this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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This entire thing is just idealism vs pragmatism for the trillionth time. The idealists are mad because they think all ads are bad and we shouldn't try to work with advertisers in any capacity. They do not believe reducing the harmfulness of ads is a valid approach, because that would be an acknowledgement of ads. Common talking points there are about how this is technically working with advertisers and how the internet shouldn't have ads in the first place.
The pragmatics also think ads are bad, but believe that an Internet without ads is very unlikely to happen, so they believe attempting to reduce the harmfulness of ads is a valid approach. Common talking points there are about how this isn't giving advertisers anything they don't already have and about how this doesn't matter if you're using an adblocker.
Like all other debates of this type, this probably isn't ever going to be resolved to anyone's satisfaction and we've really just been seeing the same talking points over and over again since the beginning. So I hope y'all have fun duking it out, I don't think I'm gonna bother looking at these pointless PPA threads anymore.
As a privacy enthusiast and pragmatist, I see Firefox as providing no additional benefit to users or advertisers. Considering the laughably small market share of Firefox, I'm not sure how it is expected to woo advertisers over either.
Which of these options look more robust: Google Topics, Mozilla PPA, or advertisers doing AB testing on their own by simply using different links for different audiences?
If you trust the advertiser, they can do it on their own. If you don't trust the advertiser, then the additional third party does nothing.
This is a nonsense comparison as these features serve completely different purposes, while only having in common that advertisers currently use user tracking to achieve the same.
Topics data-mines your browsing history for information about your interests and reveals this information to advertisers in order to improve ad selection. It's meant to replace ad networks tracking each individual user's visits to connected websites and building that profile themselves. Since this is, in a way, much more powerful than tracking cookies, Chrome has a scary dialog asking for it to be enabled, and I don't think we'll be seeing it in Firefox. "Using different links" cannot replace user profiling at all.
PPA doesn't provide any new capabilities to advertisers. It's a privacy-preserving way of measuring ad campaign success that is currently done by ad networks tracking individual users from ad impressions to conversions. "Using different links" is also defective, as advertisers need to connect ad impressions to conversions even if they are not immediately connected through a click on the ad.
If these features become generally available, this reduces the leverage advertisers have on legislators to prevent tracking from being outlawed. Mozilla will be hoping Chrome picks up PPA.
You want to legislate telling companies which servers they are allowed to gather data from, making it into a de jure oligopoly rather than a de facto one?!
Where did I say that?
Wrong.
Not an idealist, I'm not even mad, just calling out the hypocrisy because Mozilla did this quietly, not telling us at all.
"I'm doing this for your benefit, but I'm not telling you about it", where have we heard that before?
Save me from people "doing things for my benefit".
Just so funny how you blatantly mis-charaterize this, even using pejoratives to label people who dislike Mozilla's arguably adversarial approach.
And frankly, they had a chance to develop a fair balance over 20 years ago, and chose to say "fuck all the users" instead. And the website owners keep repeating this. Ok, fine, I will never stop blocking ads - they chose this battleground, not me.
To take your approach to making arguments: how's the taste of boot today?
Please argue how removing all (non-voluntary) advertising from society right now would do anything other than vastly improve society, and keep calling people like me idealists.
All ad supported services would need to move to a paid only model, locking out those who couldn't afford to pay.
Or profit margins could just go down. I don't know why you treat those two concepts as mutually exclusive; it's been shown that even with expensive products companies will still mine massive amounts of user data and advertise to you endlessly. These parasites aren't going to turn down extra profit at any avenue, no matter how legally, morally, or ethically questionable.
Many of the non-pragmatists also see this as somehow leaking information about you to advertisers though, rather than only working together with advertisers in the first place. But nobody has been able to mention what an advertiser would be able to know about me.
(Yes, yes, there are also people for whom it is only about working together with advertisers - I'm not talking about you, so no need to let us know.)
Exactly, well said.
It's not that the ad issue isn't going to be solved, it's that ads are here now and we have to deal with them.
They are going to be replaced by direct micro-payments eventually but the puzzle pieces have been slow to get into place (also Google and the whole ad industry haven't been cooperating for obvious reasons).
One of the major hurdles was the [in]ability to make online payments of a fraction of a cent but the digital Euro aims to make that possible (among other things).
With that and support for direct micropayments implemented in the browser we'll be able to give a web page owner that fraction of a cent they get from ads now but only IF we want to, and when we do that we cut out all the ad industry as middlemen.