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I have DoNotTrack set and my browser blocked several tracking scripts from their site. As for the problem, it really comes down to making money: Data is sold t

by bArray 7y ago

I have DoNotTrack set and my browser blocked several tracking scripts from their site. As for the problem, it really comes down to making money: Data is sold to inform targeted adverts. An additional requirement is that the ad company needs to know how much to pay the ad host. Also remember that ad blockers came about mostly as a result of reducing web bloat and reducing the fight for the users attention. Nobody in their right mind would agree to this without some sensible solution in place. Servers cost money to run and content is usually not free to create.

icebraining 7y ago
Newspapers and radio and TV and billboards and flyers managed to have ads without reporting back detailed info about the people viewing them. The problem is that once some are tracking, the non-tracking become less profitable, leading everyone to track. But if nobody can track...
- ilovetux 7y ago
  I mean, true enough, but DDG has since proven that non-tracking ads can be profitable even in an industry dominated by nosey advertisers. The trick I think is to look at whether or not you're profitable not if you are the most profitable company in your sector. To be honest I would be happier running a company which made $1,000,000 per year profit than a company which had to race to make more and more profits each year. That's the rub, though, if you have investors you need to keep growing and at some point growth requires you to abandon even the most basic pretense of ethical behavior.
EnderViaAnsible 7y ago
The sensible solution, I think, is requiring digital advertisers to support non-personalized ads as a fallback for tracking ads; that is, a digital advertiser would not be allowed to only offer personalized ads. Then allow content creators right of refusal for those consumers who don't wish to allow any advertising at all, and build software supporting this into major browsers. Supplement with things like Brace's Basic Attention Tokens and premium subscriptions. Will people just make ad free browsers elsewhere that don't respect this? Yes, of course. But hopefully these will be few or niché, as even now many users do not mind personalized tracking and many don't want to move to a new browser. And yes, content has to to be paid for. If content creators do not want to work for free, let them find alternate revenue streams or cease creating. (And the second is an option.) The alternative is tantamount to saying creators or their paymasters have a right to personally track me simply because they created content that I happened upon, and it's the de facto situation right now, albeit with a vigorous arms race of advertisers and ad blockers.
- nebulaserfer 7y ago
  Content doesn’t have to be payed by obtrusive ads and user tracking. Many articles wrote just for the sake of writing or as an additional marketing channel (digital ocean articles how to setup servers, basecamp blog and so on). I don’t want to read the content created with incentive to sell me to advertisers. The quality of such content is also questionable.
criddell 7y ago
> Data is sold to inform targeted adverts That's the part that needs to go away. I think the original version of Google had the right idea. The content of the page determines the ads. Billions of dollars that have been spent on brilliant engineers, bandwidth, and CPU cycles to improve ad targeting by a fraction of a percent here and another fraction there. I can't help but feel like the big winners in the web of the past two decades are ad companies and not creators. Even the term content creator points to this. Ads are what is important and the stuff they go around is just content. We've devalued creative work to the point of absurdity.
- manigandham 7y ago
  It's not fractions of a percent. It's massive increases which is why FB and Google are two of the most valuable companies on the planet. They have 1st-party access to user profiles which is why they're so good compared to independent parties which use more anonymous profiles. This is why 3rd-party audience data is poor and will get poorer while Google and Facebook will be more entrenched because of GDPR and similar laws. So there will be a move to context for some ads, but not most of the ones you see.
  - username223 7y ago
    > It's not fractions of a percent. It's massive increases Do you know a number on the difference between targeted and untargeted search (not display) ads? If I search for "instant pot," I'm probably looking to buy an instant pot. How much does knowing my entire search and browsing history help the advertiser? I'm sure Google has these numbers, and equally sure they aren't sharing. It looks like there may be big differences for display ads (2-3x?), but for search?
    - manigandham 7y ago
      Yes things are different with search ads. What you're describing is called "intent" and there's nothing more clear than what you query, although it can and does get boosted by history. I didn't think this discussion was limited to just search though.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> Servers cost money to run and content is usually not free to create. Yes- and you know who makes a lot of money out of servers and content? ISPs. If they want to keep making that money, perhaps they can fork out some of it to cover the costs of running the infrastructure and the content that keeps them in the money.
- cmpolis 7y ago
  I don't want my ISP determining which content and infrastructure to funded; that seems like an even more broken model.
  - y4mi 7y ago
    At first I agreed, but it might actually be a good idea if the payment is enforced. Imagine a scheme in which any traffic has to be bought/paid by the ISP, which is financed by your monthly subscription. So if you open an url, you're gonna have to pay a tiny amount for the request. But it's probably too easy to game. Just write a malware that keeps downloading from your servers. It would make hijacked chrome extensions insanely profitable. And just imagine the money Mirai's Creator could've gotten with this... It would also make bigger websites more profitable than lean and clean pages. So I guess you're right. Not a good idea. It would be cool if it worked though. sometimes I wish capitalism wouldn't pervert any system at the cost of society. Too bad there aren't any alternatives that actually seem to work.
    - BuckRogers 7y ago
      > It would be cool if it worked though. sometimes I wish capitalism wouldn't pervert any system at the cost of society. Too bad there aren't any alternatives that actually seem to work. Only if you adopt the mainstream, incorrect definition of what capitalism is. To put the correct definition into laymen terms, capitalism is essentially paying someone less than the value that they produce. A privately-held and operated Ponzi scheme with nearly everyone on the bottom. That's what all the talk about "mode of production" is about. The term does not hold exclusive domain on profit or enterprise. There were markets under feudalism. To address your second point, there are plenty of alternatives that work. There's even one that's currently showing itself as being outright superior. Look into worker owned cooperatives such as Mondragon in Spain. Both Microsoft and GE have sent representatives there to figure out why their quality level is so high and so consistent.
quest88 7y ago
Why would a company sell their most important resource? They let advertisers specify a Target user but they don't sell their own data afaik, right?
wdr1 7y ago
> As for the problem, it really comes down to making money: Data is sold to inform targeted adverts. If it came down to simply targeting, the original DNT proposal would have succeeded. If someone cares enough about not seeing targeted ads that they're willing to opt-in for this setting, then probably not much value in targeting that way anyway. The issue came down to things like measurement, ad spam & the rest. Basically things that involve tracking but not targeting. The advertising side wanted to still allow these things if DNT was set, but there were vocal voices saying DNT must be strict & not allow those tracking cases either.

by bArray 7y ago

icebraining 7y ago

Newspapers and radio and TV and billboards and flyers managed to have ads without reporting back detailed info about the people viewing them. The problem is that once some are tracking, the non-tracking become less profitable, leading everyone to track. But if nobody can track...

ilovetux 7y ago
I mean, true enough, but DDG has since proven that non-tracking ads can be profitable even in an industry dominated by nosey advertisers. The trick I think is to look at whether or not you're profitable not if you are the most profitable company in your sector. To be honest I would be happier running a company which made $1,000,000 per year profit than a company which had to race to make more and more profits each year. That's the rub, though, if you have investors you need to keep growing and at some point growth requires you to abandon even the most basic pretense of ethical behavior.

EnderViaAnsible 7y ago

The sensible solution, I think, is requiring digital advertisers to support non-personalized ads as a fallback for tracking ads; that is, a digital advertiser would not be allowed to only offer personalized ads. Then allow content creators right of refusal for those consumers who don't wish to allow any advertising at all, and build software supporting this into major browsers. Supplement with things like Brace's Basic Attention Tokens and premium subscriptions. Will people just make ad free browsers elsewhere that don't respect this? Yes, of course. But hopefully these will be few or niché, as even now many users do not mind personalized tracking and many don't want to move to a new browser. And yes, content has to to be paid for. If content creators do not want to work for free, let them find alternate revenue streams or cease creating. (And the second is an option.) The alternative is tantamount to saying creators or their paymasters have a right to personally track me simply because they created content that I happened upon, and it's the de facto situation right now, albeit with a vigorous arms race of advertisers and ad blockers.

nebulaserfer 7y ago
Content doesn’t have to be payed by obtrusive ads and user tracking. Many articles wrote just for the sake of writing or as an additional marketing channel (digital ocean articles how to setup servers, basecamp blog and so on). I don’t want to read the content created with incentive to sell me to advertisers. The quality of such content is also questionable.

criddell 7y ago

> Data is sold to inform targeted adverts That's the part that needs to go away. I think the original version of Google had the right idea. The content of the page determines the ads. Billions of dollars that have been spent on brilliant engineers, bandwidth, and CPU cycles to improve ad targeting by a fraction of a percent here and another fraction there. I can't help but feel like the big winners in the web of the past two decades are ad companies and not creators. Even the term content creator points to this. Ads are what is important and the stuff they go around is just content. We've devalued creative work to the point of absurdity.

manigandham 7y ago
It's not fractions of a percent. It's massive increases which is why FB and Google are two of the most valuable companies on the planet. They have 1st-party access to user profiles which is why they're so good compared to independent parties which use more anonymous profiles. This is why 3rd-party audience data is poor and will get poorer while Google and Facebook will be more entrenched because of GDPR and similar laws. So there will be a move to context for some ads, but not most of the ones you see.
- username223 7y ago
  > It's not fractions of a percent. It's massive increases Do you know a number on the difference between targeted and untargeted search (not display) ads? If I search for "instant pot," I'm probably looking to buy an instant pot. How much does knowing my entire search and browsing history help the advertiser? I'm sure Google has these numbers, and equally sure they aren't sharing. It looks like there may be big differences for display ads (2-3x?), but for search?
  - manigandham 7y ago
    Yes things are different with search ads. What you're describing is called "intent" and there's nothing more clear than what you query, although it can and does get boosted by history. I didn't think this discussion was limited to just search though.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

>> Servers cost money to run and content is usually not free to create. Yes- and you know who makes a lot of money out of servers and content? ISPs. If they want to keep making that money, perhaps they can fork out some of it to cover the costs of running the infrastructure and the content that keeps them in the money.

cmpolis 7y ago
I don't want my ISP determining which content and infrastructure to funded; that seems like an even more broken model.
- y4mi 7y ago
  At first I agreed, but it might actually be a good idea if the payment is enforced. Imagine a scheme in which any traffic has to be bought/paid by the ISP, which is financed by your monthly subscription. So if you open an url, you're gonna have to pay a tiny amount for the request. But it's probably too easy to game. Just write a malware that keeps downloading from your servers. It would make hijacked chrome extensions insanely profitable. And just imagine the money Mirai's Creator could've gotten with this... It would also make bigger websites more profitable than lean and clean pages. So I guess you're right. Not a good idea. It would be cool if it worked though. sometimes I wish capitalism wouldn't pervert any system at the cost of society. Too bad there aren't any alternatives that actually seem to work.
  - BuckRogers 7y ago
    > It would be cool if it worked though. sometimes I wish capitalism wouldn't pervert any system at the cost of society. Too bad there aren't any alternatives that actually seem to work. Only if you adopt the mainstream, incorrect definition of what capitalism is. To put the correct definition into laymen terms, capitalism is essentially paying someone less than the value that they produce. A privately-held and operated Ponzi scheme with nearly everyone on the bottom. That's what all the talk about "mode of production" is about. The term does not hold exclusive domain on profit or enterprise. There were markets under feudalism. To address your second point, there are plenty of alternatives that work. There's even one that's currently showing itself as being outright superior. Look into worker owned cooperatives such as Mondragon in Spain. Both Microsoft and GE have sent representatives there to figure out why their quality level is so high and so consistent.

quest88 7y ago

Why would a company sell their most important resource? They let advertisers specify a Target user but they don't sell their own data afaik, right?

wdr1 7y ago

> As for the problem, it really comes down to making money: Data is sold to inform targeted adverts. If it came down to simply targeting, the original DNT proposal would have succeeded. If someone cares enough about not seeing targeted ads that they're willing to opt-in for this setting, then probably not much value in targeting that way anyway. The issue came down to things like measurement, ad spam & the rest. Basically things that involve tracking but not targeting. The advertising side wanted to still allow these things if DNT was set, but there were vocal voices saying DNT must be strict & not allow those tracking cases either.