7 ms·

Instead of more palatable user tracking, how about we tell advertisers and internet companies: fuck off, we don't want any tracking? How about we hunt down and

by yholio 6y ago

Instead of more palatable user tracking, how about we tell advertisers and internet companies: fuck off, we don't want any tracking? How about we hunt down and eliminate all features that allow cross-site information sharing? How about we treat attacks on user privacy as security problems of the web standards, à la Tor, and build technology that aggressively hides any user signature in any layer, from rotating IP and MAC addresses to user agents, referers and canvas leaks? But wait you say, how would the very useful internet ecosystem survive without advertising revenue? Well, there is nothing wrong with advertising per se, it's a natural part of a free market economy. It's ok to target ads to the user's search terms or social feed. The problem is that, in the pursuit of advertising revenue, a cutthroat economic competition pushed advertisers to mine more and more personal data simply to stay competitive. It's a low sum game: it doesn't bring much more money in advertising or make the internet significantly more useful, but it destroys the privacy of everyone. A spectacular market failure ripe for correction.

codezero 6y ago
I wrote a long, but low effort comment where my thesis was that I think it’s ok for companies to pay for your attention, but the problem is that they are paying Google. I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention, but I haven’t thought of better alternatives for businesses to grow or expand online yet. USPS becomes vehicle for junk mail Telco becomes vehicle for robocalls Television a ratio of value to ads that gets smaller and smaller Internet becomes vehicle for ad revenue All of these things are companies abusing communication platforms for your attention and we seemingly are never willing to pay more than advertisers are, maybe because by the time that decision happens folks move to the next platform. The meta thing is that the Internet is a meta platform and we can keep making new communication methods, but we are still stuck with Google.
- travisgriggs 6y ago
  > I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention, but I haven’t thought of better alternatives for businesses to grow or expand online yet. I think western society struggles with banning things. But we've shown an aptitude for taxing vices. It's all about the money, right? Rather than banning, would taxing this economy achieve a compromised version of what you're seeking?
  - guywhocodes 6y ago
    The problem is that if you tax it the government becomes incentivized to increase attention selling. If the money isn't destroyed you will end up in smaller scale corruption. One example that comes to mind is HK zoning fees and the government's increasing dependency there of.
    - travisgriggs 6y ago
      Maybe I'm being naive; I work with some peers who smoke habitually. They pay a hefty tax for their habit. I don't really see the government's incentive to keep them at it to collect more taxes happening. Is it super sneaky and I just don't see it?
      - warlog 6y ago
        Are you kidding? .gov made sure Phillip Morris could stay alive just to keep the taxes flowing.
      - zo1 6y ago
        I think for certain "unpalatable" vice taxes, the increase in revenue is usually not worth the bad publicity. But one example I can think of regarding cigarette taxes is the increase in smuggling they cause, and as a consequence a lot of "government action" to prevent said smuggling. What ends up happening then is you get to see a glimpse of the thinking not being "lets keep people from smoking" but rather more in terms of "lost revenue" or "tax money stolen by smugglers". On some level, if the tax is there to "discourage" people, then the fact that they're willing to buy "smuggled" goods to save a bit of money shows you that they're not discouraged enough and they're not your target audience.
      - MomoXenosaga 6y ago
        Smokers dying early saves the State a ton of money, they did the math on this. Getting people to stop smoking is about morality.
        6y ago
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  >I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention I don't think that's either possible or desirable. Attention seeking would simply take on sneakier forms that are indistinguishable from legitimate distribution of information and protected free speech. Instead of somewhat independent ad funded publications, you would get publications that are owned by product companies (or political parties) themselves. The content they publish would be far more biased. Subscription based publications wouldn't stand a chance against those free and well funded company owned publications. Advertising is very annoying, but I think it can be more transparent than almost any other form of influencing people. Tracking for personalised advertising is an entirely separate issue. That's where I think a blanket ban could work.
  - jka 6y ago
    Your reasoning is accurate; but doesn't most of what you're describing already occur _as well_? Often progress is about eliminating one large negative externality, only to discover that there are others to handle too. The 'submarine' type content you're referring to is somewhat addressed by trust networks, fact checking, link reputation, and various other techniques. One large question is whether we're ready for all of the economically-motivated actors to start shifting into that space. PS: You make a good point about transparency. It's nice that (at least the most honest) adverts are identified clearly as such. Could we have similar transparency in content? ("I wrote this because I'd been thinking about it after reading an article by X about Y yesterday, and here is the source)
    - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
      >but doesn't most of what you're describing already occur _as well_? I believe it would happen on a far greater scale, because it would be the only way to get the message across and competition from independent ad funded publishers would cease to exist. Today, it's more difficult for a product company to justify the expense of running their own large scale publishing and influencing operation because it would have to outcompete advertising in terms of effectiveness. People will always try to get other people's attention for their own gain. Trying to stop this is a quixotic endavour. I think we should regulate to limit the negative impact of this social constant, not try to stop it altogether. >Could we have similar transparency in content? Yes, I do think we could. But I also think that people would still prefer high quality if biased company bloggers to paying for expensive subscriptions. Don't forget that most subscription based publications show adverts to their subscribers as well. Without advertising, subscription prices would rise steeply.
- Terretta 6y ago
  > we seemingly are never willing to pay more than advertisers are On the contrary, users are consistently willing to pay more than advertisers when given the option. Problem is after a while, the advertisers and middle men eyeball all that ad-free content, and decide you’ll accept just a little advertising ... Next thing you know, you’re subscribing to ads.
  - GuB-42 6y ago
    > On the contrary, users are consistently willing to pay more than advertisers when given the option. Problem is: there is a huge difference between paying even one cent and not paying. If you ask for $0.01, you will probably get the same result as asking for $0.10 or even a dollar. And if the only thing you have to offer is a mildly interesting blog post, no one will give you a dollar, so, if you want that cent per view, putting an ad is the only option. Micro transactions turned out to be largely a failure. Another option is to find an editor/platform that gives you a share of a larger subscription. But even then, most people don't want to pay. For example, the usual reaction when I mention YouTube Premium is "why would I pay for something free?". And it gives even more power to large platforms: YouTube can reasonably ask for $10/month given the amount of content, it is much harder for a small player. So what is the solution? Braved tried something with BAT, but it is still an ad-based solution, and I don't really trust it. Carriers tried it with the equivalent of premium-rate phone numbers. Governments suggested tax-based solutions, none of them convincing.
asxd 6y ago
I really wish that ads would be targeted based on server side information. As in what website you’re on, or what search term you put in. I really don’t think ads based on my past behavior are useful to me or my purchasing tendencies.
- srg0 6y ago
  That's not enough. If anything, it can make tracking more pervasive and harder to control. The server fingerprints the user and shares this info with an ad network, fetches and injects a personalized ad. Same result, zero accountability: no way to delete server side PII, no way to know what information was collected, no way to know how it was actually used. Even worse, the server gets to read the ad delivered to you, which may leak even more information. There is no purely technical solution which can replace regulation.
  - asxd 6y ago
    I think "server side" distracted from my point. I'm not offering a technical solution, only that I really wish ads would be targeted solely on what you're looking at. Similar to how magazine and newspaper ads are targeted.
TravisLS 6y ago
One potentially negative unintended consequence: closed systems like Facebook become even more powerful than they already are. Their revenues will dwarf (even more than they do now) any other free digital platform that can't re-create a fully targeted ad product entirely in-house. Without Google AdX and the mess of disturbing cross-site tracking, I can't see why advertisers wouldn't just spend 100% of their digital budgets in walled gardens. It would just be so much more effective.
- danielheath 6y ago
  Assuming tracking works (I have my doubts it boosts conversion), there has to be an equilibrium price, right? That is, advertising camping gear on a camping review site (without tracking) still has some nonzero commercial value even if facebook tracking exists and works.
  - ece 6y ago
    I have the same reservation about ever more tracking increasing conversion, but I would guess in reality the equilibrium price might come as more people use adblockers vs those who would turn them off if they could be assured they weren't being tracked and only being served some form of a content-based ad. For a large site like Facebook, adblockers might have a small effect, but for smaller sites seeing 30-50% adblocked traffic, their choices might be direct ad sales, and likely little else. I saw a post about ethical-ad-server recently, and maybe such ad servers should be the ones default unblocked by adblockers.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - EMM_386 6y ago
    > That is, advertising camping gear on a camping review site (without tracking) still has some nonzero commercial value even if facebook tracking exists and works. Precisely this. Go back to the advertising model where you place the advertisements in relevant locations. It's like going into the local pizza parlor and seeing an advertisement for a local plumber. "Joe's Pizza" in Somewhere, NY can still say "I only want advertisers who want their ads shown in 30 mile radius of Somewhere, NY". Flip the entire thing on its head and go back to camping sites showing camping ads, and auto parts stores showing ads for the latest amazing oil filter. They don't need to know who the user is at all. They are on a camping related site, they probably want to see camping related advertisements.
cookiengineer 6y ago
Shouting is easy, doing so isn't. I gave up on trying to maintain forks of web browsers, because their extension API deliberately doesn't allow modifying response bodies. It's just impossible to maintain any fork of any browser because of the sheer amount of features that rely on JS APIs for websites and the amount of commits upstream. Ad Blockers are just a dirty hack that completely relies on Chromium respecting the Content-Security-Policy headers for all domains. If Google decides to blocklist their own domains for HTTP header modifications, we're fucked. Quite literally. That's the reason why I kinda started to build my own browser (without a rendering engine for now) that focusses on filtering, parsing, and peer-to-peer offloading traffic and sees itself as a mixture between web browser, scraper and proxy that can be used as a cache for others. It has the idea to act as a web filter service + a webview to render its UI rather than being a render engine and document engine. [1] I hope that with this market niche there's a way to make this kind of effort sustainable for the future, because all other web browser fork projects I've seen so far are dying off due to no funding and too much work to maintain the codebase. It's just not feasible to compete in the everday user's browser market. Lots of companies have tried, and lots of companies have failed. [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth Edit: Clarification of Chrome vs. libchromium
- minitech 6y ago
  > If Google decides to blocklist their own domains for HTTP header modifications, we're fucked. I mean, you could just stop using Chrome if this happened, if you haven’t already. All the other popular browsers would be unaffected, and I’m sure projects like ungoogled-chromium would patch a change like that out.
  - cookiengineer 6y ago
    I'm using Ungoogled Chromium. But let's don't kid ourselves, this is just a temporary solution. There will always be the point where it's impossible to maintain patches and keep up with the cat and mouse game upstream. Also all the other popular Browsers are either based on Chromium or based on Gecko, an engine that has no developers anymore since last year. When I wrote about sustainability, that's exactly what I was talking about.
nickysielicki 6y ago
All it would take is one multimillionaire/billionaire to look at philanthropy through a different lens for this to become a reality. What we need is a social movement with funding for Adblock work and outreach. The entire advertising industry is a house of cards waiting to fall. Someone with a grudge and the money to back such a movement could singlehandedly wipe out the revenue of places like Google, Facebook, and most of traditional and print media in a year or two. A couple million in investment could wipe hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue out.
- HomeDeLaPot 6y ago
  C'mon, Bill.
smsm42 6y ago
There's nothing wrong with advertisement, but adtech on the internet turned malignant years ago. It's one thing showing me a banner or short text, another to stalk me all over the net, keep all surveillance data forever, and bombard me with megabytes of useless trash each time I want to see some site. The difference between normal advertising and what we have now is the difference between healthy cells and cancer. Instead of taking their part in the ecosystem, they are destroying it.
colordrops 6y ago
Isn't that precisely what Brave is trying to do?
charcircuit 6y ago
You are just opening up yourself to abuse. Sybil attacks are one of the biggest problems in computing and tracking helps us mitigate it. A truly private internet can't handle bad actors and such will be unable to scale.
- bawolff 6y ago
  The current internet has hardly solved that problem either.
  - charcircuit 6y ago
    Which is why we shouldn't make it easier for people to make a new identity. We already are struggling with the current solutions for profiling users.
bawolff 6y ago
Because you can't both trust and not trust websites at the same time. The web is built around the model that websites can create a session with remembered state (well ever since cookies were invented). You can't have that feature without also trusting the website with that shared state. At least not with the level 9f interactivity expected. Maybe lynx could manage it, but you'll never get all the side channels out of an attack surface the size of a modern html5 browser.
- zo1 6y ago
  I think we should disable local-storage entirely, all of it. 99% of the websites out there don't need cookies. And for the 1% that do need it, how about we build tech around a central authority issuing "cookie issuing" licenses that the browsers respect. Have it become a process and trust-chain similar to certificates so that we can block/ban root certs that allow tracking en-masse. But until then, please developers stop putting the damn shopping cart in cookies and local-state, just persist it on your damn DB and only allow me to have a cart after creating an account with you. That is your damn consent for you to track me, not your stupid GDPR popup that you spam me and every other visitor to your site.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    You want to kill cookies but still have accounts? How's that going to work?
    - zo1 6y ago
      That would fall under the 1%. They get a cert or whitelisted or something such that browsers would "allow" them to request the browser to store cookies. Perhaps the type of data to be stored is also restricted in the certificate itself so the site can't deviate from the storage they've been granted. I don't know, it's just a random thought and not fully fleshed out. I'm sure there are millions of much smarter individuals than me that could figure out the details and nuance. Point is that we need to think outside the box if we are to fix the web. But doing it incrementally with "input" from ad-companies such as google is not going to work.
greatgib 6y ago
You can tell them what you want, if people are stupid enough to continue to download and use Chrome, they lost their free will on the subject to the almighty google!
hoophoop 6y ago
> there is nothing wrong with advertising per se, it's a natural part of a free market economy. There is plenty wrong. Even Adam Smith's purely theoretical concept of "free market" requires buyers and sellers to be purely rational actors and be fully and correctly informed. Advertising has one goal: making customers less rational and more biased towards a given product.
- yholio 6y ago
  While that is true to some degree, the primary motivation of advertising is to close the information gap, to make sure customers know about your product.

by yholio 6y ago

codezero 6y ago

I wrote a long, but low effort comment where my thesis was that I think it’s ok for companies to pay for your attention, but the problem is that they are paying Google. I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention, but I haven’t thought of better alternatives for businesses to grow or expand online yet. USPS becomes vehicle for junk mail Telco becomes vehicle for robocalls Television a ratio of value to ads that gets smaller and smaller Internet becomes vehicle for ad revenue All of these things are companies abusing communication platforms for your attention and we seemingly are never willing to pay more than advertisers are, maybe because by the time that decision happens folks move to the next platform. The meta thing is that the Internet is a meta platform and we can keep making new communication methods, but we are still stuck with Google.

travisgriggs 6y ago
> I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention, but I haven’t thought of better alternatives for businesses to grow or expand online yet. I think western society struggles with banning things. But we've shown an aptitude for taxing vices. It's all about the money, right? Rather than banning, would taxing this economy achieve a compromised version of what you're seeking?
- guywhocodes 6y ago
  The problem is that if you tax it the government becomes incentivized to increase attention selling. If the money isn't destroyed you will end up in smaller scale corruption. One example that comes to mind is HK zoning fees and the government's increasing dependency there of.
  - travisgriggs 6y ago
    Maybe I'm being naive; I work with some peers who smoke habitually. They pay a hefty tax for their habit. I don't really see the government's incentive to keep them at it to collect more taxes happening. Is it super sneaky and I just don't see it?
    - warlog 6y ago
      Are you kidding? .gov made sure Phillip Morris could stay alive just to keep the taxes flowing.
    - zo1 6y ago
      I think for certain "unpalatable" vice taxes, the increase in revenue is usually not worth the bad publicity. But one example I can think of regarding cigarette taxes is the increase in smuggling they cause, and as a consequence a lot of "government action" to prevent said smuggling. What ends up happening then is you get to see a glimpse of the thinking not being "lets keep people from smoking" but rather more in terms of "lost revenue" or "tax money stolen by smugglers". On some level, if the tax is there to "discourage" people, then the fact that they're willing to buy "smuggled" goods to save a bit of money shows you that they're not discouraged enough and they're not your target audience.
    - MomoXenosaga 6y ago
      Smokers dying early saves the State a ton of money, they did the math on this. Getting people to stop smoking is about morality.
      - 6y ago
fauigerzigerk 6y ago
>I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention I don't think that's either possible or desirable. Attention seeking would simply take on sneakier forms that are indistinguishable from legitimate distribution of information and protected free speech. Instead of somewhat independent ad funded publications, you would get publications that are owned by product companies (or political parties) themselves. The content they publish would be far more biased. Subscription based publications wouldn't stand a chance against those free and well funded company owned publications. Advertising is very annoying, but I think it can be more transparent than almost any other form of influencing people. Tracking for personalised advertising is an entirely separate issue. That's where I think a blanket ban could work.
- jka 6y ago
  Your reasoning is accurate; but doesn't most of what you're describing already occur _as well_? Often progress is about eliminating one large negative externality, only to discover that there are others to handle too. The 'submarine' type content you're referring to is somewhat addressed by trust networks, fact checking, link reputation, and various other techniques. One large question is whether we're ready for all of the economically-motivated actors to start shifting into that space. PS: You make a good point about transparency. It's nice that (at least the most honest) adverts are identified clearly as such. Could we have similar transparency in content? ("I wrote this because I'd been thinking about it after reading an article by X about Y yesterday, and here is the source)
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    >but doesn't most of what you're describing already occur _as well_? I believe it would happen on a far greater scale, because it would be the only way to get the message across and competition from independent ad funded publishers would cease to exist. Today, it's more difficult for a product company to justify the expense of running their own large scale publishing and influencing operation because it would have to outcompete advertising in terms of effectiveness. People will always try to get other people's attention for their own gain. Trying to stop this is a quixotic endavour. I think we should regulate to limit the negative impact of this social constant, not try to stop it altogether. >Could we have similar transparency in content? Yes, I do think we could. But I also think that people would still prefer high quality if biased company bloggers to paying for expensive subscriptions. Don't forget that most subscription based publications show adverts to their subscribers as well. Without advertising, subscription prices would rise steeply.
Terretta 6y ago
> we seemingly are never willing to pay more than advertisers are On the contrary, users are consistently willing to pay more than advertisers when given the option. Problem is after a while, the advertisers and middle men eyeball all that ad-free content, and decide you’ll accept just a little advertising ... Next thing you know, you’re subscribing to ads.
- GuB-42 6y ago
  > On the contrary, users are consistently willing to pay more than advertisers when given the option. Problem is: there is a huge difference between paying even one cent and not paying. If you ask for $0.01, you will probably get the same result as asking for $0.10 or even a dollar. And if the only thing you have to offer is a mildly interesting blog post, no one will give you a dollar, so, if you want that cent per view, putting an ad is the only option. Micro transactions turned out to be largely a failure. Another option is to find an editor/platform that gives you a share of a larger subscription. But even then, most people don't want to pay. For example, the usual reaction when I mention YouTube Premium is "why would I pay for something free?". And it gives even more power to large platforms: YouTube can reasonably ask for $10/month given the amount of content, it is much harder for a small player. So what is the solution? Braved tried something with BAT, but it is still an ad-based solution, and I don't really trust it. Carriers tried it with the equivalent of premium-rate phone numbers. Governments suggested tax-based solutions, none of them convincing.

asxd 6y ago

I really wish that ads would be targeted based on server side information. As in what website you’re on, or what search term you put in. I really don’t think ads based on my past behavior are useful to me or my purchasing tendencies.

srg0 6y ago
That's not enough. If anything, it can make tracking more pervasive and harder to control. The server fingerprints the user and shares this info with an ad network, fetches and injects a personalized ad. Same result, zero accountability: no way to delete server side PII, no way to know what information was collected, no way to know how it was actually used. Even worse, the server gets to read the ad delivered to you, which may leak even more information. There is no purely technical solution which can replace regulation.
- asxd 6y ago
  I think "server side" distracted from my point. I'm not offering a technical solution, only that I really wish ads would be targeted solely on what you're looking at. Similar to how magazine and newspaper ads are targeted.

TravisLS 6y ago

One potentially negative unintended consequence: closed systems like Facebook become even more powerful than they already are. Their revenues will dwarf (even more than they do now) any other free digital platform that can't re-create a fully targeted ad product entirely in-house. Without Google AdX and the mess of disturbing cross-site tracking, I can't see why advertisers wouldn't just spend 100% of their digital budgets in walled gardens. It would just be so much more effective.

danielheath 6y ago
Assuming tracking works (I have my doubts it boosts conversion), there has to be an equilibrium price, right? That is, advertising camping gear on a camping review site (without tracking) still has some nonzero commercial value even if facebook tracking exists and works.
- ece 6y ago
  I have the same reservation about ever more tracking increasing conversion, but I would guess in reality the equilibrium price might come as more people use adblockers vs those who would turn them off if they could be assured they weren't being tracked and only being served some form of a content-based ad. For a large site like Facebook, adblockers might have a small effect, but for smaller sites seeing 30-50% adblocked traffic, their choices might be direct ad sales, and likely little else. I saw a post about ethical-ad-server recently, and maybe such ad servers should be the ones default unblocked by adblockers.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- EMM_386 6y ago
  > That is, advertising camping gear on a camping review site (without tracking) still has some nonzero commercial value even if facebook tracking exists and works. Precisely this. Go back to the advertising model where you place the advertisements in relevant locations. It's like going into the local pizza parlor and seeing an advertisement for a local plumber. "Joe's Pizza" in Somewhere, NY can still say "I only want advertisers who want their ads shown in 30 mile radius of Somewhere, NY". Flip the entire thing on its head and go back to camping sites showing camping ads, and auto parts stores showing ads for the latest amazing oil filter. They don't need to know who the user is at all. They are on a camping related site, they probably want to see camping related advertisements.

cookiengineer 6y ago

Shouting is easy, doing so isn't. I gave up on trying to maintain forks of web browsers, because their extension API deliberately doesn't allow modifying response bodies. It's just impossible to maintain any fork of any browser because of the sheer amount of features that rely on JS APIs for websites and the amount of commits upstream. Ad Blockers are just a dirty hack that completely relies on Chromium respecting the Content-Security-Policy headers for all domains. If Google decides to blocklist their own domains for HTTP header modifications, we're fucked. Quite literally. That's the reason why I kinda started to build my own browser (without a rendering engine for now) that focusses on filtering, parsing, and peer-to-peer offloading traffic and sees itself as a mixture between web browser, scraper and proxy that can be used as a cache for others. It has the idea to act as a web filter service + a webview to render its UI rather than being a render engine and document engine. [1] I hope that with this market niche there's a way to make this kind of effort sustainable for the future, because all other web browser fork projects I've seen so far are dying off due to no funding and too much work to maintain the codebase. It's just not feasible to compete in the everday user's browser market. Lots of companies have tried, and lots of companies have failed. [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth Edit: Clarification of Chrome vs. libchromium

minitech 6y ago
> If Google decides to blocklist their own domains for HTTP header modifications, we're fucked. I mean, you could just stop using Chrome if this happened, if you haven’t already. All the other popular browsers would be unaffected, and I’m sure projects like ungoogled-chromium would patch a change like that out.
- cookiengineer 6y ago
  I'm using Ungoogled Chromium. But let's don't kid ourselves, this is just a temporary solution. There will always be the point where it's impossible to maintain patches and keep up with the cat and mouse game upstream. Also all the other popular Browsers are either based on Chromium or based on Gecko, an engine that has no developers anymore since last year. When I wrote about sustainability, that's exactly what I was talking about.

nickysielicki 6y ago

All it would take is one multimillionaire/billionaire to look at philanthropy through a different lens for this to become a reality. What we need is a social movement with funding for Adblock work and outreach. The entire advertising industry is a house of cards waiting to fall. Someone with a grudge and the money to back such a movement could singlehandedly wipe out the revenue of places like Google, Facebook, and most of traditional and print media in a year or two. A couple million in investment could wipe hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue out.

HomeDeLaPot 6y ago
C'mon, Bill.

smsm42 6y ago

There's nothing wrong with advertisement, but adtech on the internet turned malignant years ago. It's one thing showing me a banner or short text, another to stalk me all over the net, keep all surveillance data forever, and bombard me with megabytes of useless trash each time I want to see some site. The difference between normal advertising and what we have now is the difference between healthy cells and cancer. Instead of taking their part in the ecosystem, they are destroying it.

colordrops 6y ago

Isn't that precisely what Brave is trying to do?

charcircuit 6y ago

You are just opening up yourself to abuse. Sybil attacks are one of the biggest problems in computing and tracking helps us mitigate it. A truly private internet can't handle bad actors and such will be unable to scale.

bawolff 6y ago
The current internet has hardly solved that problem either.
- charcircuit 6y ago
  Which is why we shouldn't make it easier for people to make a new identity. We already are struggling with the current solutions for profiling users.

bawolff 6y ago

Because you can't both trust and not trust websites at the same time. The web is built around the model that websites can create a session with remembered state (well ever since cookies were invented). You can't have that feature without also trusting the website with that shared state. At least not with the level 9f interactivity expected. Maybe lynx could manage it, but you'll never get all the side channels out of an attack surface the size of a modern html5 browser.

zo1 6y ago
I think we should disable local-storage entirely, all of it. 99% of the websites out there don't need cookies. And for the 1% that do need it, how about we build tech around a central authority issuing "cookie issuing" licenses that the browsers respect. Have it become a process and trust-chain similar to certificates so that we can block/ban root certs that allow tracking en-masse. But until then, please developers stop putting the damn shopping cart in cookies and local-state, just persist it on your damn DB and only allow me to have a cart after creating an account with you. That is your damn consent for you to track me, not your stupid GDPR popup that you spam me and every other visitor to your site.
- bawolff 6y ago
  You want to kill cookies but still have accounts? How's that going to work?
  - zo1 6y ago
    That would fall under the 1%. They get a cert or whitelisted or something such that browsers would "allow" them to request the browser to store cookies. Perhaps the type of data to be stored is also restricted in the certificate itself so the site can't deviate from the storage they've been granted. I don't know, it's just a random thought and not fully fleshed out. I'm sure there are millions of much smarter individuals than me that could figure out the details and nuance. Point is that we need to think outside the box if we are to fix the web. But doing it incrementally with "input" from ad-companies such as google is not going to work.

greatgib 6y ago

You can tell them what you want, if people are stupid enough to continue to download and use Chrome, they lost their free will on the subject to the almighty google!

hoophoop 6y ago

> there is nothing wrong with advertising per se, it's a natural part of a free market economy. There is plenty wrong. Even Adam Smith's purely theoretical concept of "free market" requires buyers and sellers to be purely rational actors and be fully and correctly informed. Advertising has one goal: making customers less rational and more biased towards a given product.

yholio 6y ago
While that is true to some degree, the primary motivation of advertising is to close the information gap, to make sure customers know about your product.