17 ms·

At this point honestly I just wish for a general ban on tracking ads of any kind. Just give me good old contextual ads and remove some MBs of js, with the only

by yulaow 6y ago

At this point honestly I just wish for a general ban on tracking ads of any kind. Just give me good old contextual ads and remove some MBs of js, with the only purpose of tracking me, from most websites of the internet.

petre 6y ago
How would the EU enforce such a ban? They actually need to prove company X was tracking its users if it goes to court.
- jorge-d 6y ago
  By setting very high fines for those who don't comply?
  - petre 6y ago
    Already done. It's up to 10% of turnover, not profits. Which the companies would happily go to court over. But how to actually prove in court that company X is tracking users if a leak doesn't occur? Subopenas? They need a court order for that. They need reasonable suspicion to get a court order.
    - speedgoose 6y ago
      Right now it's very easy to see, the companies are not hiding it at all. They send the data to third-party trackers straight from their website or application.
      - EGreg 6y ago
        Disqus loads a million external resources That’s so stupid, why not just take your OWN cookie and use it in the backend to send to all these resources, proxying through your own server or having a CNAME for theirs under your domain?
        speedgoose 6y ago
        I guess it's often much simpler and cheaper to not try to hide it. The CNAME practice is becoming more and more common. See https://blog.apnic.net/2020/08/04/characterizing-cname-cloaking-based-tracking/ https://blog.apnic.net/2020/08/04/characterizing-cname-cloak... or https://medium.com/nextdns/cname-cloaking-the-dangerous-disguise-of-third-party-trackers-195205dc522a https://medium.com/nextdns/cname-cloaking-the-dangerous-disg... or https://www.laquadrature.net/2020/10/05/le-deguisement-des-trackers-par-cname/ https://www.laquadrature.net/2020/10/05/le-deguisement-des-t... I think proxying or doing it server side only will be implemented later when these people will be forced to hide to save their shitty business model.
        Sayrus 6y ago
        CNAME cloacking has gone even further, ad company now ask you to put a A/AAAA record pointing to one of their IPs as CNAME uncloaking was working pretty well.
        _-david-_ 6y ago
        I think the move will be for ANAME records. ANAME is not a real record (yet), but some providers are supporting them. It is similar to a CNAME record but instead of storing the domain name you want to map to it pulls the A record and puts that IP as your A record.
    - travisjungroth 6y ago
      Those issues aren’t unique to this problem. Courts already try to solve them. It’s the same as how you would find banks denying loan based on race. You find banks by complaints or wide search. You do an initial investigation from the outside with no warrant or subpoena. Like send in a white client and black client (or someone with a search history of fishing versus sewing) and see what happens. Then that’s enough to ask for all the secrets. Of course they could delete them, but that should be a big crime. I’m not saying this is a perfect system. It’s not. But it’s an attempt the problem you describe.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    That is like saying if we make the punishment for any crime tortorous enough we won't need law enforcement. That only answers "what the punishment will theoretically be" not "How can it be found out when it is being broken? By whom? Will we able to take action against it?".
    - maedla 6y ago
      Oh heaven help us if a trillion dollar enterprise gets a fine !!!!
      - caddywompus 6y ago
        I think what they mean is, how can you track which companies are not complicit, how do you organize the proof so that you can levy the fine successfully
- mrtksn 6y ago
  Turkey successfully made US tech giants comply to Turkish law by banning purchase of ads from non compliant ones and threatening with accumulating fines and progressive bandwidth throttling.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  How about we make them prove they are not tracking users instead?
  - sefrost 6y ago
    How could I prove my blog doesn't track you?
    - matheusmoreira 6y ago
      Allow experts to audit your blog, including the code running on the servers. Hosts should submit to similar audits.
      - filoleg 6y ago
        Never thought I would see the day when people on HN would enthusiastically support making it much more difficult for anyone to publish their stuff on the web. All while, in the same breath, clamoring for the "good old days" of the web when publishing something was as easy as just uploading a folder with your HTML/CSS to your host. No, thank you, I don't want to go through audits and deal with bureaucracy when I just want to publish my side-project blog on the web. If you want to discourage people from building and publishing their personal projects and making them easily accessible to the public, that's how you do it. However, I am absolutely ok with EU doing this, given they seem to be hellbent on running their local tech industry into the ground. Truly great founders from EU will either manage to make their companies succeed despite EU or eventually end up creating their companies in the US, and both of those scenarios sound like a win-win to me (from the perspective of the US; from the perspective of the EU, I guess they are doing all of this knowingly, so they get what they wanted, which would count as a win in a way too).
        matheusmoreira 6y ago
        Well, in the good old days people didn't abuse users with unwanted tracking and fingerprinting. Pages used to be just that: files someone uploaded to the internet. People came up with tracking techniques here and there but they weren't so pervasive. Now most pages aren't pages, they're hostile applications purposefully built to extract as much value out of you as they can by any means available whether you want it to or not. If all you did was publish an HTML+CSS page, your innocence is self-evident. Anyone can look at your page's source and confirm it. If you link to Google's javascripts though, that should put you into a completely different category of suspicion.
jka 6y ago
Ads could be placed into a search engine, and user agents could choose to request relevant ads based on the page they are viewing (the context) and/or the current user's profile (if the user opts-in to their profile being included). Advertisers would compete within that search engine to have the most relevant and accurate product and service offerings to match demand, and would pay the search engine provider for the hosting. The search engine provider could attribute and send credit back to the websites from which advertising requests from the user agent originated. This could be attributed based on requests, clicks, purchases, etc. Under this model, publisher websites would not need to design and manage their pages specifically to incorporate advertising slots, and users would not have to see any advertising at all unless they are genuinely interested in further commercial information related to the page they're on. As a side-effect this could reduce the usage of advertising in various grey areas (spam, disinformation, and even the rare-but-feasible harassment of individuals by using targeted advertising).
- GradientAssent 6y ago
  And when effectively no users opt in to advertising, how does the search engine stay in business? It does actually cost money to operate a good search engine.
  - pryelluw 6y ago
    How about they find alternate revenue channels? Like every other business in the world?
    - GradientAssent 6y ago
      Sounds like a great opportunity for you to enter the market and capture one of these alternative revenue channels with your ad-free search engine.
      - colejohnson66 6y ago
        Yep. People don’t pay for search anymore. They haven’t since Google took over the world a decade and a half ago. That’s not to say free is the best option, but people don’t want to pay when there’s a free solution that works just as well.
melomal 6y ago
The thing is these ads are not exactly effective either. I mean you'll read about the guru's with 90% conversion rate at 0.50c per click or some garbage like that but when you run them yourself, with what is considered a normal company (not a unicorn) you somehow find yourself with a <1% CR on most remarketing/tracking ads. They are crazy cheap though and essentially act like a TV/Radio ad. It's about getting repeated exposure, even if it's not a direct conversion (because it never is). Everyone wants to get rich quick these days and highly customized ads appear to be the best way to get there.
- 8fingerlouie 6y ago
  It’s not like the current tracking adds are super efficient always. I searched for a new washing machine, found one I liked, bought it, and spent the next 3 months looking at washing machine adds.
  - melomal 6y ago
    The cost of keeping it like that is next to none so there's very little motivation to fix it too. I've done many remarketing ads and generally speaking setting it up to avoid recent buyers is pointless in the grand scheme of daily work.
  - II2II 6y ago
    Clearly more tracking needs to be done in order to connect your conversion to your purchase. Not only will they stop showing ads of washing machines after the purchase, knowing the make and model will help them gauge when to start targeting repair ads as well as start targeting replacement machine ads. They will also know whether you will stick to the current manufacturer or which you will switch to, and which model you will buy. You will be able to live with the comfort of knowing that your entire future of washing machine purchases is planned out and concentrate your energy on more important things in life (such as lobbying for better privacy protections).
    - tluyben2 6y ago
      Well, they could just use common sense: a washing machine is something people look at when the old one broke down or moved house: they need it so they are likely to buy one asap. Show it a week and then stop. Laptops are similar: makes no sense showing it for months, and that is what happens now. Even if they have the sales data, it is not connected to the ad data (bought a laptop from a big chain here this week: will get ads for that laptop from the same chain for months) so common sense should work fine for now. If the ads appear around the days I am looking for the article, I even might click on them. Now that my brain knows all ads are irrelevant because they are outdated things I already have, I just do not see them anymore.
qertoip 6y ago
"ban, ban, ban, ban, ban" - what a great idea to improve the world.
- eternalban 6y ago
  You're reducing the equation to an unreasonable degree. Parameters are: - negative effects on society at-large - destruction of privacy - creation of turn-key surveillance systems - negative effects on urban environment aesthetics - ... - legitimate business desire to promote goods and services. It's that sole last item, which is the entire stated purpose of "advertising". We could create a web just for product promotion, and it would be opt in. Looking for widget x? Go to the market and even provide demographics for better service. Advertising is a pretext for baking in surveillance and social modification systems into society. It is, like certain aspects of financial system, 'sacrosanct', and it is strictly taboo to state the obvious regarding advertising, as a systemic approach to moderating societal norms and behavior.
- maedla 6y ago
  yes
whazor 6y ago
Tracking should be considered creepy, just imagine if a single person would collect all this data of you. There should be some limitations of what can be advertised on.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Just disable Javascript. If people did this en masse, even for one day, the adtech companies would start to panic. Castles made of sand.
- qertoip 6y ago
  That would help but tracking would still be possible through HTTP layer like resource caching and other headers.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
    I control the HTTP layer with a forward proxy. Works well.
- lizardmancan 6y ago
  that extension that silently clicks every add was funny. Why was it not allowed? Seems anti-competitive to me.
TechnoTimeStop 6y ago
It is crazy to think Facebook is still able to operate as they do. I mean look at the stock price. Ridiculously out of reality. This will come crashing down soon enough.
- justapassenger 6y ago
  > Ridiculously out of reality Their P/E ratio is 27. It’s below P/E ratio for SP500, which sits right now at 40, and includes tons of beyond ridiculous companies like Tesla, with P/E ratio over 1200. There’s lots of wrong with Facebook, but calling their stock overpriced isn’t one of those things.

by yulaow 6y ago

petre 6y ago

How would the EU enforce such a ban? They actually need to prove company X was tracking its users if it goes to court.

jorge-d 6y ago
By setting very high fines for those who don't comply?
- petre 6y ago
  Already done. It's up to 10% of turnover, not profits. Which the companies would happily go to court over. But how to actually prove in court that company X is tracking users if a leak doesn't occur? Subopenas? They need a court order for that. They need reasonable suspicion to get a court order.
  - speedgoose 6y ago
    Right now it's very easy to see, the companies are not hiding it at all. They send the data to third-party trackers straight from their website or application.
    - EGreg 6y ago
      Disqus loads a million external resources That’s so stupid, why not just take your OWN cookie and use it in the backend to send to all these resources, proxying through your own server or having a CNAME for theirs under your domain?
      - speedgoose 6y ago
        I guess it's often much simpler and cheaper to not try to hide it. The CNAME practice is becoming more and more common. See https://blog.apnic.net/2020/08/04/characterizing-cname-cloaking-based-tracking/ https://blog.apnic.net/2020/08/04/characterizing-cname-cloak... or https://medium.com/nextdns/cname-cloaking-the-dangerous-disguise-of-third-party-trackers-195205dc522a https://medium.com/nextdns/cname-cloaking-the-dangerous-disg... or https://www.laquadrature.net/2020/10/05/le-deguisement-des-trackers-par-cname/ https://www.laquadrature.net/2020/10/05/le-deguisement-des-t... I think proxying or doing it server side only will be implemented later when these people will be forced to hide to save their shitty business model.
        Sayrus 6y ago
        CNAME cloacking has gone even further, ad company now ask you to put a A/AAAA record pointing to one of their IPs as CNAME uncloaking was working pretty well.
        _-david-_ 6y ago
        I think the move will be for ANAME records. ANAME is not a real record (yet), but some providers are supporting them. It is similar to a CNAME record but instead of storing the domain name you want to map to it pulls the A record and puts that IP as your A record.
  - travisjungroth 6y ago
    Those issues aren’t unique to this problem. Courts already try to solve them. It’s the same as how you would find banks denying loan based on race. You find banks by complaints or wide search. You do an initial investigation from the outside with no warrant or subpoena. Like send in a white client and black client (or someone with a search history of fishing versus sewing) and see what happens. Then that’s enough to ask for all the secrets. Of course they could delete them, but that should be a big crime. I’m not saying this is a perfect system. It’s not. But it’s an attempt the problem you describe.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  That is like saying if we make the punishment for any crime tortorous enough we won't need law enforcement. That only answers "what the punishment will theoretically be" not "How can it be found out when it is being broken? By whom? Will we able to take action against it?".
  - maedla 6y ago
    Oh heaven help us if a trillion dollar enterprise gets a fine !!!!
    - caddywompus 6y ago
      I think what they mean is, how can you track which companies are not complicit, how do you organize the proof so that you can levy the fine successfully
mrtksn 6y ago
Turkey successfully made US tech giants comply to Turkish law by banning purchase of ads from non compliant ones and threatening with accumulating fines and progressive bandwidth throttling.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
How about we make them prove they are not tracking users instead?
- sefrost 6y ago
  How could I prove my blog doesn't track you?
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    Allow experts to audit your blog, including the code running on the servers. Hosts should submit to similar audits.
    - filoleg 6y ago
      Never thought I would see the day when people on HN would enthusiastically support making it much more difficult for anyone to publish their stuff on the web. All while, in the same breath, clamoring for the "good old days" of the web when publishing something was as easy as just uploading a folder with your HTML/CSS to your host. No, thank you, I don't want to go through audits and deal with bureaucracy when I just want to publish my side-project blog on the web. If you want to discourage people from building and publishing their personal projects and making them easily accessible to the public, that's how you do it. However, I am absolutely ok with EU doing this, given they seem to be hellbent on running their local tech industry into the ground. Truly great founders from EU will either manage to make their companies succeed despite EU or eventually end up creating their companies in the US, and both of those scenarios sound like a win-win to me (from the perspective of the US; from the perspective of the EU, I guess they are doing all of this knowingly, so they get what they wanted, which would count as a win in a way too).
      - matheusmoreira 6y ago
        Well, in the good old days people didn't abuse users with unwanted tracking and fingerprinting. Pages used to be just that: files someone uploaded to the internet. People came up with tracking techniques here and there but they weren't so pervasive. Now most pages aren't pages, they're hostile applications purposefully built to extract as much value out of you as they can by any means available whether you want it to or not. If all you did was publish an HTML+CSS page, your innocence is self-evident. Anyone can look at your page's source and confirm it. If you link to Google's javascripts though, that should put you into a completely different category of suspicion.

jka 6y ago

Ads could be placed into a search engine, and user agents could choose to request relevant ads based on the page they are viewing (the context) and/or the current user's profile (if the user opts-in to their profile being included). Advertisers would compete within that search engine to have the most relevant and accurate product and service offerings to match demand, and would pay the search engine provider for the hosting. The search engine provider could attribute and send credit back to the websites from which advertising requests from the user agent originated. This could be attributed based on requests, clicks, purchases, etc. Under this model, publisher websites would not need to design and manage their pages specifically to incorporate advertising slots, and users would not have to see any advertising at all unless they are genuinely interested in further commercial information related to the page they're on. As a side-effect this could reduce the usage of advertising in various grey areas (spam, disinformation, and even the rare-but-feasible harassment of individuals by using targeted advertising).

GradientAssent 6y ago
And when effectively no users opt in to advertising, how does the search engine stay in business? It does actually cost money to operate a good search engine.
- pryelluw 6y ago
  How about they find alternate revenue channels? Like every other business in the world?
  - GradientAssent 6y ago
    Sounds like a great opportunity for you to enter the market and capture one of these alternative revenue channels with your ad-free search engine.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      Yep. People don’t pay for search anymore. They haven’t since Google took over the world a decade and a half ago. That’s not to say free is the best option, but people don’t want to pay when there’s a free solution that works just as well.

melomal 6y ago

The thing is these ads are not exactly effective either. I mean you'll read about the guru's with 90% conversion rate at 0.50c per click or some garbage like that but when you run them yourself, with what is considered a normal company (not a unicorn) you somehow find yourself with a <1% CR on most remarketing/tracking ads. They are crazy cheap though and essentially act like a TV/Radio ad. It's about getting repeated exposure, even if it's not a direct conversion (because it never is). Everyone wants to get rich quick these days and highly customized ads appear to be the best way to get there.

8fingerlouie 6y ago
It’s not like the current tracking adds are super efficient always. I searched for a new washing machine, found one I liked, bought it, and spent the next 3 months looking at washing machine adds.
- melomal 6y ago
  The cost of keeping it like that is next to none so there's very little motivation to fix it too. I've done many remarketing ads and generally speaking setting it up to avoid recent buyers is pointless in the grand scheme of daily work.
- II2II 6y ago
  Clearly more tracking needs to be done in order to connect your conversion to your purchase. Not only will they stop showing ads of washing machines after the purchase, knowing the make and model will help them gauge when to start targeting repair ads as well as start targeting replacement machine ads. They will also know whether you will stick to the current manufacturer or which you will switch to, and which model you will buy. You will be able to live with the comfort of knowing that your entire future of washing machine purchases is planned out and concentrate your energy on more important things in life (such as lobbying for better privacy protections).
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    Well, they could just use common sense: a washing machine is something people look at when the old one broke down or moved house: they need it so they are likely to buy one asap. Show it a week and then stop. Laptops are similar: makes no sense showing it for months, and that is what happens now. Even if they have the sales data, it is not connected to the ad data (bought a laptop from a big chain here this week: will get ads for that laptop from the same chain for months) so common sense should work fine for now. If the ads appear around the days I am looking for the article, I even might click on them. Now that my brain knows all ads are irrelevant because they are outdated things I already have, I just do not see them anymore.

qertoip 6y ago

"ban, ban, ban, ban, ban" - what a great idea to improve the world.

eternalban 6y ago
You're reducing the equation to an unreasonable degree. Parameters are: - negative effects on society at-large - destruction of privacy - creation of turn-key surveillance systems - negative effects on urban environment aesthetics - ... - legitimate business desire to promote goods and services. It's that sole last item, which is the entire stated purpose of "advertising". We could create a web just for product promotion, and it would be opt in. Looking for widget x? Go to the market and even provide demographics for better service. Advertising is a pretext for baking in surveillance and social modification systems into society. It is, like certain aspects of financial system, 'sacrosanct', and it is strictly taboo to state the obvious regarding advertising, as a systemic approach to moderating societal norms and behavior.
maedla 6y ago
yes

whazor 6y ago

Tracking should be considered creepy, just imagine if a single person would collect all this data of you. There should be some limitations of what can be advertised on.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

Just disable Javascript. If people did this en masse, even for one day, the adtech companies would start to panic. Castles made of sand.

qertoip 6y ago
That would help but tracking would still be possible through HTTP layer like resource caching and other headers.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  I control the HTTP layer with a forward proxy. Works well.
lizardmancan 6y ago
that extension that silently clicks every add was funny. Why was it not allowed? Seems anti-competitive to me.

TechnoTimeStop 6y ago

It is crazy to think Facebook is still able to operate as they do. I mean look at the stock price. Ridiculously out of reality. This will come crashing down soon enough.

justapassenger 6y ago
> Ridiculously out of reality Their P/E ratio is 27. It’s below P/E ratio for SP500, which sits right now at 40, and includes tons of beyond ridiculous companies like Tesla, with P/E ratio over 1200. There’s lots of wrong with Facebook, but calling their stock overpriced isn’t one of those things.