Ads on the web don't actually *need* user tracking. Browsers don't *have to* cooperate with those who want to surveil us.
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
@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. "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. @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? @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. @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 :/ @res260 are you suggesting those with paywalls would remove them if they could just do user-tracking ads? That sounds bizarre. @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 @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. 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) @bagder A popular Dutch news site has: @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 @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. @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". That's the point of user tracking. Precisely. Collecting and selling the user profiles to political parties for analysis and micro-targeting for example. Also harmful for democracies. 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. @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. 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. @nottrobin @res260 @bagder @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. facebook advertisers being misled about the effectiveness of facenbook ads? Yes, infamously so. @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 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? news sites are being killed despite ads already... I don't think that's as good an example as you think it is. @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. @bagder Correct. Advertiser pays website for ad space on it. No further variables or parameters are really needed. 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. @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. @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. @scottytrees Why settle for mediocre? @AlgoCompSynth @bagder I use the Samsung Internet browser made by overworked, underpaid South Korean IT engineers. 😑 @AlgoCompSynth @bagder "1. The technology involved is lawful" this has not been demonstrated to my satisfaction @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.... @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 In saying this, are you advocating Mozilla's recent experiment in Firefox? 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. @bagder sadly the browsers that people actually use are mostly made by or funded by those who want to do the tracking, though. @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. @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" @bagder That's true, but one of the biggest developers is an ad-company - Google. :/ @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 @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. @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. @bagder Also, websites shouldn't host ads that redirect you to a different website, that's shady. A lot of them are scams anyway. @bagder @geerlingguy @bagder Unfortunately, I think that they kind of have to and the reason is #capitalism Meh. @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 https://mastodon.social/@Schouten_B/112780696822570041 @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. @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? @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. @bagder well, no, but the marketologists made people believe that :cirno_what:
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@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