One of my pet meta-theories about Hacker News is that the frustration expressed over several apparently different stories really has a single source: Hacker News likes the internet of 10-20 years ago a lot more than the average person.
One place this shows up is a frequently-expressed sentiment that the internet is a less magical, less weird, and more corporate place than it was 10-20 years ago. Part of this may be because SEO has diluted the voices of individual creators. But part of it is also because way more average, everyday, tech-unsavvy people are on the internet now.
Another example is the periodic highlighting of somewhat garish HTML-based websites. I like these too! My own personal website falls in this category! But as far as I know, the generic internet user likes the generic slick-graphics-and-whitespace style, and so go the websites that want to attract them.
More relevant to the topic at hand, many comments in this thread argue that targeted ads are unnecessary for a functional internet, since the internet of 20 years ago seemed to work just fine without targeted ads. But, again, it's less clear to me that general internet users -- that is, mostly people who never experienced the internet of 20 years ago -- have the same preference.
It's funny, because I'm to a large extent on HN's side on this one. But my enthusiasm is tempered by my sneaking suspicion that the other side is a lot bigger, and my side is actually powered by more elitism and nostalgia than I thought.
I don’t understand the line of logic here. What does nostalgia for the internet of twenty years ago have anything to do with the way big advertising takes advantage of us now?
They use underhanded, arguably immoral, technological tricks that most general internet users might not even be aware of, much less understand how to defend themselves. It has nothing to do with the fact they never experienced the ‘old’ internet, they just don’t understand how or why they are being taken advantage of.
The HN crowd isn’t mad about obscene privacy practices because of nostalgia. They’re mad about it because they understand the actual technological mechanisms behind it, and how they work. And why the way big advertising exploits those mechanisms is so f’ed up.
Edit: Sorry, maybe I’m getting too angry. I think I see what you were going for, about many HN frequenters pining for the days of old. But I don’t agree with the idea that general internet users who weren’t online back then are okay with the current state of big advertising tracking technology. I think they just have no idea how or why it works.
I think many people are confused and frustrated that seemingly every random site or social media app they use seems to be aware of everything they do and look at online.
Besides encouraging people to buy things you might think they don't need, what's an actual harm people experience from targeted ads as opposed to non targeted ads?
Former gambling addict and current mental health advocate here. For anyone with an addiction or a serious mental health problem, targeted advertising can be very dangerous.
Think about the “filter bubble” effect that we experience on platforms like YouTube where we are always being “recommended” content that confirms our pre-existing beliefs.
Targeted advertising is no different except that it follows you across multiple devices and multiple online platforms in order to sell your attention to the highest bidder.
This might be fine if you are a capable, healthy and intelligent individual seeing ads for computer parts or shoes. What about the recovering alcoholic who is being “targeted” by alcohol advertising? Or the homeless schizophrenic girl I worked with a while ago who couldn’t escape a constant barrage of ads for highly addictive online gambling products?
Our brains are all wired differently and not everyone has the same level of “free will” as you do. The entire purpose of the advertising industry is to push you away from reasoned decision making and towards compulsive consumption.
As adtech becomes better at exploiting our psychological weaknesses and influencing human behaviour, I worry that we will not only see an increase in negative outcomes for the most vulnerable among us - but also an increase in mental illness among the general population as our borderline, compulsive and narcissistic traits are enabled and encouraged by soulless algorithms.
Just to add to this; I've been sober for a number of years and I remember reading about how alcohol companies specifically target people in recovery. After reading this, the targeted ads on TV and in magazines became very apparent. Knowingly contributing to ruining people's lives.
I know for a fact this happens. Gambling companies often buy marketing data from porn websites and MLM schemes in order to better target people with “impulse control issues”.
I agree, gambling and alcohol ads should be banned. I personally would never work on them. There are categories of vice products that the law treats differently in many mediums.
I don't see why the existence of alcohol should mean SaaS software companies shouldn't be able to reach their target market with ads.
I don't understand the argument. If they're harmful enough, you ban them. If they are not, presumably you accept their existence? If you ban targeting instead, you just increase the cost of all ads, the ads from your list still reach those vulnerable individuals. This feels like an inefficient, weird and indirect tax?
Your point is very convincing, but it would be great to first have a more quantifiable view (beyond anecdotal) on whats going on and second have an idea what to do about/against it. I still believe that the societal/collective memory will eventually find the best way to deal with these challenges. I hate the consensus (here on HN) that people are just too dumb to deal with it on their own and take responsibility for it.
I dislike that the burden of proof is put on the targets of this style of advertisement instead of on the companies themselves. There are plenty of studies on the impact of propaganda and advertisement on society and individuals. In the meantime I will continue to recommend the use of ad blockers and pi-hole.
(Disclaimer: I've been working in adtech for over 15 years.)
Advertisers and publishers don't really want tracking and data collection. It carries huge costs (technical as well as social) with very little benefit for advertising. Advertisers want statistically significant and unbiased population samples, and that's not something you can arrive at by blindly throwing more data at it.
Data collection by Google et al., is really because they eventually want to pivot from adtech to govtech - think "social credit" or "Minority Report". From their vantage point of course it's a much more lucrative and advantageous place to be than a mere seller of internet clickbait.
I appreciate you disclosing your experience in the ad-tech industry. But I’m not sure I understand your point.
It sounds like from your experience, the concept of FLoC from the main article is exactly where Google and other want to be? They want legit population samples versus the ‘noise’ of huge amounts of random individual use data?
But when they are trying to market it to us as users, as a ‘privacy win’, that’s hard to swallow when you’re saying their end goal is some sort of ‘govtech’ or ‘social credit’ system.
> It sounds like from your experience, the concept of FLoC from the main article is exactly where Google and other want to be?
Yes, if it can be made into some objective standard, and not just another "trust me, I'm Google".
> But when they are trying to market it to us as users, as a ‘privacy win’, that’s hard to swallow when you’re saying their end goal is some sort of ‘govtech’ or ‘social credit’ system.
Yes, because Google is not just an adtech company. Obviously they are more than that. (Or at least they want to be.)
When ad-tech is mentioned we are not just talking about selling toothbrushes or cat food, its about how this technology can be used by companies and special interests groups to do damage to society, say for instance trying to target people who might be more likely to listen to an ideology that would inevitably fail our democracies.
The Cambridge analyticas and the Russian bots happened because the average internet user was not paying attention to ad tech.
We need better education around ad tech, we need more people to understand what these ad companies are enabling so more average internet users can stay better protected, and make better and more informed choices.
If I see an ad for healing crystals on some rando website, then I just think the website is stupid.
When I saw one on Facebook I was insulted, because Facebook thinks I am the kind of person who is so stupid they believe in them. You can write this of as not actual harm because it is only emotions, but it had a negative impact on me, which I consider actual harm.
The other issue is information leakage. If you want to show an article on your phone to a buddy you don't want the ads to be for adult diapers.
It's not just the ads. Do you actually trust the company that has personally identifying information about you? Do you trust the people working at said company? Any time you have information about someone, you can use it for nefarious purposes.
> As described above, FLoC cohorts shouldn’t work as identifiers by themselves. However, any company able to identify a user in other ways—say, by offering “log in with Google” services to sites around the Internet—will be able to tie the information it learns from FLoC to the user’s profile.
Ads, tracking, and SEO content: promote low-quality information, allow all kinds of bad actors to profit from bad behavior, promote the use of adware, give economic advantage to actors who have access to big data, create market assimetries, waste my time and attention, make me stressed due to the need of locally filtering barrages of bad, dangerous, or malicious information targeted at me, put my wellbeing in danger because bad information is targeted at people around me that have influence over my everyday life.
TLDR: The ad industry promotes shit content, finances fake news, and wastes my resources.
I think OP’s just trying to say that we’re the vocal minority - Google has literally billions of users yet HN gets ten million or so unique monthly viewers[0] (my estimate from 2015 stats). I think we’re nostalgic but for different reasons than what OP suggests - that is, we want a web not driven purely for profit at the expense of privacy (and whether or not FLoC solves this is discussed elsewhere in the comments).
> I think I see what you were going for, about many HN frequenters pining for the days of old. But I don’t agree with the idea that general internet users who weren’t online back then are okay with the current state of big advertising tracking technology.
Yeah, my original post is not very clear about this. I'm not trying to argue that general modern internet users like the targeted advertising ecosystem. Instead, reading through some of the discussions here -- and past discussions of similar topics -- many of them at some point feature one user saying "tbh, i think it's fine if getting rid of targeted ads means losing a lot of revenue, because the old internet did just fine without all that revenue". But "how appealing is the old internet to modern internet users?" is a different question. And it's one where, I think, HN users overestimate the number of people that agree with them. My overall suggestion is that it's good to check whether or not this assumption is getting made somewhere along the way in these kinds of arguments, because I think for a lot of HN users, it is getting made.
The question of “How appealing is the old internet to modern modern internet users?” certainly is a totally different question. And one completely unrelated the the topic of the article. Which is the difference between 3rd party tracking cookies versus Google’s new proposal of FLoC.
I suspect you might be right. Modern internet users probably do prefer the ‘new’ web to the ‘old’ web.
As someone who experienced the ‘old’ web and the ‘new’ web I wouldn’t disagree. The old web mostly sucked. Everything looked like shit, and I certainly much prefer the more advanced, more pleasing looking websites of modern times.
But we don’t all have nostalgia for the old web because it looked good. It’s because it was new, and exciting, and we were all using dial-up modems. It was the ‘wild west’.
But that’s all unrelated to the topic at hand, general internet users being target and exploited, against their will. I need to look into FLoC more, as the concept is still new to me. On the surface it at least sounds marginally better. But only if it is easy to deny sites access to my local sandboxed data. If every website presents me with a pop up to ‘allow’ or ‘deny’ access to my FLoC data, similar to the GDPR cookie pop ups we’ve become accustomed to, I’d probably accept that as a small ‘win’.
But as it stands now, most of my friends and family when I ask them, are frightened and confused as to how every freaking place they go on the web, somehow knows about the stuff they searched on Google last week. The feeling of some obscure, all knowing power, tracking their every move online is stressful.
I try to instruct them on ways they can protect themselves. They are mostly easy, and have negligible downsides, but they are not immediately obvious to people outside the HN crowd.
The main things I recommend are A) Use Firefox B) Use 1.1.1.1 (free) or similar VPN service C) Do most of your search’s in DuckDuckGo.
That’s not a foolproof strategy, but it’s one that is super easy, and only takes the effort of downloading a few new apps. These steps alone will cause any user to very quickly to regain a huge amount of privacy, stop seeing targeted ads, and their overall internet experience will be virtually indistinguishable.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I miss the early Web mainly because I was young, had my life ahead of me, and everything was an unknown frontier to be explored.
Do you remember how f'in hard it was to find stuff online back when a) there was less stuff online and b) you had to use a metasearch engine like Metafind or Dogpile to aggregate the terrible results from multiple engines into something remotely useful? Remember surfing because actively searching fog data was next to impossible? Remember 300ms-per-hop latency and being impressed by 6KB/sec downloads, taking a week to download a Linux distro and rarely upgrading your packages because it took forever? Remember that day in 1998 when the world changed because some Stanford project called 'Google' appeared? I do. I won't go back. I have a few PDP-8s and a PDP-11/03 and various 8-bit micros and some Teletypes and 80s-90s UNIX systems and Winboxen if I want to go back to the old days. They're not dead, they're still here and they still do exactly what little they did in the past. I don't love how dystopian tech has become, but it's a ton more useful to me and most other people than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago.
I kind of wish the next generation of my family wasn't having thier young minds and perception of tech shaped by the corporate dystopia net. Even if I did have to download the the matrix as a multi part rar file in tiny resolution, or leave Napster running all night on a noisy desktop to get that Radiohead album mp3s.. it's better than bugging a parent for credit card like an addict to buy some cosmetic skin for a game.. skins used to be free and fan made mods!
https://ut99.org/viewtopic.php?t=3471
> I kind of wish the next generation of my family wasn't having thier young minds and perception of tech shaped by the corporate dystopia net.
My approach here is just stay off the internet. Go outside. Play board games. Imagine there was a world before computers and people entertained themselves just fine
Computers are not the internet: you can have a lot of fun with computers and also programming them without the internet. Probably not if you need to make money from it, but as a hobby it is very much possible. There are a lot of environments that have docs included (game dev mostly, like pico8 etc), but languages like C, Go, lisp you can program on a deserted island far away from comm networks if you need to because they are small enough and have enough that can be carried with you. People had a lot of fun with computers before the internet. But yes going outside is a good plan anyway.
The internet isn't the corporate dystopia net either: you can also still have fun with running a server for an obscure game or setting up a blog without having your attention tracked and exploited for profit.
Home, and the internet I remember, are both not only a place but a specific period in time. As I get older the phrase "You can never go home" has really started to resonate with me.
There's no need to go back, and every reason to go forward. Just because a lot of tech has gotten very good is no reason we have to passively accept that it can't get any better or friendlier or safer.
To abuse a metaphor, we're not advocating throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but that bathwater still _has to go._
I'll admit I like some aspects of the internet of 20 years ago more than today's. I don't like our current world of targeted ads, SEO, overlays, scripts, autoplay videos, and a thousand trackers. But I don't think this makes me that different from today's average internet user - just different from today's average marketer. Indeed, noxious marketing-friendly/user-hostile devices existed in some form 20 years ago as well (intrusive banner ads, popups etc).
Today's average user comes to the internet for Youtube, TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, and maybe more "useful" stuff like Maps, Translate, Docs, or information like news, recipes, guides, etc.
None of this would be possible without ads. No one is going to pay for all that.
> it's the all-encompassing privacy-stripping tracking
Which is exactly what FLoC is a step towards fixing. It may not be as perfect as not having any targeted ads at all, but it's a much better than the current status quo
As for targeted ads, I would argue that most advertising would be non-viable without it. Yes, something like Coca-Cola won't care, but your average small business owner who needs to target a specific niche will basically be unable to advertise it.
Imagine I build an app specifically for people into biking, or into animal crossing, or into some other small niche that's less than 0.1% of the population. How do you propose I grow my audience without any sort of targeting at all?
The cases you state can easily be marketed to using contextual targeting, e.g. displaying ads on biking websites or communities or individual pages that contain the keyword "Animal Crossing". All of that is already possible and doesn't require any data on the user.
> None of this would be possible without ads. No one is going to pay for all that.
Recipes and guides would not be possible without ads???
YouTube, TikTok, Twitter is mostly user generated content. You really can't imagine a world were hosting for user-generated content is not funded with ads???
The "good" internet was run by rich people's money, we had a good run because someone paid for it without expectation to make the money back right away but to acquire " internet real estate". Now these people want their money back, they want to scoop the returns of their investments.
Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit were all magical. Digg was also magical but it died out when tried to scoop returns in inelegant way.
Rich people did not become rich and don't stay rich by giving money away. When Youtube was advertiser unfriendly it was magical but it was also burning a billion $ a quarter, the same goes for all those "evil" companies. It all was a scheme to create and grow a market up until they run out of people. When they run out of people, it's time to make the money back out of it. Hmm, maybe I should remove the " " of "evil" but I am not sure. What was the alternative? The French "internet" maybe, but it died if in the face of capital fuelled frenzy of the American internet.
BTW, that's why I am an Apple fanboy, I like the idea of directly paid services. The relationship is simpler.
I'm probably too old, be "Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit" are not "old internet" to me. I would rather think of a network of self-hosted web pages with unique and not marketing-driven content that people produced for fun. And yes, I feel a lot of nostalgia for that - I know such pages still exist but they are overshadowed by the "Web 2.0" which sets the rules, both directly and indirectly.
Why would the government want to nationalize the dystopia? It's better run by private business, just like most other things where profit seems to be a useful proxy for desired quality. It could also be useful to seem to be optimizing for profit regardless of actually optimizing for it: "Youtube recommends this video because it thinks it might help keep people engaged and show more ads" is much better implicit marketing than "US government wants people in Elbonia to watch this video".
I do. I know what you mean but this rhetoric is ridiculous, I don't think that Apple or any manufacturer is obligated to make their product modifiable.
As far as I am free to do whatever I want with the hardware I purchased, no matter how hard it is to do it, I do own it.
Let me put it this way, I can't put diesel in my petrol car in the sense that it wouldn't work because the manufacturer did not develop their engine to run on any fuel. They also made the refuelling hole in different size. This doesn\t mean that I do not own the car, if I feel so I can modify it to work with the fuel I like. Actually, it's widespread to install kits to make the car work with Propane but if I really want to I can convert it to electric or diesel too.
The same goes with any Apple product. Want to make the hardware do something that is not designed to do or actively prevented doing it? Hack your device. You own it. As long as the police doesn't knock on the door due to me fiddling with Apple made device, I do own it.
I would say that the average HN user isn't so much opposed to targetted ads as they are opposed to organizations that are unaccountable to them storing their personal information in an insecure way. And Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. all provided information to the NSA so it could illegally spy on almost every American with access to the internet.
If that were the case, then wouldn't you expect the average HN user to like FLoC? Targeted ads, where the personal information is stored securely in your browser.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
Why would I trust that what FLoC is presented as being is actually just that and only that? Everything google makes seems like bait and switch lies massaged by lawyerspeak to make it legal. Like anyone else who has burned me and my friends in the past, they have to show me they have nothing up their sleeve first
> they have to show me they have nothing up their sleeve first
https://github.com/WICG/floc describes something open source and running on the client. Will that be sufficient, or is there additional disclosure you'd like to see?
Because having read the EFF article, it is clear that personal information is not secured to my browser. By definition, putting me into a category exposes my personal information, in a summarized form that is potentially reversible.
It enhances the ability to fingerprint me, effectively exposing my browsing history.
If Google offered it as an "opt in", giving me some reward for sharing my personal information that Google sells to advertisers, then that is a fair deal. In return for some form of sharing the revenue, Google gets to sell my information.
But that's not the model. It's still the "you're a product" model where Google not only gets to sell my search history, but now also continues to sell my browsing history.
I can see how it benefits Google and how it gives them/you something to sell to advertisers, but what's in it for me?
This isn't information that Google would sell to advertisers: the proposal is that it be available to all JavaScript in the browser: https://github.com/WICG/floc
What you get in return is that ad-supported sites you visit are better funded because they can show better-targeted advertising.
In general I agree. Cannot speak for others here of course.
The devil is in the detail. So if FLoC and new third party tools to subvert FLoC became too mainstream, then I would expect Google to act in its own interest and provide value-added back-end services. Just as has happened with Android AOSP and Play Services.
Until then though, I feel FLoC being both client-side and open-source would be an improvement on the status quo
This also seems to be a tech-elite/libertarian mindset and borders on paranoia. Does the average voter care enough to vote one way or other for it? I would suspect not.. they have bigger problems to deal with and they seem ok with government knowing something about them.
Being opposed to something that is literally proven to actually happen is "tech-elite/libertarian mindset and borders on paranoia"? I don't understand your point of view at all, frankly.
It's okay to say that you personally don't believe in a right to privacy or don't believe that it's an issue to vacuum up the data of own's own citizens, etc, but what I don't understand is saying that other people are paranoid elitists if they hold the view that they think it's wrong to spy on citizens. It seems incredibly uncharitable.
Furthermore your comment reads like you're addressing an argument the GP never made. What's the relevance of this section:
> Does the average voter care enough to vote one way or other for it? I would suspect not.. they have bigger problems to deal with and they seem ok with government knowing something about them.
The GP never insinuated that the average voter cares about such things (indeed by mentioning that the HN userbase does that implies that the general population does not otherwise it would not be worth mentioning)
Does that make the HN side any less valid? Without resistance we let the forces that be do whatever they want. I don't find that to be acceptable, especially when so many of us are actually in a position to change things, if only our masters would let us
Recently I asked my non tech savvy mom if she wanted to join YouTube Premium with me under a family plan so that she doesn't have to see ads on her YouTube any more.
Her response was "No thank you. I like the ads. Sometimes I see things I like".
This is why I'm not going to bother with a Pi-Hole. For my girlfriend, half the things she likes to look at would disappear.
On a more positive note, I bought my 81 year-old Dad 'Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World' for his birthday in January. He's so knocked out by it that he sends me PDF scans of certain pages. So probably the way to go is starting with a little covert education.
Ask her if she likes all the implications that comes with giving in to all the privacy invasion and manipulation that comes with those ads that she might like.
Ask her if she would give up on the ads that she sometimes likes if she learned that ad tech makes us addicted to our computers, more socially isolated, less likely to connect to our family and community, etc. IOW, ask her if she would trade the ads on Youtube for better quality time with her children and (potential?) grandchildren.
Giving in to ads because "some ads are nice" is no different to think that a diet based only on heavily processed foods are nice because "some of it taste good".
"The ads are annoying" is the last of the problem with the ad-based economy. People do become ad-blind after a while. The problem is all the tracking, profiling and the "eyeball-based website funding model".
We were humans before this Internet-thing came to us. And it must adapt to our human ways of life. I'm now even more tempted to likening of the invention of Internet to when man discovered fire.
Anyway, back to the topic... Why are you assuming the user is not intelligent/capable of making an informed choice ? Most people by now (we are talking about Internet users after all here) already know the implications of these ads towards their privacy. Yet 9/10 times they will choose convenience over it.
You are also assuming that time spent on YouTube is eating on time they would (rather??) spend on their families. What if the user watches Youtube at night when the family is asleep?
On to advertising. Some ads are indeed useful, despite of their tracking-based nature. Some are informational. Some are non-intrusive at all. I can't tell you how many times I've taken up a promo (on products I already use) because of a simple ad.
Putting all ads on the same bandwagon hurts the players who just care about serving marketing info and nothing more.
Foregoing ad-funded products or even ads themselves is not a binary decision. We need to get away from this mentality.
Good questions. These solutions are not up to me (as a user). Neither are they up to you (users like you). The majority of this space will make this decision for the products and by extension you if you use the product. Speaking for myself, I'll be waiting for the outcome on the other end with an adblocker. Doesn't mean I won't support projects that I care about.
What a cop out. Why carry water for the awful way the internet is heading?
Perhaps it’s because the net of the past used to be a “wild frontier” not owned by a couple companies is why people have nostalgia. Those companies can make major decisions for the web based on solely on securing their own profit.
I like your observation. I do not completely agree, though.
A tech-unsavvy user often dislikes "targeted advertising", as much as I could observe. For one, for the weird cross-media targeting effects, when a person sees the same ads, or ads about the same thing, like a fridge, following the user on many unrelated sites. It's most annoying when this keeps happening after the user has bought a fridge, and is unlikely to buy another just yet.
A less recognized but more annoying effect of ads is that they consume as much CPU and network latency as possible without making some sites outright unusable. The user says: see, I have this new and powerful computer, and this new and fast network thingie — why is the internet so slow? This is when installing even a simple ad-blocking extension shows the difference very vividly.
BTW I think that truly targeted ads can be useful — such laser-precision ads in Facebook showed me a few niche communities that interested me, e.g. dedicated to chiptune music creation. But most ads I see when I browse without ad-blocking are pretty lame, maybe 2% are well-targeted (and then I click on them). I keep a separate browser profile without ad-blocking to see what the internet is like for a vanilla user. OTOH the amount of tracking normally present on innocuous sites is surprisingly large, and slows things down rather unpleasantly, even if the ads are served instantly.
So yes, the internet full of ads is the norm for last 20+ years, and no, "normal users" do notice the impact of it.
> It's most annoying when this keeps happening after the user has bought a fridge, and is unlikely to buy another just yet
On the contrary, the most likely moment any random person online is to buy a fridge is just after they bought one: we know they had a need + awareness of the desired specs + intent to buy, so it's really just a question of convincing them that fridge B is better than the one they bought.
Buyer's Remorse is basically free in many countries, ex 14 days to return item in the EU.
The hatred of targeted advertising comes more out of what it systemically enables, and incentivizes. The mapping and realtime exploitation of UUID like-metadata collected through ubiquitous surveillance. Dossiers were the things of novels and intelligence agencies, nowadays marketers have sold people (even those like you) that somehow this gratuitous invasion of your privacy is normal, desirable, acceptable, and even more insidiously, always was.
Nothing could be further from the truth. You now have multiple dossier's that will follow you around the world. Some governments will deny you entry unless you surrender access to any social media accounts.
None of what is normal about the web today was ever at all what made the early web magical. You weren't monetized. You were reaching out and leaving something of yourself out there, and finding that there were like minded individuals to you the world over!
You also had the cloak of anonymity. Anything on the net was a non-issue. Controversial viewpoint? Whatever. Really need some insight on XYZ? Trawl the BBS's or a chat room.
Nothing was as centralized as it is now. People didn't do daft things like trying to put things you shouldn't on a fundamentally insecure network. People weren't so dependent on things that the ne net was more... Relaxed. Not a full time deal.
I have no illusions the magic has faded not just due to age and familiarity, but to what it has become, and what it has enabled the world to become.
I don't torrent much anymore, but one of the things I really love about private torrent trackers are the forums.
They're stuck in the mid 2000s, in all the best ways.
Technologically they're ancient (usually HTML tables), the amount of users grow slowly (if at all) and are limited to maximum a few thousand (usually just a few hundred actively using the forums though). Users won't risk their treasured accounts by acting badly, and since very few join private trackers for the forums you get a wide specter of different people participating, in their different ways.
Some users are silly and post memes, others post long and thought through replies, often in the same thread. Everything is discussed, from politics to the latest movie. There's no "karma" to earn.
After a while you start recognizing the same people. I'm really glad I still have access to it, otherwise I would feel kinda lost in today's internet, where you need to find a new site/subreddit for every topic. No tracking either for that matter.
I think one way to put it is that normies don't like a visible reminder of what the service/organization knows about them, but are otherwise perfectly content to not care about how the sausage is made. (Which is understandable since naturally a non-tech person isn't going to have a good mental model of what cookies, HTTP requests, tracking pixels etc are)
In other words, you can track the normies all you want as long as your app doesn't do something "creepy" that reveals how much it really does know about them
Indeed, there's a couple of data points suggesting that when users are asked for informed consent for tracking, only around 9% agree. That was true across both the UK information commissioner's website, as well as a small commercial shop website (from memory).
It strikes me that, as you say, even "normies" don't like tracking.
I think the problem is when sleek services obfuscate how they work and users don't understand what happens.
The average "normie" doesn't realise that, by default, a cloud service provider sees all their data in the clear. They assume it's somehow private, but haven't seen behind the veil to understand how services work. And the increasing complexity of the tech stack means understanding it becomes harder and harder every day that goes by.
I have no nostalgia for the internet of old, the internet for me growing up with facebook, reddit, and newgrounds, i just dont want my privacy violated
This is a weird take. Just because you're going meta, does not invalidate that the internet has turned into a steaming pile of shit since last 10 years.
It sounds pseudo-englightening without any substance. Ok, you've observed this meta aspect of HN. So, what?
I agree that it's not a very deep observation, or maybe even not true. But it 1) seems to explain several different reactions I see on Hacker News, and 2) it illustrates a trap that I, as a Hacker News user, find myself falling into without realizing: the belief that the thing I want is the thing that other people want. To me, it's good to be aware of that.
> But, again, it's less clear to me that general internet users -- that is, mostly people who never experienced the internet of 20 years ago -- have the same preference.
This may be the case, but i don't think we can draw the conclusion from that that they like the new internet, only that we dont know if they do. Which is a very different conclusion
That said, i think the real reason is that the internet sold out and went corporate. I think its pretty similar to what happens when an indie band makes it mainstream - all the original fans tend to hate the change.
The problem I see mainly is people complain about something without providing a usable alternative.
Most of the web tech are open source so it's just a matter of forking an existing tech and convincing others to use your thing instead. If your thing breaks half the existing workflows that's your problem, not others'
I suspect its as much due to the speed as anything else. The internet has moved from early adopter/enthusiast to ubiquity in less than a lifetime. In fact, in less than a working career time span. I imagine that rate of change is not going to keep the early adopters as thrilled as they used to be.
I really doubt that an average internet use is craving for being tracked. GDPR seems to be widely supported in Europe, the only thing that annoys people are numerous "give us consent please" pop-ups which some attribute to GDPR itself, not to advertisers' attempts to track people despite GDPR.
> That framing is based on a false premise that we have to choose between “old tracking” and “new tracking.” It’s not either-or. Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads.
I don't want to be tracked. I never have wanted to be tracked. I shouldn't have to aggressively opt-out of tracking; it should be a service one must opt-in to receive. And it's not something we can trust industry to correct properly. This is precisely the role that privacy-protecting legislation should be undertaking.
It seems like FLoC could make it easier to opt out centrally rather than going through a mess of specific (dis)approvals for the specific trackers on every site. Maybe it could even be a good place for a dial - "I'll expose a 4-bit cohort, but nothing more specific."
It also seems like FLoC could make it more politically viable to crack down non-consensual tracking. Publishers wouldn't be able to say "we have no choice but to deal with this [third party tracker] scum" but could continue to gate content by subscription or (consensual) FLoC as necessary for their business model.
Pushing publishing and advertising towards proactive consent about targeting puts them into a dialog with the market about what's ok, instead of letting them hide behind a bunch of shifting tracker businesses.
> "I'll expose a 4-bit cohort, but nothing more specific."
You're dreaming. You'll also expose to Google IP and website URL via Referer in requests for fonts and jsquery bundles, in Google cookies masqueraded as first-party via CNAME tricks, in Chrome identifier and so on. Chances are you're using Google DNS 8.8.8.8 too.
I wont trust a company to disable the data source for their main revenue. Just don't use any of Google software and services. Android included, sadly.
It still coerces consent with a bad default. Sites will refuse to operate unless the FLoC is enabled, or will become obnoxious to use with it disabled. However, if FLoC were disabled by default then sites would be less likely to provide an obnoxiously bad service to those with it disabled.
Google is the farmer, websites are the dogs, and we are the livestock.
Some might say, in a fit of charitability, "but it's a bird reference", citing prior work. To which I say no; don't convince yourself for one moment that Google's army of PhDs didn't notice the sheep allusion. They are not that dumb. But they are this arrogant.
If I understand correctly, couldn't you just provide a static FLoC that isn't personalized? How will the sites know whether what they're receiving is actually personalized or not?
This is my question - unless this ties in with a model to rely on trusted computing, a system receiving a FLoC shouldn't be able to validate it. That means a browser plugin could simply return "0000".
Unless this ends up as some closed source DRM style blob (in which case we might as well kiss goodbye to the open web that can be accessed by standards compliant browsers), I can't see how anyone can stop this.
On the other hand, given the widespread use of ad blockers and tracking block lists, perhaps this simply isn't a design goal - just accept that 20% of techies will block it anyway and return 0 or simply not run a browser that supports it, and focus on the majority who think Chrome is synonymous with "the internet" and run it without add-ons.
If more people block ads then more effort is also devoted to circumventing ad blockers. Ad supported sites typically don’t care about the experience of viewers who aren’t revenue generating.
> If most browsers aggressively blocked ads then more sites would test to see if blocking ads breaks the site.
I'm not sure that's a reasonable assumption.
Many sites actively break their own user experience and hide their content as best as possible for users with adblockers. It's also understandable, because these sites don't want users but adviews and adclicks. They would rather intensify their efforts to force the user to turn on adds than make sure the website works without generating revenue.
I also don't think we would see much more subscription or pay once models, because they are just not viable for many websites. These websites would simply cease to exist and we end up with less diverse available information on the internet.
I don't think FLoC provides a default - that's the browser's job. We can all guess what Chrome's default will be (although I'd also expect that Incognito will disable or at least reset FLoC), but regulations like GDPR/CCPA might still require affirmative consent.
Re: obnoxiously bad service, frankly I think sites should run however they want as long as they are truly transparent about it (not just a buried EULA). I prefer open sites, but nobody should be forced into service just because I have an IP.
> It seems like FLoC could make it easier to opt out centrally rather than going through a mess of specific (dis)approvals for the specific trackers on every site.
Wasn't this already the idea behind the DNT (Do Not Track) header?
But if FLoC requires the browser to do the tracking itself, would it be possible to fork Chromium, disable tracking, and have FLoC return fake or random data instead?
Opting out of cookies is often not very easy because of:
- hidden and confusingly worded opt-out dialogues
- different cookie banners on ever site
- dark patterns such as requiring far more clicks to opt-out than in
- opt-out dialogues with lots of technical wording
- sites that just don't provide opt-out options
- sites that purposely degrade the ux if you opt-out
All these mean that the average "not technical" user (such as my parents) cannot reliability opt-out.
Also worth remembering sites that simply dump their third party cookies before the prompt even loads up! Often someone doesn't understand how their cookie prompt script works, or simply doesn't care and assumes if people see the prompt they'll assume it's legal!
Textbook illegal, but major high-street global brand names do this, and there's no easy way to make them stop - regulators just can't move quickly enough or show enough teeth. We would need thousands of convictions per day to even scratch the surface - I'd estimate at least 9 in 10 sites I visit breaks the law in one way or another around their cookies and consent prompt.
Perhaps we need a way to commercialise and earn revenue from identifying the sites breaking the laws as you describe? The law demands "opt in" for Europe, yet everyone tries to skirt this and use dark patterns like forgetting the cookie settings of anyone who dares not accept everything. Many of these dark pattern techniques are actually illegal.
If you could commercialise each of these findings, we would have everyone compliant in a matter of weeks. SEC style whistleblower model (albeit on a smaller scale)?
What's tracking in your definition here? Is counting display of an ad tracking? Load of an image on page? Is logging nginx entry for your page load tracking? Is responding with correct image for your browser user-agent tracking?
I'm sometimes confused what is covered under this term and I'd kinda like to know where the line here is drawn. What exactly are we talking about here?
I fear that your questions reduce the problem to the point where no answer is possible. Loading the Y Combinator logo in here is almost certainly not tracking, but loading an invisible, 1px-by-1px gif in an email almost certainly counts. It's missing the forest for the trees.
The simplest definition of tracking I can come up with is "collect data about me that can (and often, is) used to build a profile of me and my behavior". The NGinx log could or could not be tracking, depending on whether you use it to diagnose issues ("we should optimize this picture, it's loading too slow for too many people") or to profile me ("ID 12345 uses a 56K modem, let's sell him a new one"). But no perfect definition exists because everyone has different thresholds of what they are okay with.
If I understand FloC correctly though, it sends your profile/tags/interesting topics from your owned client software. So this basically means that if you have a browser like Firefox, it could send a preset cohort set to server that doesn't build your tracking profile and gives you things you're interested in.
To me this seems like a win? It allows you as a person to control how your ad profile is built (and if it's sent at all) and doesn't send your data to servers anymore?
(Please correct me if I misunderstood the technology.)
Personally, what I'm interested in is not seeing ads. I think the notion that more relevant ads are somehow better for the user is mostly industry propaganda. Ad targeting is about finding people more susceptible to manipulation into spending money. User satisfaction is at best an epiphenomenon of the ad industry, and at worst is directly counter to their goals.
If you don't want to see ads, why not run an adblocker or avoid visiting sites that show ads? There's no good option right now, if you have a paywall people will complain and almost no one will visit your site, and if you have any ads at all people will complain about that too. (I remember an HN article about a guy who had a banner advertising his own product on his personal blog, absolutely no tracking, that got added to uBlock adblocking lists.)
If you want you can use duckduckgo with ads disabled in settings, visit HN and wikipedia and stackoverflow (although they have the #hireme thing), pay $10/month for youtube and spotify premium so you don't see ads there, etc. And then use ghostery to disable third-party cookies and things of that nature. What more do you want the industry to do?
Personally, I want the advertising industry to not exist. Moral question of for-profit manipulation aside, I think if you look at net societal benefits versus total cost, it's pretty easy to see that we could find better things to do with the ~$1 trillion that it consumes. That day won't come any sooner just by me running an ad blocker.
What I want is them not to know anything about my profile or what I want and them not to send anything about me to anyone unless I ask them to. Which I'm not going to.
That would be an actual win. Not showing me ads at all would be an additional icing on the cake. I even don't want to see ads about things I'm interested in. Just nothing.
I think we forget the hidden cost of not being able to run well targeted ads. If we remove the ability to advertise this way, it increases the barriers to entry for new business. Right now, due to highly effective targeting any small startup (and big firm) can go pretty niche and launch a product with a small amount of budget.
If we rely on old pre digital tactics with no targeting, it's like going back 50 years and using a machine gun in the dark.
Combine the Google cookie depreciation, Apple's recent changes in 14.5 and the general mood around 3rd party data sharing which makes effective outbound lead gen more difficult. I think we are witnessing death by a thousand cuts in terms of increasing the barriers to entry for smaller business.
Has anyone actually presented studies that show that targeting advertising using fingerprinting and other invasive and hidden identification works?
Sure, google/FB and others sell that to advertisers as an advantage, but has anyone proven it works?
Google's original use of Adwords was based on my current search, didn't use my history, and didn't use anything else to identify/classify me.
Then they started adding geo location, using things like IP addresses and other out-of-band information, then cookies which allowed them to track me outside of their own site.
I don't care whether outbound lead gen is more difficult. I have no incentive to care. I have no incentive to offer my details to anyone.
Advertising has always been a manipulative business, by definition, its aim is to manipulate people into wanting to consume the product or service being advertised.
But it was constrained by the inability to target more than large demographic groups and locations.
That "pretty niche" product can still target its niche. What it can't do without the current dark patterns and tracking is target individuals. That would be a good thing.
Pre-digital tactics is not going back 50 years, it's going back 20. It's pre-9/11, pre-government-general-surveillance. That government surveillance has given tacit permission to business to do the same thing. The "if you've got nothing to hide, why are you worried about the government?" argument is applied to business now.
In short, fuck Google and FB and Amazon's need to sell targeted audiences. Their business model is flawed and has caused greater social disturbance than the overall reward.
Not having individually targeted ads doesnt mean no targeting it means less efficient targeting. There are also other avenues for promotion. There is no way to offset losing your privacy
If they will not send data to their servers anymore, then they can easily regain trust by just introducing a contractual obligation to pay out a reasonable sum if they are found to be doing so that would disincentive them from doing so. Say 1 year of revenue or ~$100B? Since they have control over their own actions and there is no reason to send data to their servers anymore, then that would be pure upside with no risk if they are being truthful. However, until they make promises where success and failure can be evaluated by non-technical individuals and there is actual downside when failing to fulfill those promises, I see no reason for anyone to believe their claims if they will not put their money where their mouth is.
Not really. GDPR establishes specific rules around data protection and retention, but what I am proposing is having them establish a contractual obligation to abide by their claims with pre-defined damages in the event of a breach of contract to demonstrate a commitment to their claims. GDPR is about data protection, this model is about honesty/fulfilling obligations which just so happens to be about data protection in this case. If they want to gobble up all the data and they are completely honest and forward about it such that the average impacted individual properly understands the scope and degree of what is occurring, then I do not care too much about it since at least everybody is going in with open-ish eyes. It is doing so while lying about it or appealing to people's wishful thinking then blaming them for not reading the fine print that is truly evil.
If this doesn't get taken advantage of by google, this would be awesome.
I bet if a random open source project of the same kind were released, it would probably be pointed at as a reason why Google is evil ('see there are good alternatives!'). But because Google is doing it, people are (rightly) wary and (definitely not rightly) calling it evil without doing research.
> But because Google is doing it, people are (rightly) wary and (definitely not rightly) calling it evil without doing research.
That's what happens when no one trusts you. It's human nature, and logical arguments aren't going to change that.
If anything, it's a good thing for society if Google burns despite trying to do something genuinely good (not that FLoC is good), because it shows others that there are real consequences to betraying the trust of your customers.
We lose one untrustworthy company today, and gain many trustworthy companies in the future. That's a net positive for society!
Where are the lines between market research, profile building, tracking, 1984? (Eg. our sites are viewed by these cohorts, we should put up these ads... versus oh this particular request seems to come from this particular cohort, let's send this ad, or this user is logged in, last time bought a boat, let's show it a keg of beer... etc.)
In many cases yes, but broadly, IP address is not a basis for determining an individual. It's difficult to know it's not some other NAT'd user or dynamically assigned.
And why is the same not true for FLoC? How come when it comes to FLoC, the bare minimum amount of information is magically enough to identify you, but when it comes to IP, you just shrug it away as it being too difficult?
Personally, I didn't make any claim about FLoC magically identifying people. It does help to identify people, though. IP address you can't do without, FLoC would be additional information beyond that, so it helps identify people.
Legislation will not solve the technical problem that the guy you're replying to brought up. Are they gonna write distributed communication protocols into law now?
<sarcasm>But what about a "free and open web".</sarcasm>
These constant references to "the web" when discussing certain companies is annoying. The www does not belong to any incorporated middleman. I do not care how much traffic they are curently in control of. The www is a medium not a small, privileged group of messengers. How is this company even contemplating something like this. Answer: Because a majority of users choose a browser controlled by an advertising company. WTF.
This company will no doubt exert influence/control over the "standards" process and next thing we know, every developer working on a browser will feel obligated to "implement FLoC".
Maybe this is an either-or question. Who is the www for: users or advertisers. The middleman needs both. Advertisers need the middleman and users. But users do not need advertisers. And, truly, they do not need the middleman. Users are creating the content. The middleman just sits in between, spying on everything.
Maybe there needs to be more than one www. Maybe there needs to be a non-commercial www for smart people.
Any new feature that is added to the user agent should serve or empower said user — not any other parties, including the browser maker and the advertisers. That simple.
That's the thing: Chrome did empower users, that's why everyone uses it! Users just want things to work, and Chrome worked better than IE and FF at the time. FF didn't get multi-process support for a decade after Chrome had it. Did this also serve Google's purposes? Of course. But that's how life works. It's a win-win for Google.
Everyone complains about the evils of Google, but revealed preferences show that focusing on what people actually care about has substantial value.
It's like no one follows what people say about cookie popups. Does your average non-tech user praise the EU for adding the popups and allowing opt outs? Of course not. They complain about these stupid fucking popups they have to click through on every site now!
This kind of strategy has never ever worked because the majority of the world's population just accepts whatever is thrown at them without questioning.
Some well designed regulation would be nice. But just on the off chance we should probably also try frying tofu and sending it to the mozilla foundation, because we might need some divine intervention after all.
As long as it remains massively profitable to collect every ounce of data from us, tech corporations are going to keep doing this.
Even with some existing laws, the profits are enough that they are willing to flagrantly violate these laws and simply pay meager fines.
It's also unlikely that we will ever get significant legislation to protect us from this either, because all these tech profits allow big tech to buy our government, because policy is heavily swayed by corporations.
But, the reality we need to accept and work from is that with vested corporate interests aligning so well with intrusive governmental and military interests, nothing is going to change.
Don't hold your breath for privacy protection legislation.
Your browser recording history of web pages you've been and saving it locally is not someone else tracking you. Your perspective is seriously warped. Even if they were tracking you, they are doing so to give people better ads to make the world a better place.
Unrelevant ads are a waste of time and resources for all parties. Getting rid of these waste benefits all parties. It's a win-win-win situation. I believe making society more efficient makes the world a better place.
The technique is designed to encourage consumption. This does not necessarily make society more efficient; having frequent nags to consume product one does not need is wasteful.
It's more than likely that targeted ads make humanity less efficient, due to the widespread coercion to consume products and services that are not necessary for a healthy and happy life.
> If you don't, and don't want to be tracked for ads, how do you propose things work?
There are so many hobbies and interests where the rich, meaty information people can benefit from is found on old-school blogs and websites that their owners have maintained without expecting to make much money at all, besides the occasional click-through to an Amazon referral link.
However, those blogs and websites have now become hard to find because they have been pushed down in search results due to Google's changed algorithms and ad-supported websites heavy on SEO – sometimes those ad-supported websites are literal copies of earlier advertising-free blogs where a developing-world freelancer was paid to rewrite all the content just enough to avoid a DMCA takedown. Also, the advertising-supported world of mobile social-media apps has made people today less likely to step outside of their walled gardens and consider small third-party independent websites.
So, to a degree, things would work better in certain cases if targeted-advertising-supported websites disappeared; their decline would reveal a whole world of useful free content that was there the whole time.
Wikipedia is a well-known example of a vast amount of content that I can read without any tracking or targeted ads. In fact, there's very little advertising at all -- a few times a year they show me a banner asking for donations to the site.
SEO was a thing before tracking and widespread advertising, though, and I can't see it disappear even if we somehow manage to ban those widespread tracking practices. Remember keyword stacking?
Businesses providing paid services on the internet will still want to get noticed before those free smaller websites and will do whatever they can to appear first in relevant search engines results regardless. The reasons to get people on their sites would shift from showing them ads to selling them a paid product, but reeling people in is still going to be the objective.
There are many great arguments against tracking, but IMHO, SEO isn't one.
Car dealerships send direct mail post cards to you if you've bought from them before. Seems like individual retargeting to me.
If you've every made the buying decisions for an organization, you've been targeted individually before. Through digital economies of scale, it's less expensive to do with consumers now and allows for publishers to get paid to generate content at the same time.
Indeed, their page doesn't make it obvious, but on a computer you can use extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Puma is the only option on mobile though ( never heard of it either).
Puma is a fork of Firefox that does other cool shit: it supports Handshake for DNS, uses DDG by default, and there are some mentions of IPFS that I don't know if it's implemented or not.
I have yet to play with it though, mostly because I do the vast majority of my browsing on a desktop.
Thanks a lot. Coil looked like its own browser, and I didn't want yo use another browser. I was using a similar service in the past, but unsuscribed because most created I wanted to send money weren't receiving it.
Yeah, it's not as obvious as it could be, i'm in the process of writing an article on the subject and how important i think it is combat ads and tracking in the long term.
You can, but do you remember the times on the Internet when that was the case? I vaguely remember cents per thousands of ad clicks, which would make most websites financially unviable.
You can, but do you remember the times on the Internet when that was the case? I vaguely remember cents per thousands of ad clicks, which would make most websites financially unviable.
I do, and the amount of money webmasters made back then was much better.
Some of the sites I ran got $10-$15 CPM. Ad campaigns targeted to my sites' niches could be up to $25 CPM.
Ever since Google introduced AdWords and its race to the bottom, content-heavy web sites are lucky to get 10¢ CPM.
But since the new kids on the block have never experienced a profitable web without tracking, they don't know any better and think it didn't exist.
But AdWords isn't a race to the bottom; it's the opposite. Google's ad business is so big because Google drives so much more value than other ad targeters.
This will never happen because the people who would pay the most to avoid targeted ad tracking are the ones who are the most valuable to advertisers (essentially, people able and willing to spend money). So when you see Facebook making $20 per user or whatever and think “I’d pay $20 to avoid being tracked,” it’s actually Facebook making nothing from a ton of users, a little from a bunch of them, and a huge amount from their “whales,” and the people willing to pay to avoid being tracked are most likely in the “whales.”
I would say with some subscription services you see the inverse of this - i.e. streaming media. IIRC youtube creators make more per view with subscribers than they do with ads, but I could be wrong.
Simple answer: The sum of all online marketing dollars is more than the sum of any amount of money people would pay for online content.
That alone means direct payment will never replace ads.
Most people are not reading The Financial Times or Bloomberg, they are reading rags like The Sun and Facebook gossip. I would love for that content to go away, but really, ad supported models work great for that demographic.
I think you miss my point. Even if online advertising (as well as marketing, but that's a different concept) was completely worthless, the number of paid dollars would not go up, and the "total GDP" of the internet would go down.
If that's a desired future we should be honest about it, but it's a future without as many independent journalists who can't afford a team to sell their content, for example.
Indeed, because for many of them the only option is ads, because almost nobody uses any alternatives ( the only one i know of is Web Monetization). Until it's massively used, few site owners will make the effort.
I think I would be fine with paying too, but by paying you're giving up all of your personal information. Unless websites will suddenly start accepting something like Monero, I actually prefer to be tracked, as I can at least block it.
If a highway robber stops you and demands "your money or your life" and you object, they can't justifiably say "well if you don't pay me, how do you propose things work?"
The responsibility isn't on the user to either consent to tracking or to come up with an alternative business model that allows people to monetize things. The responsibility for monetizing things falls on the people who want to do the monetizing. They have to figure out a business model that works and that users consent to.
That's like diving into a conversation about CCTV proliferation with "just wear a ski mask". It's inconvenient, hinders daily activities, makes you look like a criminal, and might not even help. It's unreasonable.
>It was probably a mistake to equivocate the kind of data gathering that ad-tech companies do with the kind that oppressive governments do.
Given that oppressive governments can obtain the data from the ad-tech companies... no, not really.
Can you go a day without the Internet? How about two days?
Sadly without this tracking, the engines of the ad economy come to a stop. We have royally ducked up the ecosystem to the point where there's no fixing it. Ever. Even laws such as GDRP won't cut it, Facebook & co. are happy to flout the rules since paying the fines is worth the cost of breaking the rules.
In the case of Google ad money vs Content marketing economy, it really is a case where the chicken came before the egg.
This seems to imply that without ad revenue, the internet would not exist. But plenty of sites existed and still exist without the support of ad revenue. The price to host a static site is lower than it's ever been (and for sites that provide free hosting, the cost of providing that service is lower than it's ever been). If something like YouTube couldn't exist without ads, then so be it: let them move to a subscription model. There is nothing that says that we must be forced to tolerate ads in exchange for the internet, let alone ads that intentionally obliterate the human right to privacy.
Large parts of what you know today as the Internet are ad-funded as opposed to user/donation funded. Without this ad revenue being available to the web, not so many websites and applications would have been born.
Youtube did not even think of charging premium so many years after launching as a free service.
Do you think they would have been that successfully were it not for the user base aka free eye-balls?
> There is nothing that says that we must be forced to tolerate ads in exchange for the internet
While true but this is the way the game and the field has been setup. Same thing that explains why you see ads on even on paid devices. Why be content with 5$, when you know you can shake 6$ from a customer?
I am for privacy. Believe me. But this battle is not winnable when you make up 5% of the sober group and the rest are happy and drunk in love with Clubhouse or whatever new social media drug that is the rage.
Vimeo was working the paid angle around the time that Youtube launched, and it wasn't under water. Youtube was successful because they _purposefully_ (and so, criminally) refused to take down copyrighted content because they were aiming to grow fast enough and large enough to be purchased by Google.
It's not just Youtube/Vimeo; for instance, Flickr was a premium paid service around the time that Facebook launched, and it wasn't under water, either.
These "freemium" services were able to act as _hideously unprofitable_ loss leaders for the large advertisement firms, and so take down the non-advertisement-funded competition.
It was predatorial monopolistic practices that gave us the current web.
Okay. Allow me to rephrase it. Knowing what you know about these products, can you live without Google, Youtube, Gmail for a day? This is what I refer to above when I say 'the Internet'. I reckon most people can't go a week.
> can you live without Google, Youtube, Gmail for a day?
The only one of those I ever interact with on purpose is Youtube, only via youtube-dl, and only because other people refuse to use reasonable means of distributing video content (eg bittorrent).
Absolutely? I know I’m atypical for an internet user, but apart from YouTube I rarely use Google products, and YouTube is a nice-to-have, not a necessity.
Yes. All I really need are Wikipedia, HN, and Python.org and few other programming sites. I don't mind shelling out a few dollars to support them either.
This is exactly why we're building EthicalAds. It's an ad network that only targets based on the content of sites, doesn't allow any third-party media, and is currently only focused on a developer audience: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/
We had the same choice on Read the Docs, but didn't really have any other way to make money but advertising. We decided to build ethical advertising, so that we could be proud of the ads we show, knowing we weren't adding to massive pool of data out there. I talked a bit more about it here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-ma...
I hate the use of new/uncommon acronyms/initialisms without immediate clarification, a form of clickbait. So many paragraphs down to see what it's called. Expected more from EFF.
In the case of reverse-engineered acronyms like this one, I think there's a judgment call that you need to make: in some cases it is simply not useful to expand the term. They explain what FLoC means very early on, but the expansion of the acronym conveys very little information since it is technical, somewhat nonspecific, and it's clear that the acronym was designed before its meaning.
Consider, for example, that it's uncommon to expand military program acronyms because their meaning is often less useful than saying "it's just a word."
Hello! Author here. thank you for raising that, this was an oversight (due to moving text around in the editing process) that has been fixed. Totally agree that acronyms should be defined on first use.
Come here to say the same, I actually had to click on the github link to learn what it meant first. Should've explained it the first time it's brought up instead.
I really don't understand the problem here. It looks like FLoC will entirely depend on the browser (which Google controls if it's Chrome). So the browser will analyze your browsing history (and since it's Google, it will probably connect to everything else Google knows about you) to request targeted ads.
But, what about the people who don't use Chrome? I would hope that most people who know what EFF is already don't. Firefox will surely come with a way to disable it, or you'll configure it to always send "my little pony" or something like this.
In the end, this seems to really be about Google (with a browser) competing against Facebook and other ad providers (who don't have a browser).
The big problem with FLoC, as I see it, is that it makes fingerprinting vastly easier. Your FLoC bucket narrows you down to one of several thousand users, rather than one of several million, and that's before fingerprinting applies.
Ironically, it seems that FLoC makes user tracking easier, not harder.
I see no upside in FLoC for me as a user, and plenty of potential downside. I'm glad I use Firefox.
Without making any drastic changes to my browser to intentionally inhibit fingerprinting, I already have a unique fingerprint according to https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/, so this honestly doesn't signal a change to me at all. I just run uBlock Origin to block trackers/ads.
I have the same. And the majority of what makes me unique, at least according to the EFF website, is absolutely not needed for 99.99% of the websites I visit.
Just what I was thinking. The article doesn't clearly answer the question of what level of browser cooperation is necessary for FLoC. I use Firefox. When I'm not using Firefox, I'm using Safari. Does this mean FloC won't affect me?
> FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves
This seems to hint that avoiding FLoC is just a matter of avoiding Chrome, with no 'arms race' of any sort.
If this actually goes anywhere, I'm kind of excited about it from the perspective of a product developer.
Being able to do content recommendation for fresh visitors without any tracking effort of your own would be pretty cool.
It will probably come with a dialog, so users will likely opt out often for ads or on page load, but not if they just clicked "show me movie recommendations" in your app.
Oh Christ I hope not. Any replacement for the current setup has to get rid of that blight. Should be a single opt in/out decision when you start using the browser.
The proposed designs never expose segments (err, cohorts, whatever) to the page. This machine works for managing targeted advertising in Chrome, and... that's it.
> The draft specification states that a user’s cohort ID will be available via Javascript, but it’s unclear whether there will be any restrictions on who can access it, or whether the ID will be shared in any other ways.
Oh yeah, sorry, I should have clarified: there are a LOT of followup documents that build on it. The reason I think it won't be an option comes from one of those. (I think FLEDGE, but don't have time to check.)
But like you said, we'll see what they actually ship.
Oh that‘s disapointing, if not surprising. Thanks for the clarification. It seems strange that they are willing to give such a boost to small competitors.
The major flaw here, as pointed out in the article, is that third-party websites can tie authenticated users to their FLoC ids. This is much worse for privacy than the status quo.
On the flip side, if opting out of FLoC is a single switch that turns off all third party tracking, then it makes opting out a breeze (compared with ad blockers now).
Why do we need user tracking at all. Advertisers can operate based on the sites that are relevant. For example let’s say a magazine website cpumagazine.com is popular. Advertisers for computer parts, computer services etc can pay to be ads on this site.
The point is the individual user doesn’t need to be tracked for advertising to work.
It’s a false choice thinking we need 3rd party cookies or a. special browser based UUID ad profile.
The truth is we don’t need either and advertising can still be effective.
What you're describing used to be called contextual advertising which worked perfectly fine based on the content of the page user views.
It just wasn't bringing all the excess profits that advertising corporations wanted. So, enter the fingerprinting and tracking. Like a stalker following you around the web, gathering data on what you are and what you might want to buy.
One could standardize a list of things people would want to fill out about themselves (i.e. please put in your age and sex or else we can't guarantee you won't be hassled with ads of things completely irrelevant to you), but your software inferring things about you and snitching to the world is outright malware.
> A browser with FLoC enabled would collect information about its user’s browsing habits, then use that information to assign its user to a “cohort” or group.
> Each user’s browser will share a cohort ID, indicating which group they belong to, with websites and advertisers.
Sorry, I'm out. My browser is my agent. I don't want it to analyse my browsing data and send the resultant classification to random machines over the internet. Why is this even a thing? Browser's job is to display websites, not spy on the user.
If advertisers want to track me, they can create their own software and entice me to install it. Oh wait, that's exactly what Google did with Chrome :(
Fully agree with EFF here, and what's most frustrating is that Google could actually be on the side of banning tracking, and win big over Facebook.
Google had a fully working, very lucrative business model in search term based ads. You search for "office rent Arizona", and Google shows you ads about offices in Arizona. No privacy violations.
There was no other problem with search term based ads except that Google wanted to pump up shareholder value faster than what that could give them.
So the floc is supposed to change one week over the next, but it most likely will remain correlated to previous values. It will provide something like 10-15 bits of entropy. You then have the geolocation from your IP provider, another good 10-15 bits. And then of course you have the browser fingerprinting, even my Brave leaks 18 bits.
It seems trivial to write a machine learning model that can correlate slowly drifting flocs with the other information. And this is especially true if one already knows the sites that the old floc has been visiting, for example via Analytics data, so you can predict the direction of the floc drift and uniquely identify the majority of web users.
Essentially, Google is not proposing limiting tracking, it proposes raising the entry bar into tracking so that a centrally placed company that can correlate all this data has a massive advantage. I wonder why.
And for the punchline, they call it... democratization!
I mean... what do you expect from Google, or any internet advertiser for that matter? If 90% of your revenue comes from advertising, getting rid of tracking is like pulling the chair out from under your bum. Having a committee of advertisers sitting on a board governing advertising & tracking in the W3C is going to go about as well as you expect. Conflict of interest: massive.
Their only concern is maximizing their revenue in any way possible, because otherwise they will cease being competitive and go out of business. Ergo this lovely new "Privacy Sandbox" that provides advertisers with a standardized, direct way to get to you. As long as Google or any other advertiser has sway over Internet standards, there will be a fox guarding the henhouse type situation. Moral of the story: don't use Chrome.
> The power to target is the power to discriminate.
I would extend on this point: the power to target information that the user is not choosing to share is the power to discriminate. Part of recognizing people's agency online is giving them the ability to choose how they present themselves and to choose what they share. It's not inherently wrong to say that someone might want to signal something about themselves that they find important or even just convenient to share. But that should always be their choice, it should not be a top down decision about what information is "safe" or "dangerous".
FLoC has some benefits (although they won't matter once every website decides to use FLoC as a fingerprinting vector), but even saying that FLoC has benefits, it is still based on the idea that users should not be in charge of their identities. It's got to be automated, it's got to happen in the background, it's got to use machine learning and be something that users can't inspect. I oppose the philosophy behind both current tracking systems and proposals like FLoC.
Last time this came up I also theorized about what a privacy-respecting version of FLoC could look like for people who do want to see ads or who do want personalized content online -- what a version of FLoC could be that I would be more supportive of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25907079
None of those ideas are fleshed out, but they try to get at the heart of what the fundamental difference is between allowing a user to easily signal that they want to see personalized content about shoes, and trying to intuit behind a user's back that they will buy shoes if you show them a particular ad.
Genuine, honest question. Are posts like this written by bot or bought propaganda? Nonspecific, knee-jerk overreaching generalizations, inspiring fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Who aims to gain, if it's the case? It's that incentive enough to warrant a smear campaign. I can't prove it. It just feels off. That's my hunch.
Even if it is astroturfing (my hunch is no), it taps into a genuine, honest zeitgeist that gets plenty of air on HN. Google is practically a cliche for bad-faith acting these days, and the apostasy of abandoning its nobler founding sentiments (the "don't be evil" hypocrisy) rankles many. Knee-jerk it may be, but it's closer to war-mongering within a sympathetic circle than it is to smear-campaigning.
I'm reasonably certain I'm not a bot, and I'm 100% certain no one is paying me for my unpopular opinions.
So: who aims to gain from my comment? Well, if Google were to be broken up, and some amount of privacy restored to all of us, I'd say society would gain.
No one needs to mount a smear campaign against Google. Their own actions are damning enough.
Perhaps if you existed outside your karma coma, you'd see it. Perhaps if I existed outside the anger and rage that makes me comment as "srswtf123", I'd take your point of view. But I doubt it. That's my hunch.
I'm wondering how hard it would be to reverse-engineer the FLoC algorithm that assigns ids based on browsing history.. could one just have a bunch of headless browsers randomly visit sites, and compute the FLoC ids periodically to see what types of sites end up producing which ids?
This seems important since being assigned a group ID that includes a bunch of people might not be so bad, but (as the article suggests) if its well known which web sites are included in the group, that's a more disturbing story
If you run an advertising company, you could probably just pay people a small amount of money to get their browsing history and their FLoC id, and enough people would take you up on that offer that you'd get that data (and maybe also demographics), without having to do any work to reverse-engineer.
The cookie dialogue was dumb, but a FLoC dialogue that only triggered on browsers that implemented it would be an actual deterrent that made a difference for privacy.
> Google has promised that the vast majority of FLoC cohorts will comprise thousands of users each, so a cohort ID alone shouldn’t distinguish you from a few thousand other people like you. However, that still gives fingerprinters a massive head start.
This is far fewer bits than one's IP address (> 32), unless you're using a VPN or have some weird ISP doing NAT for its users.
I am still not sure how and what google are doing to generate these cohorts or label a browser accordingly.
This article talks about simhash. My understanding is that simhash does NOT perform any such analysis but generates a fingerprint based on the content that is comparable to those of similar content - for example, a checksum of my HN homepage is different to yours, as it contains user-specific information. Simhash, however, gives us a comparable "fingerprint".
In short, this only works for identifying pages of similar content - by itself i cant see how it could be used for cohort analysis unless there is either a client-side ML model involved, or millions of simhashes are shipped with the browser.
I raised this question the other day, and a googler pointed me to the "code". That code contained no reference to an ML model, its construction, or datasets. The code also contained no pool of simhashes. To me, that means that there is no way to label the browser with cohorts. Furthermore, the code appears to generate these simhashes, and then sync them to google via (the account identifiable) chrome sync. It is there that analysis is performed. Maybe this is why it's called "Federated LEARNING", instead of "Federated INFERENCE"?
Is this truly what we can expect from this? That instead of google tracking our behaviour from ONLY their analytics and advertising partners, they will now be secretly collecting a hash of EVERY page we visit and sending it to google directly? How is this private? The whole point of a simhash is to establish similarity between pages - and google has a huge rainbow table of simhashes for their search.
I got downvoted for raising this concern before. I would appreciate if someone would tell me what I have wrong instead of piling on the downvotes. Noone seems to be talking about this.
Something I didn't know was a thing, that I really shouldn't be surprised about, is that website owners actually jump through some hoops to further sell out the users privacy. FB has the "Conversion API" where they enable website owners to basically "manually" track you by attaching an ID to users and sending "events" to FB via their API, in lieu of try to do so with a tracking pixel. Literally, it's an API to subvert people trying _NOT_ to be tracked with ad blockers and hostfiles etc. FB isn't even the only company that has an API like this, apparently, it's pretty established and developers/site owners are more than happy to narc you out if it means they can extend their advertising reach a little.
To block all these ads and tracking, I am already using DNS over TLS/HTTP, NextDNS with custom DNS block lists (including almost all CDN's, Google Services, fonts etc), ADblock Plus with custom lists, Ublock Origin, Firefox, extensive browser settings (blocking cookies or JavaScript unless whitelisted, blocking almost anything except images), isolating websites in Firefox containers, custom privacy settings for each website I have an account at, DuckDuckGo, iOS with only necessary apps and very strict settings, Arch Linux with custom settings, etc etc...
Yet there are still ads or tracking. And it doesn't look like it's getting any better or easier to opt out.
This signals to me that Google thinks that Chrome either has, or will soon have, a significant enough market share where it is realistic and useful to move their invasive tracking methodology from the web into the browser. Maybe they also realize that any sensible browser vendor which is not also an ad giant should already be blocking web-based tracking technologies. So why even try to make them compatible.
Honestly, as long as Firefox is still compatible with most sites, this won't hugely impact me. After that, I don't know.
Saying please do not seems like a weak strategy for containing this. Financial pressure to target advertising is huge. There will have to be ways of defeating or at least detecting this.
So after years of profiting from the dark practices cookies allowed they decided to replace them with something new, better, more powerful, and potentially harder to block (when they decide to make it mandatory or burry it so deep that the average person can’t find the off switch).
Are we supposed to be grateful now? Are we expected to celebrate this as a “huge win for the end user”?
This looks like a typical case of “fighting symptoms, not the cause”.
If FLoC is what I have understood it to be then, I support it.
Two things in FLoC's favour:
The algorithm is open-source and it's client-side.
It would be trivial for developers of ad-blockers to provide tools for anyone who cares about privacy to inject poisoned data into their stream. And for those who don't care, well it's a market and they are free to choose to partipate or not.
It is bad idea for one company(whatever it maybe) to be gatekeeper of the web. Thing is in today's world it is more a question of when rather than if. And it seems like there is nothing we can do about it except not be part of it. Even that won't work if everyone is part of it.
We are progressing more towards a dystopian reality where nothing is really in our control.
I'm intrigued by the idea that users will be able to solve this problem on the client side. Perhaps not on the underlying data directly, but running an adversarial browser agent clicking its way purposefully through the internet, in a tab you never look at.
Feels like URL rewriting in some form (maybe in the form of XHR pings) will come back into fashion to skirt any future cookie laws or browser mitigations
As long as it remains massively profitable to collect every ounce of data from us, tech corporations are going to keep doing this.
Even with some existing laws, the profits are enough that they are willing to flagrantly violate these laws and simply pay meager fines.
It's also unlikely that we will ever get significant legislation to protect us from this either, because all these tech profits allow big tech to buy our government, because policy is heavily swayed by corporations.
Let's go back to banner ads that are "targeted" based on what type of website you're looking at, rather than based on vacuuming up as much private info as possible about users.
Yeah, revenue for that is pennies to the dollar compared to tracking. I am not defending it but it is not a simple switch to stop being evil and everything is fine. Hundreds of thousands of services would shut down that relied on ads to function. Which, again, they are relying on a predatory business model, but still.
> Hundreds of thousands of services would shut down that relied on ads to function. Which, again, they are relying on a predatory business model, but still.
You appear to understand the situation, so I'm not sure why you bring this up as a problem. If a business is utterly incapable of operating without resorting to an unethical business model, then the solution is to shut down the business rather than abandon ethics.
Well, some people don't understand the scope of it. I for the most part think it would be a good move, but it certainly would throw off the web for a good while.
>You appear to understand the situation, so I'm not sure why you bring this up as a problem.
It is a problem, just not one that I think is more important than the benefits it comes with.
>If a business is utterly incapable of operating without resorting to an unethical business model, then the solution is to shut down the business rather than abandon ethics.
I agree, but weigh the impact of other industries that rely on that business as well. It would be a very unpopular move, and given the lobbying in the US, it's unlikely to pass here. And if it passes in the EU that might have other negative impacts in partitioning the web even more. It's a balancing act, and the solution is not as clear cut as "ban tracking in advertising". Knowing lawmakers, do you think this would differentiate between a paid service keeping a user logged in and, say, google ads? I bet the paid service would have an option in the subscription menu to upgrade, is that tracking in advertising? Probably not to 99% of sane people, but can lawmakers (or anyone for that matter) express what they want out of such a law in a concise enough manner to not be misconstrued in a major way?
On practice, everybody was announcing at Google when it used the site's content to decide what to show, and kept announcing at them once they changed into targeting the user instead. The change went mostly unnoticed.
On the other hand, it can be that people detected the change on their results metrics, and decided to increase their spending because of the change. I really don't know how to differentiate this scenario from a normal increase on internet advertising that should naturally happen at the earlier days of a fast growing web. I don't think even Google (that has all the numbers) can tell them apart either.
I agree, but mainly because I don’t know how much more valuable targeted ads based on past actions are than current site/intent.
Say, for example, an payday lender buys a banner on example.com/r/povertyfinance – could that not be construed as predatory in the same way as building a poverty FLoC based on browsing history?
Ironically some of the most profitable ads on the web (those that appear on search results pages) are almost completely contextual. So clearly targeting is not always necessary.
It seems to me that as long as advertisers have ingenuity they will find new privacy harming ways of tracking us -- it seems like Goggle is moving earth to use their ingenuity instead to make a tracking device that isn't 'too identifying,' and could reasonably form the basis of a 'truce' between users and advertisers -- maybe we should let them?
That is until they combine it with DRM tech similar to the current web DRM plugins which "certify" that you use a google approved FLoC implementation which sends proper data or you will not be able to visit the site because you get spammed with endless CAPTCHAs
Until Google sites start deliberately breaking if you don't send this data (or your browser is known to implement any other feature intended to circumvent it), thereby destroying the market share of any browser that dares to do so.
I mention this. If Firefox were to come out and say "we're going to start spoofing this data", Google servers would start rejecting Firefox users within the week. No major browser would dare do it, not even Safari and Edge, because plenty of people are forced to use Google services for work. At best, you would have a small number of people using minor browsers and passing around patches for major browsers to spoof the data discreetly.
Firefox blocks (blocked?) [0] google analytics in incognito mode in firefox and google still pays them buckets of money. It's not the same as doing it in normal mode, but it is in that direction.
I'm pretty sure Google would never dare block Safari and start a direct war against Apple - they're even powerless to resist current privacy changes on Safari. Apple has monopoly on browsers on the most popular modern mobile platform and I don't think Google can fight that.
There is a slight difference between a monopoly and a dominant market position. The latter is only achieved by consistently being better than competitors and it is easy to lose once this is no longer the case. Google with all its current power is not in the position to dictate what all the browsers should do - and prohibiting Firefox from its servers is a) an evil move that would make people reconsider their dependency on Google services (and there are a lot of companies that would be happy to get these customers) b) Is easy to circumvent by using Chrome for Google services and Firefox/whatever for anything else.
Here's the part of how does this work that's my TL;DR.
> A browser with FLoC enabled would collect information about its user’s browsing habits, then use that information to assign its user to a “cohort” or group. Users with similar browsing habits—for some definition of “similar”—would be grouped into the same cohort. Each user’s browser will share a cohort ID, indicating which group they belong to, with websites and advertisers. According to the proposal, at least a few thousand users should belong to each cohort (though that’s not a guarantee).
> If that sounds dense, think of it this way: your FLoC ID will be like a succinct summary of your recent activity on the Web.
> Google’s proof of concept used the domains of the sites that each user visited as the basis for grouping people together. It then used an algorithm called SimHash to create the groups. SimHash[0] can be computed locally on each user’s machine, so there’s no need for a central server to collect behavioral data. However, a central administrator could have a role in enforcing privacy guarantees. In order to prevent any cohort from being too small (i.e. too identifying), Google proposes that a central actor could count the number of users assigned each cohort. If any are too small, they can be combined with other, similar cohorts until enough users are represented in each one.
> In computer science, SimHash is a technique for quickly estimating how similar two sets are. The algorithm is used by the Google Crawler to find near duplicate pages. It was created by Moses Charikar.
So...in addition, Google can use all the users' CPUs instead of their own.
I think the average person that cares about tracking worries about the privacy implications if someone can look at their individual actions/conversations, but not so much about being marketed to as part of a group.
The actions of Cambridge Analytica-type groups are an important issue, but I don’t think FLoC is trying to solve that.
99.9% of the interactions with the internet should be read-only and could be delivered via something like IPFS. Make browsers read-only by default and closely monitor when information is sent out.
> That framing is based on a false premise that we have to choose between “old tracking” and “new tracking.” It’s not either-or. Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads.
This seems backwards to me: the alternative to "targeted ads" are "untargeted ads", aka Spam. Who would rather have spam than targeted ads. Sure, spam might be easier to ignore, but it's also not effective from the company's perspective: showing the ad only to people who might be willing to spend money seems like a good thing to me. It's certainly economical. Which is why I feel like targeted ads are not something we can get rid of.
I would, because the targeting creeps me out entirely. Instagram were so good at it that I deleted the app. In the old days, you stuck luxury advertising in rich neighborhoods and used demographics for broadcast and other media. That'll do.
Why should that do when you can do better? Why stop there? That would be like saying "post everything programming related on r/programming, that'll do. Let's ignore that there are more focused venues for my content".
Don't get me wrong, I'm not keen on getting tracked, either. But I can totally see that from a company's perspective, if you can make sure that only people who are interested in your product actually see the ad, that's better. You don't annoy people who aren't interested (not everyone in a rich neighborhood cares about a BMW ad, some already have a Tesla) and you increase effectiveness.
If a stranger comes up to you and addresses you by name, you're probably going to be creeped out. It's human nature. Same thing here - you didn't start this relationship voluntarily or invest in it; why would you react positively to an unknown entity approaching you with prior knowledge about you?
I place targeted advertising in the "creepy spam" category. It's still spam.
If I was to receive an unwanted phone call from a travel agency while I am browsing plane tickets on the net, that would be creepy and annoying to me: I prefer to make thoughtful decisions by myself, thank you.
I realize not everyone thinks the same way. But in my opinion, advertisement has a severe net negative impact on our society, and would like to get rid of it altogether.
I already pay for targeted advertisement that comes in the news articles I read, no need to force-feed me.
I've seen that fun video (in French [1]) where a person asks various advertisers their opinion on the role of advertising in the society, then asks them about an "electric knife" ad that was then running. The cognitive dissonance that follows is hilarious.
> I've seen that fun video (in French [1]) where a person asks various advertisers their opinion on the role of advertising in the society, then asks them about an "electric knife" ad that was then running. The cognitive dissonance that follows is hilarious. (1990, no subs)
Beside Séguéla who dares asserting that advertising makes people more intelligent and is a public service for democracy, the angry one is now congressman (for the right-wing party of course, 20 years of mandate and counting) :-)
This "it's either no privacy or you get spam" is another false premise. Google has built their empire on ads based on search keywords and topics of websites you visit. Personalized cross-site tracking is a relatively new and small addition.
I think they're going to need to state their case in a way that allows Google to still make money and be competitive in the market place. It's not a simple matter of doing it and not doing it. It's a matter of doing it, and making more money or not doing it and making less. Google seems willing to move in the direction of privacy, but it's not going to do so in a way that sabotages the bottom line. It's unrealistic to expect any entity to voluntarily sacrifice its own values for the values of another.
If their intent is to convince Google, then I agree. If the intent is to convince the public and policy makers, I don't think they need to re-frame it. I am okay letting a company (even a complete industry) fail if society has decided that the industry or business practices are parasitic.
Privacy is a freedom which has many parasites (state and private entity driven) attacking it and I welcome changes to perception, regulation, and law which places safeguards around it.
Not how opinions and politics stand now, but that is part of the reason why articles like this are important. There is quite a distance to travel between writing an article criticizing tracking + the technology that enables it and arriving at legislation.
I might be traitor to the cause, but I feel like giving the industry an "out" might be easier to achieve and significantly faster to implement - e.g. instead of complete ban on targeted advertising, standardize on a clientside API that can send a list of topics/themes that are interesting to the person. In a way that's not owned by a single corporation.
This way I feel there will be less legislative and lobbying pushback while still achieving major privacy wins.
This is the transition that needs to happen. People just need to get used to the idea of paying for software. Software providers can then focus on making their products better rather than finding streams to tangentially monetise their offerings by invading user’s privacy.
Nobody will pay for every small blog, recipe/repair tutorial/gardening tips website/YouTube channel. How much value do they bring to you ? How much would you pay for them? How would you know they're worth it without using them first, and why would they allow you to use them for free, when most users would be one-shot?
I remember back when people put stuff on the internet for free because it was fun and they enjoyed sharing. I suppose the need for compensation has truly destroyed every good thing.
Even with significantly less stuff there was more stuff than you could ever consume. In addition, the cost and barriers to hosting static content have fallen quite a bit since then, and the percentage of the human population that has access to the internet (and can thus participate in creation) has risen dramatically. An ad-free internet would not be starved for content.
With OnlyFans, Patreon and Twitters super follow we’re slowly finding ways to make the consumer/creator interaction more direct. It’s only a matter of time before something close to microtransactions pops out of these.
It’s interesting that influencer promotion is already out-of-band from general internet advertising. They are paid directly to promote products to people who have proactively followed/engaged with the influencer already.
> I think they're going to need to state their case in a way that allows Google to still make money and be competitive in the market place.
I'm sorry but Google has no any competition. If you don't want to limit oneself to, say, Facebook users, you pretty much have to buy Google's ad services.
One place this shows up is a frequently-expressed sentiment that the internet is a less magical, less weird, and more corporate place than it was 10-20 years ago. Part of this may be because SEO has diluted the voices of individual creators. But part of it is also because way more average, everyday, tech-unsavvy people are on the internet now.
Another example is the periodic highlighting of somewhat garish HTML-based websites. I like these too! My own personal website falls in this category! But as far as I know, the generic internet user likes the generic slick-graphics-and-whitespace style, and so go the websites that want to attract them.
More relevant to the topic at hand, many comments in this thread argue that targeted ads are unnecessary for a functional internet, since the internet of 20 years ago seemed to work just fine without targeted ads. But, again, it's less clear to me that general internet users -- that is, mostly people who never experienced the internet of 20 years ago -- have the same preference.
It's funny, because I'm to a large extent on HN's side on this one. But my enthusiasm is tempered by my sneaking suspicion that the other side is a lot bigger, and my side is actually powered by more elitism and nostalgia than I thought.