you to a different website, that's shady. A lot of them are scams anyway.

Alex Bissessur

@bagder @geerlingguy
Just so happens that the most used browser is owned by the same guys as the biggest ads provider 🙁

Julian

@bagder on the other hand our current economic system basically forces ad networks to do invasive tracking, which could only be improved by browsers actually coming up with *better* (as in generating more profit) solution

Rhandos

@bagder Did you see this thread of Mozilla Tech Lead Bas Shouten arguing that tracking ad impressions is not data processing and that they decided against informed consent because it would be „too complex to explain“? Good times mastodon.social/@Schouten_B/11

gkrnours

@bagder I wonder how much effort it would be to sabotage the ads tracking thing and send them a lot of noise

farzag

@bagder Tracking (by which I guess you mean attribution in this case) makes the ads much more effective because the next set of ads can be targeted more precisely to people who might want to see them. More effective ads makes them cheaper for the advertiser, which means that a small business actually can reach new customers economically. And that also means that people will see fewer irrelevant/spammy ads. It’s a tradeoff many don’t like, but it’s not just evil profiteering.

scrottie (he/him/they)

@bagder always thought that when apps demanded access to the microphone to work, or demanded location, there should be a "yes but send fake data" option. The OS/browser/whatever should be on my side there. If the webpage coordinates so heavily with third party ad networks that the page won't load without ad metrics, then be on my fucking side here and send fake data. Spam the spammers. Is that so wrong?

:blahaj: Why Not Zoidberg? 🦑

@bagder Said it before; a lot of the time pages I like ask me to disable my adblocker.

I do so, but then the page still don't recognize that the adblocker is off as long as you still block trackers.

So then I enable my adblocker again, because fuck them.

Andrij Glyko :ua_tryzub:
@bagder well, no, but the marketologists made people believe that :cirno_what:
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