9 ms·

> "Kill it before it lays eggs." but do we worry about what evolves from this if it dies? Nothing really evolves here - status quo is what stays. You continue

by izacus 6y ago

> "Kill it before it lays eggs." but do we worry about what evolves from this if it dies? Nothing really evolves here - status quo is what stays. You continue to be tracked head to arse on everyones servers, the media keeps adding 150 trackers to every webpage and the internet moves on. Thinking that one of the biggest profit making industries in US will just go away if you scream loud enough on HN is utterly naive and will require a better push. This approach is inherently negative and just STOPS a process - but it doesn't IMPROVE on the current state and that will require more work. I'm not quite sure what that work would be though - it seems that current approach is "this gigantic multibillon industry must be banned and completely destroyed" which is great on a personal level, but I don't feel like it's realistic on a purely political level.

Santosh83 6y ago
Only govt action will work. That too concerted action by several national govts.
- sneak 6y ago
  Developing a browser (or forking the existing one) with comprehensive anti-tracking features would also work. There are a half-dozen plugins one can add to Ungoogled Chromium to browse the web in (relative) safety. It's not a nation-state level undertaking: six or seven figures. The problem really comes from apps, which are loaded to the gills with spyware.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    How can it do that when the server needs an IP address to send traffic to? Cookies just make it more convenient but there is fundamentally that "analog hole". You can Tor things up and obfuscate but if you can interact with them they can track you.
    - jefftk 6y ago
      > How can it do that when the server needs an IP address to send traffic to? https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness
    - pabs3 6y ago
      The Tor Browser is a pretty comprehensive solution to that, especially in high security mode.
- extropy 6y ago
  The govt action is the shitty way out. This all is a classic there is not enough to go around situation. Govt regulation will make it more entrenched and "manageable". The best outcome is to come up with a fundamentally better business model. Something that satisfies seller's desire to promote their products and customers desire to feel respected and important. Preferably cutting out a middleman and reducing costs of doing business at the same time.
  - hobs 6y ago
    As soon as you invent that you will be bought out or strong armed out, it is very rare for a new niche to be established wholesale.
  - foobiter 6y ago
    There’s no business model better than exploitation, as evidenced by all of history. Nearly 100% of worker and consumer rights come from government regulation in some form.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > The best outcome is to come up with a fundamentally better business model A fundamentally better business model already exists: make users into customers. Google should charge users directly for the services they use. Then they wouldn't need to resort to all these underhanded tactics to try to monetize their valuable services. They could just monetize them directly. Of course this is highly unlikely to happen now that everyone is conditioned to expect valuable services like Google's to be available for "free". But they're not free and never have been: the only question is how we pay the costs. Right now we pay those costs with our personal data and our attention, plus the time and effort we have to spend to try to push back against our personal data being monetized and our attention being incessantly competed for by advertisers. I would gladly pay in money to make those non-monetary costs go away. Perhaps I am an outlier and not many people would. But that just means we pay the costs in other ways that end up being even more costly than the direct money costs would be.
    - jakelazaroff 6y ago
- po1nt 6y ago
  Do you remember Snowden story?
- izacus 6y ago
  >Only govt action will work. That too concerted action by several national govts. Any government action will be a compromise by necessity. Which is why I think EFF doesn't really push for it - even GDPR doesn't ban targeted advertising in full.
x0x0 6y ago
Also, nearly $125B was spent on internet advertising in the US in 2020, per the first estimate I found on the internet [1]. While Google and Facebook keep huge chunks of that, my guess is at least 40% flows through to publishers. So that's a $50B revenue stream to publishers (all sorts of web sites, including news; apps, musicians (via spotify and so forth)) that we're talking about breaking. I really don't believe people have thought through all the effects of that. Not least of which is seeing almost all (reliable) news behind a paywall. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183523/online-advertisement-spending-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183523/online-advertisem...
- cortesoft 6y ago
  So if suddenly all tracking stopped, advertisers would just stop spending money on advertising? That doesn't seem right... advertisers published ads before tracking was a thing, they would still do it if tracking becomes impossible.
  - x0x0 6y ago
    Huge amounts of it, yes -- particularly since the anti-floc people (which, to be blunt, I'm not in love with, particularly Google just deciding to do this on their own) tend to also be in the break 3rd party cookies camp. With respect to eg brand advertising: even if you get past an inability to measure impact, once you break most of the ad infra, ad buyers simply aren't going to negotiate / buy with small sites. It's not worth their time or money. Small here is probably less than millions of uniques per day. With respect to direct response advertising, you've mostly lost the ability to track a conversion. So it becomes pointless. The advertising before extensive tracking was a different time: way way less money, way fewer ads, way less ad blindness amongst viewers, way way way fewer publishers, etc. Will some advertising persist? Absolutely. eg the branded / source trackable referral codes that podcast advertising uses. But there will be an enormous falloff in dollars pointed at publishers. And to be clear, I'm not a fan of 3rd party tracking. But we should be deliberate before we end the ad-supported internet.
    - 6y ago
berkes 6y ago
We should keep in mind why Google invests in FLoC, though. Either they realize third party cookies are on a (regulated) dead end. Or they realize there is a bigger moat. Or something else that helps them. But in any case, seeing the current Google, this is not something benefitting their users(products?) primarily. Unless some benefits accidentally aligned. So, pushing back towards the broken status quo may be the right thing, if you know, or believe, how Google is going to benefit from the new FLoC. I cannot evaluate that. But Googles track record does not offer me confidence their new tech is going to help me overcome the issues I have with the status quo.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Don't users not like being tracked by 3P cookies? Isn't that why 3P cookies are being phased out?
  - andreareina 6y ago
    The cynic in me says that Google is phasing out 3P cookies only because it's got something better (via Analyitics and now FLoC), and so it can simultaneously get some good PR while hamstringing the competition.
- izacus 6y ago
  > We should keep in mind why Google invests in FLoC, though. Is that really so hard to figure out? Google wants to continue running their Ad network and they've been under attack for collecting data. FLoC seems to significantly reduce the need to data collection while still enabling their core business to continue. I might be wierd, but this still seems like a major win to me - since I care about my data not being stored somewhere off my devices and FLoC keeps it on my terminal equipment. And it allows my Firefox to send customized or faked data.
alkonaut 6y ago
> "this gigantic multibillon industry must be banned and completely destroyed" Which industry? Online advertising? Or the whole sector with Google at the front? I think it's a mistake to assume that tracking and the massive trading in personal information that takes place now is somehow foundational to either industry. Advertising worked before that was a thing and it will continue to work after. The amount of money flowing into advertising won't be dramatically changed because advertising is necessary. It might be that if online advertising was significantly dumber, money would be shifted from online to print/tv/whatever, but that doesn't mean it's somehow "gone". Also, if dumber ads are the only ads you can buy, then dumber ads will cost more. Now clever ads cost money (ads with fraud prevention mechanism, conversion tracking, fantastic targeting) costs a lot money. A dumb ad shown to every visitor to a website without any targeting or followup wouldn't bring much money per visitor. But if that dumb ad was what you could do and your other option is a bus stop ad - then you might have to pay a premium for that too. The loss of the ability to track people wouldn't change the laws of supply and demand for advertising space.

by izacus 6y ago

Santosh83 6y ago

Only govt action will work. That too concerted action by several national govts.

sneak 6y ago
Developing a browser (or forking the existing one) with comprehensive anti-tracking features would also work. There are a half-dozen plugins one can add to Ungoogled Chromium to browse the web in (relative) safety. It's not a nation-state level undertaking: six or seven figures. The problem really comes from apps, which are loaded to the gills with spyware.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  How can it do that when the server needs an IP address to send traffic to? Cookies just make it more convenient but there is fundamentally that "analog hole". You can Tor things up and obfuscate but if you can interact with them they can track you.
  - jefftk 6y ago
    > How can it do that when the server needs an IP address to send traffic to? https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness
  - pabs3 6y ago
    The Tor Browser is a pretty comprehensive solution to that, especially in high security mode.
extropy 6y ago
The govt action is the shitty way out. This all is a classic there is not enough to go around situation. Govt regulation will make it more entrenched and "manageable". The best outcome is to come up with a fundamentally better business model. Something that satisfies seller's desire to promote their products and customers desire to feel respected and important. Preferably cutting out a middleman and reducing costs of doing business at the same time.
- hobs 6y ago
  As soon as you invent that you will be bought out or strong armed out, it is very rare for a new niche to be established wholesale.
- foobiter 6y ago
  There’s no business model better than exploitation, as evidenced by all of history. Nearly 100% of worker and consumer rights come from government regulation in some form.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > The best outcome is to come up with a fundamentally better business model A fundamentally better business model already exists: make users into customers. Google should charge users directly for the services they use. Then they wouldn't need to resort to all these underhanded tactics to try to monetize their valuable services. They could just monetize them directly. Of course this is highly unlikely to happen now that everyone is conditioned to expect valuable services like Google's to be available for "free". But they're not free and never have been: the only question is how we pay the costs. Right now we pay those costs with our personal data and our attention, plus the time and effort we have to spend to try to push back against our personal data being monetized and our attention being incessantly competed for by advertisers. I would gladly pay in money to make those non-monetary costs go away. Perhaps I am an outlier and not many people would. But that just means we pay the costs in other ways that end up being even more costly than the direct money costs would be.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
po1nt 6y ago
Do you remember Snowden story?
izacus 6y ago
>Only govt action will work. That too concerted action by several national govts. Any government action will be a compromise by necessity. Which is why I think EFF doesn't really push for it - even GDPR doesn't ban targeted advertising in full.

x0x0 6y ago

Also, nearly $125B was spent on internet advertising in the US in 2020, per the first estimate I found on the internet [1]. While Google and Facebook keep huge chunks of that, my guess is at least 40% flows through to publishers. So that's a $50B revenue stream to publishers (all sorts of web sites, including news; apps, musicians (via spotify and so forth)) that we're talking about breaking. I really don't believe people have thought through all the effects of that. Not least of which is seeing almost all (reliable) news behind a paywall. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183523/online-advertisement-spending-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183523/online-advertisem...

cortesoft 6y ago
So if suddenly all tracking stopped, advertisers would just stop spending money on advertising? That doesn't seem right... advertisers published ads before tracking was a thing, they would still do it if tracking becomes impossible.
- x0x0 6y ago
  Huge amounts of it, yes -- particularly since the anti-floc people (which, to be blunt, I'm not in love with, particularly Google just deciding to do this on their own) tend to also be in the break 3rd party cookies camp. With respect to eg brand advertising: even if you get past an inability to measure impact, once you break most of the ad infra, ad buyers simply aren't going to negotiate / buy with small sites. It's not worth their time or money. Small here is probably less than millions of uniques per day. With respect to direct response advertising, you've mostly lost the ability to track a conversion. So it becomes pointless. The advertising before extensive tracking was a different time: way way less money, way fewer ads, way less ad blindness amongst viewers, way way way fewer publishers, etc. Will some advertising persist? Absolutely. eg the branded / source trackable referral codes that podcast advertising uses. But there will be an enormous falloff in dollars pointed at publishers. And to be clear, I'm not a fan of 3rd party tracking. But we should be deliberate before we end the ad-supported internet.
  - 6y ago

berkes 6y ago

We should keep in mind why Google invests in FLoC, though. Either they realize third party cookies are on a (regulated) dead end. Or they realize there is a bigger moat. Or something else that helps them. But in any case, seeing the current Google, this is not something benefitting their users(products?) primarily. Unless some benefits accidentally aligned. So, pushing back towards the broken status quo may be the right thing, if you know, or believe, how Google is going to benefit from the new FLoC. I cannot evaluate that. But Googles track record does not offer me confidence their new tech is going to help me overcome the issues I have with the status quo.

oh_sigh 6y ago
Don't users not like being tracked by 3P cookies? Isn't that why 3P cookies are being phased out?
- andreareina 6y ago
  The cynic in me says that Google is phasing out 3P cookies only because it's got something better (via Analyitics and now FLoC), and so it can simultaneously get some good PR while hamstringing the competition.
izacus 6y ago
> We should keep in mind why Google invests in FLoC, though. Is that really so hard to figure out? Google wants to continue running their Ad network and they've been under attack for collecting data. FLoC seems to significantly reduce the need to data collection while still enabling their core business to continue. I might be wierd, but this still seems like a major win to me - since I care about my data not being stored somewhere off my devices and FLoC keeps it on my terminal equipment. And it allows my Firefox to send customized or faked data.

alkonaut 6y ago

> "this gigantic multibillon industry must be banned and completely destroyed" Which industry? Online advertising? Or the whole sector with Google at the front? I think it's a mistake to assume that tracking and the massive trading in personal information that takes place now is somehow foundational to either industry. Advertising worked before that was a thing and it will continue to work after. The amount of money flowing into advertising won't be dramatically changed because advertising is necessary. It might be that if online advertising was significantly dumber, money would be shifted from online to print/tv/whatever, but that doesn't mean it's somehow "gone". Also, if dumber ads are the only ads you can buy, then dumber ads will cost more. Now clever ads cost money (ads with fraud prevention mechanism, conversion tracking, fantastic targeting) costs a lot money. A dumb ad shown to every visitor to a website without any targeting or followup wouldn't bring much money per visitor. But if that dumb ad was what you could do and your other option is a bus stop ad - then you might have to pay a premium for that too. The loss of the ability to track people wouldn't change the laws of supply and demand for advertising space.