10 ms·

With ePrivacy looming, German publishers scramble to get users logged in

73 points by okket 9y ago

freeone3000 9y ago
Oh no, those poor advertisers! Won't someone think of the advertisers?
- graeme 9y ago
  That's not what the article is about. Advertisers will always find a way to advertise. The article is about what publishers to do, and speculates that smaller publisher may not be able to create a business model, but larger publishers will be able to adapt ad systems.
  - puzzle 9y ago
    The paradox is that part of this was brought by large German publishers, or at least one of them, including the election of Juncker.
    - oh_sigh 9y ago
      Why a paradox? It seems like classic rent seeking.
      - puzzle 9y ago
        Yeah, but all these years the targets of the publishers' ires were and have been US tech companies. That includes an op-ed claiming that the publishers are afraid of tech. The same publishers that bragged about swaying elections and decision making in Brussels.
  - pouta 9y ago
    IMO using ads as a revenue model for news publishing is doomed to fail. The incentives between readers/publishers aren't aligned and it is basically a clickbait race to the bottom. Subscription will be the future.
zerostar07 9y ago
Browsers should have taken that space long ago. Mozilla tried with Persona, but inexplicably it was abandoned. We could have granular control of our real and pseudo identities.
- glenstein 9y ago
  Persona is exactly where my mind went with this as well. While Yahoo was flailing, trying to find some new vision, one of the few good things they did was partner with a company that really has a vision in Mozilla. Yahoo could have moved to align the significant portion of the web under their control into compatibility with Mozilla's various efforts, such as Persona. To me that's going to go down in internet history as one of the ultimate what-ifs. I feel like it was a missed opportunity for both companies.
  - nathanaldensr 9y ago
    We don't need companies controlling the internet, and we certainly don't want them controlling our identity systems. The current status quo is already bad enough. Where is the implementation that allows me to own my identity? Why are my user records locked away in some (many) corporation's database?
    - kbenson 9y ago
      You're right that we don't need companies Co trolling g the internet, but it sure would have been nice to have a good login system backed by a company with the intentions and motivations of Mozilla (a non profit). Businesses aren't going to trade their content out of the goodness of their heart, they want something in exchange. I would much rather trade ad views through Mozilla using a list of my interests that I control than to allow excessive tracking and profile building by some untrusted third party. What we apparently have now is login collectives starting up, but who's to say how good or bad the practices are for each, or whether they have the ability to adequately secure their system.
    - zerostar07 9y ago
      it could be based on some other identity provider perhaps an anonymous one, even trustless. persona was flexible with regards to authenticators. the point is, if the browser had control of the SSO, then the user could control it, not facebook or google or twitter.
TekMol 9y ago
What is this about? What is this ePrivacy thing? How is it related to logins?
- zerostar07 9y ago
  i think they re talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
  - thedaniel 9y ago
    They aren't, exactly. In one of the articles linked from this one, it says > It’s easy to confuse the ePrivacy regulation with the General Data Protection Regulation, a broader law addressing consumer data privacy that has dominated the market’s attention lately. The core difference is that cookie use is central to the ePrivacy regulation, which is why it’s known as the “cookie law.” Businesses in Europe must get explicit consent to use cookies and provide clear opt-outs to users under the proposed new law. Meanwhile, the GDPR regulates the general handling of personal data.
    - x0x0 9y ago
      and personal data includes cookies :) So yeah, confusing all around.
  - marknadal 9y ago
    If that is true, why not throw things into some P2P cryptographically secure user account system like this[1] (disclaimer: ours). From a technology perspective, it is non-trivial for corps/companies to do this (since they don't value that). But the technology to do it already exists, so if laws are forcing people this direction, what is the best way to market the availability of systems like this? Any thoughts/clues? Thanks! [1] https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-with-e2e-encryption-f90505b2ff8 https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi...
    - 9y ago
jbernardo95 9y ago
Portugal is heading to the same route unfortunately (https://digiday.com/media/portugals-media-companies-alliance/ https://digiday.com/media/portugals-media-companies-alliance...). There is already a website warning for the privacy issues of the platform (https://nonio.pt/ https://nonio.pt/).
erikrothoff 9y ago
I really don't understand what the EU's goal is here. Someone said that it's to model the "walled garden of regulation" approach that China has: Make regulations so tough and block out outside actors, creating an internal market that can thrive. Also wanting to break out the dominance of American tech companies within EU, and foster innovation. However, I have yet to see a single argument where these regulations (both GDPR and ePrivacy) don't hurt EU businesses, and favors companies outside that don't have to abide by these stricter regulations. So why has EU adopted this extremely hard line approach? What is the best case scenario?
- beojan 9y ago
  The EU tried the soft touch approach and we just got generic cookie warnings on everything, so now we have the stricter regulation. The ultimate purpose is to put a stop to pervasive tracking and user-targeted advertising. Advertisers will just have to go back to targeting based on the content the ad is displayed with instead.
  - x0x0 9y ago
    The point is that will not pay enough, so it's highly likely most free content disappears.
    - iagooar 9y ago
      Than it would mean that it shouldn't have been free in the first place. I really can't wait the time you have to pay for most content. It will reduce informational clutter and improve quality of the content.
      - blfr 9y ago
        Vast majority of people aren't willing to subscribe so Internet outlets will become even more dependent on partisan funding. Many esteemed newspapers are already propaganda arms for their rich benefactors (see WaPo and Bezos) without whom they couldn't keep the lights on. This will only hasten this process for European media. Maybe accelerationism is the right approach here but it is very unlikely to improve quality.
driverdan 9y ago
I don't understand the outcry. Cookies are not required to show users ads or track clickthrough rates. Why will there be a loss of ad revenue? We had ads before privacy invasive techniques like retargeting.
- esrauch 9y ago
  > Why will there be a loss of ad revenue? Presumably the privacy invasive techniques are done specifically because they increase ad revenue, not because the newspapers want to be nefarious.
  - ahultgren 9y ago
    But it can easily be argued that it's been a zero-sum game, where one actor has been forced to use more targeted ads because others have been more efficient (cheaper) by doing so. It's not like ads spending has increased; unless you're arguing that consumption has increased due to targeted/invasive ads?
    - esrauch 9y ago
      It is difficult for me to see how it would be zero sum. Instead it seems very likely to me that the total amount spent by users online is higher with invasive ads than non-invasive ones: if no ad you see is relevant to you then you are less likely to buy anything online at all.
      - musage 9y ago
        Zero sum in the sense that in so far marketing engages in the arms race of pushing the buttons of consumers rather than focusing on the products and honest descriptions of them, that is at the cost of ads that don't do that. With any individual ad you make you have the choice to go one way or the other, like two poles on a spectrum. If you are 80% of the way towards one pole, you are 20% of the way towards the other, you know the distance from both by knowing the distance from one. > if no ad you see is relevant to you then you are less likely to buy anything online at all. Only if you don't actually need that type of product after all, so I'd consider that another plus.
guy98238710 9y ago
> lose upward of €300 million ($372 million) in yearly ad sales I really like these euphemism, talking about lost ad sales when it's really about losing personal data sales.
guy98238710 9y ago
If Wikipedia is right that "no consent is needed for non-privacy intrusive cookies improving internet experience", then that's a good sign EU is finally adopting ethics-based regulation instead of the old capability-based regulation that threatened to cripple the Internet. It also means they are now specifically targeting advertising business instead of legislating universally technophobic nonsense.
- Xylakant 9y ago
  Even under the so-called cookie law, cookies that were used for example for logins did not require consent. It’s always been about tracking.
- pjc50 9y ago
  That was always the case (consent only required for third party cookies), but nobody understood it. Or was willing to give up Google Analytics. The EU has a bit of an issue with communicating to the public.
  - guy98238710 9y ago
    Where is it written that it applies only to third party cookies? AFAIK the old cookie law only allowed cookies without permission, first party or third party, where they were required for website to function, e.g. shopping cart cookies. I interpret this as banning even those cookies that improved user experience, but that weren't strictly required for the website to function.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      See http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm which lists various examples. I've got to admit that I'm struggling to come up with an example that "improves user experience" that would genuinely not be allowed.
      - guy98238710 9y ago
majormajor 9y ago
I'm pretty ad-friendly compared to most on HN (people have shown countless times that they don't want to pay if they don't have to, and microtransaction/favor/tipping systems are a giant mess and likely always will be), but the "people have to track to keep stuff running!" view strikes me as naive. a) Right now we have "content" created and tailored more to pull in ad revenue than to do anything user-beneficial. That's not ideal, most pure clickbait going away would not be a net negative. Consider news: was the internet of 15 years ago meaningfully devoid of news content compared to today, or was it better off cause it wasn't flooded with as much polarized crap? b) There's an assumption here that ad spending will decrease. One alternative possibility is that ad companies have been stuck in arms races for years now, without actually increasing yield. Look at the reasons why companies are "pivoting to video" - even with all this tracking and "AI" garbage, online display ad effectiveness still sucks. As long as every network and publisher has to follow the same rules, I don't believe any advertiser is truly worse off. And from a principle-based view, I think any sort of smart-enough tracking to produce truly well-targeted ads (vs today's "here's that thing you already bought, let me show you it on every website now" crap) is too far on the creepy side to be something we want anyway. c) The other side of the "sites won't make money anymore" side is that with a more even playing field there's a chance for some of the money to shift away from the people playing tech games and to the people producing the content. There's not a ton of effective competition in ad networks right now, look where all the revenue goes. A Facebook and Google duopoly also only makes the implications of the tracking worse. d) Finally, from the advertiser's perspective: where else are they going to send that budget? TV? Newspapers? Please. And even the worst case here - a net decrease in ad spending - is hard to paint as such a huge loss since there's a lot of more productive things out there than showing ads. There are a few other trends that will need to be ultimately addressed separately, though. One is the shift to video even for stuff that's rather stupid to force into the video format, just because the audience is more captive to ads, and this is a big problem IMO. Not really relevant to what we're discussing here, though. A more interesting debate may be around fraud prevention, I could see a plausible claim that if you have less history on the user you have fewer heuristics you can apply for fraud-fighting. I'm mostly meh on that, though, and willing to let fraud be the cost of business with internet display ads and hope it just washes out in the long run. (I'd prefer if it caused people to shift to paid models, but I'm not optimistic.)
CandidlyFake 9y ago
Logins for news sites was tried in the 2000s and it failed miserably. The only ones who could survive such a strategy are news institutions with a large subscriber base like WSJ or the NYTimes. But even they are struggling. Would a login collective be any better? I highly doubt it.
alkonaut 9y ago
Is the article switching half way from talking about login cookies, to ad sales (which presumably is about tracking cookies of other kinds)? I wish the law would just attack the problem at the root: remove all incentive to track users and gather their personal data. E.g. don’t allow advertisers to show ads to people based on anything they haven’t given that site. If I haven’t told the newspaper I’m visiting that I like fishing, they can’t show me fishing ads because I liked it on Facebook. And if they can’t risk showing targeted ads, then the value for anyone to trade in this information vanishes. This would also solve the problem of more and more advertising being harder to block because it’s “native”.

73 points by okket 9y ago

freeone3000 9y ago

Oh no, those poor advertisers! Won't someone think of the advertisers?

graeme 9y ago
That's not what the article is about. Advertisers will always find a way to advertise. The article is about what publishers to do, and speculates that smaller publisher may not be able to create a business model, but larger publishers will be able to adapt ad systems.
- puzzle 9y ago
  The paradox is that part of this was brought by large German publishers, or at least one of them, including the election of Juncker.
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    Why a paradox? It seems like classic rent seeking.
    - puzzle 9y ago
      Yeah, but all these years the targets of the publishers' ires were and have been US tech companies. That includes an op-ed claiming that the publishers are afraid of tech. The same publishers that bragged about swaying elections and decision making in Brussels.
- pouta 9y ago
  IMO using ads as a revenue model for news publishing is doomed to fail. The incentives between readers/publishers aren't aligned and it is basically a clickbait race to the bottom. Subscription will be the future.

zerostar07 9y ago

Browsers should have taken that space long ago. Mozilla tried with Persona, but inexplicably it was abandoned. We could have granular control of our real and pseudo identities.

glenstein 9y ago
Persona is exactly where my mind went with this as well. While Yahoo was flailing, trying to find some new vision, one of the few good things they did was partner with a company that really has a vision in Mozilla. Yahoo could have moved to align the significant portion of the web under their control into compatibility with Mozilla's various efforts, such as Persona. To me that's going to go down in internet history as one of the ultimate what-ifs. I feel like it was a missed opportunity for both companies.
- nathanaldensr 9y ago
  We don't need companies controlling the internet, and we certainly don't want them controlling our identity systems. The current status quo is already bad enough. Where is the implementation that allows me to own my identity? Why are my user records locked away in some (many) corporation's database?
  - kbenson 9y ago
    You're right that we don't need companies Co trolling g the internet, but it sure would have been nice to have a good login system backed by a company with the intentions and motivations of Mozilla (a non profit). Businesses aren't going to trade their content out of the goodness of their heart, they want something in exchange. I would much rather trade ad views through Mozilla using a list of my interests that I control than to allow excessive tracking and profile building by some untrusted third party. What we apparently have now is login collectives starting up, but who's to say how good or bad the practices are for each, or whether they have the ability to adequately secure their system.
  - zerostar07 9y ago
    it could be based on some other identity provider perhaps an anonymous one, even trustless. persona was flexible with regards to authenticators. the point is, if the browser had control of the SSO, then the user could control it, not facebook or google or twitter.

TekMol 9y ago

What is this about? What is this ePrivacy thing? How is it related to logins?

zerostar07 9y ago
i think they re talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
- thedaniel 9y ago
  They aren't, exactly. In one of the articles linked from this one, it says > It’s easy to confuse the ePrivacy regulation with the General Data Protection Regulation, a broader law addressing consumer data privacy that has dominated the market’s attention lately. The core difference is that cookie use is central to the ePrivacy regulation, which is why it’s known as the “cookie law.” Businesses in Europe must get explicit consent to use cookies and provide clear opt-outs to users under the proposed new law. Meanwhile, the GDPR regulates the general handling of personal data.
  - x0x0 9y ago
    and personal data includes cookies :) So yeah, confusing all around.
- marknadal 9y ago
  If that is true, why not throw things into some P2P cryptographically secure user account system like this[1] (disclaimer: ours). From a technology perspective, it is non-trivial for corps/companies to do this (since they don't value that). But the technology to do it already exists, so if laws are forcing people this direction, what is the best way to market the availability of systems like this? Any thoughts/clues? Thanks! [1] https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-with-e2e-encryption-f90505b2ff8 https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi...
  - 9y ago

jbernardo95 9y ago

Portugal is heading to the same route unfortunately (https://digiday.com/media/portugals-media-companies-alliance/ https://digiday.com/media/portugals-media-companies-alliance...). There is already a website warning for the privacy issues of the platform (https://nonio.pt/ https://nonio.pt/).

erikrothoff 9y ago

I really don't understand what the EU's goal is here. Someone said that it's to model the "walled garden of regulation" approach that China has: Make regulations so tough and block out outside actors, creating an internal market that can thrive. Also wanting to break out the dominance of American tech companies within EU, and foster innovation. However, I have yet to see a single argument where these regulations (both GDPR and ePrivacy) don't hurt EU businesses, and favors companies outside that don't have to abide by these stricter regulations. So why has EU adopted this extremely hard line approach? What is the best case scenario?

beojan 9y ago
The EU tried the soft touch approach and we just got generic cookie warnings on everything, so now we have the stricter regulation. The ultimate purpose is to put a stop to pervasive tracking and user-targeted advertising. Advertisers will just have to go back to targeting based on the content the ad is displayed with instead.
- x0x0 9y ago
  The point is that will not pay enough, so it's highly likely most free content disappears.
  - iagooar 9y ago
    Than it would mean that it shouldn't have been free in the first place. I really can't wait the time you have to pay for most content. It will reduce informational clutter and improve quality of the content.
    - blfr 9y ago
      Vast majority of people aren't willing to subscribe so Internet outlets will become even more dependent on partisan funding. Many esteemed newspapers are already propaganda arms for their rich benefactors (see WaPo and Bezos) without whom they couldn't keep the lights on. This will only hasten this process for European media. Maybe accelerationism is the right approach here but it is very unlikely to improve quality.

driverdan 9y ago

I don't understand the outcry. Cookies are not required to show users ads or track clickthrough rates. Why will there be a loss of ad revenue? We had ads before privacy invasive techniques like retargeting.

esrauch 9y ago
> Why will there be a loss of ad revenue? Presumably the privacy invasive techniques are done specifically because they increase ad revenue, not because the newspapers want to be nefarious.
- ahultgren 9y ago
  But it can easily be argued that it's been a zero-sum game, where one actor has been forced to use more targeted ads because others have been more efficient (cheaper) by doing so. It's not like ads spending has increased; unless you're arguing that consumption has increased due to targeted/invasive ads?
  - esrauch 9y ago
    It is difficult for me to see how it would be zero sum. Instead it seems very likely to me that the total amount spent by users online is higher with invasive ads than non-invasive ones: if no ad you see is relevant to you then you are less likely to buy anything online at all.
    - musage 9y ago
      Zero sum in the sense that in so far marketing engages in the arms race of pushing the buttons of consumers rather than focusing on the products and honest descriptions of them, that is at the cost of ads that don't do that. With any individual ad you make you have the choice to go one way or the other, like two poles on a spectrum. If you are 80% of the way towards one pole, you are 20% of the way towards the other, you know the distance from both by knowing the distance from one. > if no ad you see is relevant to you then you are less likely to buy anything online at all. Only if you don't actually need that type of product after all, so I'd consider that another plus.

guy98238710 9y ago

> lose upward of €300 million ($372 million) in yearly ad sales I really like these euphemism, talking about lost ad sales when it's really about losing personal data sales.

guy98238710 9y ago

If Wikipedia is right that "no consent is needed for non-privacy intrusive cookies improving internet experience", then that's a good sign EU is finally adopting ethics-based regulation instead of the old capability-based regulation that threatened to cripple the Internet. It also means they are now specifically targeting advertising business instead of legislating universally technophobic nonsense.

Xylakant 9y ago
Even under the so-called cookie law, cookies that were used for example for logins did not require consent. It’s always been about tracking.
pjc50 9y ago
That was always the case (consent only required for third party cookies), but nobody understood it. Or was willing to give up Google Analytics. The EU has a bit of an issue with communicating to the public.
- guy98238710 9y ago
  Where is it written that it applies only to third party cookies? AFAIK the old cookie law only allowed cookies without permission, first party or third party, where they were required for website to function, e.g. shopping cart cookies. I interpret this as banning even those cookies that improved user experience, but that weren't strictly required for the website to function.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    See http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm which lists various examples. I've got to admit that I'm struggling to come up with an example that "improves user experience" that would genuinely not be allowed.
    - guy98238710 9y ago

majormajor 9y ago

I'm pretty ad-friendly compared to most on HN (people have shown countless times that they don't want to pay if they don't have to, and microtransaction/favor/tipping systems are a giant mess and likely always will be), but the "people have to track to keep stuff running!" view strikes me as naive. a) Right now we have "content" created and tailored more to pull in ad revenue than to do anything user-beneficial. That's not ideal, most pure clickbait going away would not be a net negative. Consider news: was the internet of 15 years ago meaningfully devoid of news content compared to today, or was it better off cause it wasn't flooded with as much polarized crap? b) There's an assumption here that ad spending will decrease. One alternative possibility is that ad companies have been stuck in arms races for years now, without actually increasing yield. Look at the reasons why companies are "pivoting to video" - even with all this tracking and "AI" garbage, online display ad effectiveness still sucks. As long as every network and publisher has to follow the same rules, I don't believe any advertiser is truly worse off. And from a principle-based view, I think any sort of smart-enough tracking to produce truly well-targeted ads (vs today's "here's that thing you already bought, let me show you it on every website now" crap) is too far on the creepy side to be something we want anyway. c) The other side of the "sites won't make money anymore" side is that with a more even playing field there's a chance for some of the money to shift away from the people playing tech games and to the people producing the content. There's not a ton of effective competition in ad networks right now, look where all the revenue goes. A Facebook and Google duopoly also only makes the implications of the tracking worse. d) Finally, from the advertiser's perspective: where else are they going to send that budget? TV? Newspapers? Please. And even the worst case here - a net decrease in ad spending - is hard to paint as such a huge loss since there's a lot of more productive things out there than showing ads. There are a few other trends that will need to be ultimately addressed separately, though. One is the shift to video even for stuff that's rather stupid to force into the video format, just because the audience is more captive to ads, and this is a big problem IMO. Not really relevant to what we're discussing here, though. A more interesting debate may be around fraud prevention, I could see a plausible claim that if you have less history on the user you have fewer heuristics you can apply for fraud-fighting. I'm mostly meh on that, though, and willing to let fraud be the cost of business with internet display ads and hope it just washes out in the long run. (I'd prefer if it caused people to shift to paid models, but I'm not optimistic.)

CandidlyFake 9y ago

Logins for news sites was tried in the 2000s and it failed miserably. The only ones who could survive such a strategy are news institutions with a large subscriber base like WSJ or the NYTimes. But even they are struggling. Would a login collective be any better? I highly doubt it.

alkonaut 9y ago

Is the article switching half way from talking about login cookies, to ad sales (which presumably is about tracking cookies of other kinds)? I wish the law would just attack the problem at the root: remove all incentive to track users and gather their personal data. E.g. don’t allow advertisers to show ads to people based on anything they haven’t given that site. If I haven’t told the newspaper I’m visiting that I like fishing, they can’t show me fishing ads because I liked it on Facebook. And if they can’t risk showing targeted ads, then the value for anyone to trade in this information vanishes. This would also solve the problem of more and more advertising being harder to block because it’s “native”.