7 ms·

I am trying my best to not knee-jerk here, even though it's hard to see Mozilla working with Facebook of all companies. In the end it seems to come down to one

by sgift 5y ago

I am trying my best to not knee-jerk here, even though it's hard to see Mozilla working with Facebook of all companies. In the end it seems to come down to one question everyone has to answer for themselves: Do you agree that advertising on the Internet should exist? If the answer is no, that's it. This is a bad thing. Mozilla should instead built in an ad blocker today rather than tomorrow. This probably also means people have to be willing to accept that they have to pay for more things. Someone has to foot the bill after all. If the answer is yes, it gets more complicated. Facebook is - in my mind - a bad actor. There's no way around it. But Facebook is also one of the biggest platforms for advertising in the world. So, if a proposal isn't somehow either accepted by Facebook or forced on them it is already dead. I don't think Mozilla has the market power for the second variant, so only the first one is possible for them. We then want to make ads as good citizens of the internet as possible: No tracking of users, no executing scripts (which then cryptomine ..) and so on. None of that crap. So, a protocol which is a) accepted by Facebook and b) leads to these outcomes could be a good idea. In theory. In practice people with appropriate knowledge will have to check the protocol, suggest ways to make it better etc.

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
It's not black and white you can do advertising without "personalisation."
- hedora 5y ago
  Yeah; I'd go further and say that monetizing user data and non-consensual tracking should be illegal, full stop. Yes, that would destroy a few incumbents' business models. No, it wouldn't be the end of Google's ad business. According to multiple press releases I've seen, blocking tracking makes ads and marketing about 30% less effective. As a society, that'd mean some combination of increasing ad impressions by 30% and reducing total ad spend (since currently marginal ad campaigns will become unprofitable). That sounds completely acceptable to me, especially if it frees up smart people to work on stuff that actually benefits society in some way.
  - sgift 5y ago
    > Yeah; I'd go further and say that monetizing user data and non-consensual tracking should be illegal, full stop. That would be the ideal outcome for me in an ideal world. I'm also convinced it won't happen, so all that remains are private efforts.
- kccqzy 5y ago
  I still recall the shutting down of the Deck network, probably the only ad network that I can name that refuses to track users invasively. From https://web.archive.org/web/20190403051038/http://decknetwork.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190403051038/http://decknetwor..., > In 2014, display advertisers started concentrating on large, walled, social networks. The indie “blogosphere” was disappearing. Mobile impressions, which produce significantly fewer clicks and engagements, began to really dominate the market. Invasive user tracking (which we refused to do) and all that came with that became pervasive, and once again The Deck was back to being a pretty good business. By 2015, it was an OK business and, by the second half of 2016, the network was beginning to struggle again. The question is more of, in 2022 can we still do online advertising without personalization and tracking, in a way that's profitable?
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    > The question is more of, in 2022 can we still do online advertising without personalization and tracking, in a way that's profitable? Sure we can. We need to legislate personalised tracking to give more oxygen in the room for companies like Deck, who want to advertise without having to track to stay competitive. The solution in an arms race of a competitive ad market is to either keep escalating, or de-nuclearise. With enough legislation, we can achieve the latter.
akersten 5y ago
I don't think it's that black and white. Whatever happened to "do nothing" and leave things as they are? We don't need a special FLoC 2.0, just leave the dang web as it is, some people will block ads and some won't, and FB will just have to deal with it? I'm honestly shocked Mozilla is even entertaining this nonsense.
- jefftk 5y ago
  FLoC was a proposal for targeted advertising ("how do you figure out who to show your ads to?"), and FLoC 2.0 is the Topics API proposal: https://github.com/jkarlin/topics https://github.com/jkarlin/topics Mozilla's proposal here is for conversion tracking ("how do you figure out whether your ads are working?"). It is an alternative to proposals by Apple (https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-measurement-pcm/ https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-meas...) and Google (https://github.com/WICG/conversion-measurement-api https://github.com/WICG/conversion-measurement-api) (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
kvark 5y ago
I don't think Mozilla is in the right to decide whether advertising should exist or not. Firefox provides a fair choice - you can install adblocking solutions and mess with your content view of the web as much as necessary. But there is still value in improving the ethics of advertising that other people see.
pronlover723 5y ago
I believe ads on a website are free speech. If I want to put ads on my site it's MY site. Feel free to block the ads or also feel free to just not visit but, with rare exceptions, I don't won't some regulation about what content I can put on MY site. Separately, I'm less against regulation that bans sharing data but I don't know where to draw the line. It seems reasonable for me to keep logs on my site. It seems reasonable to ask my friend Brenda who's way better at statistics than me to use my logs to tell me insights about my site. Brenda starts an LLC or Corp and now suddenly there's regulations? You could say, "well, Brenda can't share it" but in the same way, Brenda might ask Jill who has better knowledge in certain areas of statistics to help out. And so the chain grows.
- ohgodplsno 5y ago
  You're not just putting ads your site. If that was the case, selling banner ads would be fine. What you are doing is forcing me into a worldwide tracking network that would make the Stasi's wet dreams look like nothing. So, no, it's not free speech, it's you personally attacking every single user.
CivBase 5y ago
> Do you agree that advertising on the Internet should exist? Yes, but not targeted advertising. The mechanism which serves the ad should not try to collect information on the user and tailor the ad to them. As far as I can tell, there is no way to do that without creating a system that inevitably allow someone to identify and track people without their consent.
ProAm 5y ago
> Do you agree that advertising on the Internet should exist? It's not the advertising, is the intrusive, extensive, cross-site, cross-industry, non-opt-out, forever tracking that is the problem. We've normalized that the two go hand in hand and are ok.
- freediver 5y ago
  It is also just the advertising, even without any tracking. Ads invade far more than privacy. Every ad is influencing you in a way, and exposure to thousands of ads will influence you thousand times.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    Yes, but if it's also less personally targeted (like, for example, focusing on fitting in with the subject of the site/post you're currently reading instead), then the influence will be lessened. We would be going back more towards trade magazine ads, which isn't such a bad thing in comparison.
  - stingraycharles 5y ago
    That sounds more like a stance against marketing in general, which I’d say is a bit out of scope here, and likely a minority stance.
    - freediver 5y ago
      Not really. I am all for opt-in advertising. What we normally have is ads by default, that you can not even opt-out of.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> Facebook is - in my mind - a bad actor. There's no way around it. But Facebook is also one of the biggest platforms for advertising in the world. They don’t have to be. I’ve tried to be supportive of Mozilla and Firefox, but partnering with Facebook is the straw that breaks this camel’s back. They’re a firm with a history of lying that starts at the top. Like attracts like. Guess it’s back to Chromium…
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Chromium is worse though. And directly supports Googles plan to eliminate competition. Let's see how much you like a google only internet? You won't. At all. The move here is to financially support a fork of Firefox. The issue is picking which one.
- dralley 5y ago
  Months ago Chrome / Chromium were pushing FLOC. I'm willing to withhold judgement until we see the end product but I hope Mozilla can do better than Google did.
pseudalopex 5y ago
> In the end it seems to come down to one question everyone has to answer for themselves: Do you agree that advertising on the Internet should exist? There are other questions. What is the evidence Facebook won't track as much as possible no matter how much browsers give them? Did advertising exist before this kind of tracking?
dTal 5y ago
>This probably also means people have to be willing to accept that they have to pay for more things. Someone has to foot the bill after all. I don't buy this. My entire OS is free. Libre and as-in-beer. No ads. No telemetry. Much of it even requires nontrivial infrastructure to maintain - build farms, package servers - and nontrivial human maintenance. A perplexing economic mystery, by capitalist standards, and yet here we are. Are websites fundamentally different? I say no. In fact I've visited many labor-of-love websites with no ads. They tend to be the best ones, too. An ad-free web would sink many business models, to be sure, but I can't say I can bring myself to care about that.
m463 5y ago
The problem is "advertising" is an ambiguous term (like "freedom" or "justice") that is used to obfuscate what is happening. Advertising to consumers is "show me a picture of a product" yet to the advertising companies it is tracking and forming a detailed dossier for every person on the planet and selling it to the highest bidder.
arepublicadoceu 5y ago
> This probably also means people have to be willing to accept that they have to pay for more things. Someone has to foot the bill after all. Or decide that 95% of what we consume today is absolutely irrelevant and not worth to pay and do something better with our lives, like literally anything [insert hobby here].
- account42 5y ago
  For many of us, 95% of what we consume today is also user generated content where the creator gets nothing out of the ads and instead all profit goes to another middleman. This notion that people won't create things wihout monetisation is ridiculous.

by sgift 5y ago

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago

It's not black and white you can do advertising without "personalisation."

hedora 5y ago
Yeah; I'd go further and say that monetizing user data and non-consensual tracking should be illegal, full stop. Yes, that would destroy a few incumbents' business models. No, it wouldn't be the end of Google's ad business. According to multiple press releases I've seen, blocking tracking makes ads and marketing about 30% less effective. As a society, that'd mean some combination of increasing ad impressions by 30% and reducing total ad spend (since currently marginal ad campaigns will become unprofitable). That sounds completely acceptable to me, especially if it frees up smart people to work on stuff that actually benefits society in some way.
- sgift 5y ago
  > Yeah; I'd go further and say that monetizing user data and non-consensual tracking should be illegal, full stop. That would be the ideal outcome for me in an ideal world. I'm also convinced it won't happen, so all that remains are private efforts.
kccqzy 5y ago
I still recall the shutting down of the Deck network, probably the only ad network that I can name that refuses to track users invasively. From https://web.archive.org/web/20190403051038/http://decknetwork.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190403051038/http://decknetwor..., > In 2014, display advertisers started concentrating on large, walled, social networks. The indie “blogosphere” was disappearing. Mobile impressions, which produce significantly fewer clicks and engagements, began to really dominate the market. Invasive user tracking (which we refused to do) and all that came with that became pervasive, and once again The Deck was back to being a pretty good business. By 2015, it was an OK business and, by the second half of 2016, the network was beginning to struggle again. The question is more of, in 2022 can we still do online advertising without personalization and tracking, in a way that's profitable?
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  > The question is more of, in 2022 can we still do online advertising without personalization and tracking, in a way that's profitable? Sure we can. We need to legislate personalised tracking to give more oxygen in the room for companies like Deck, who want to advertise without having to track to stay competitive. The solution in an arms race of a competitive ad market is to either keep escalating, or de-nuclearise. With enough legislation, we can achieve the latter.

akersten 5y ago

I don't think it's that black and white. Whatever happened to "do nothing" and leave things as they are? We don't need a special FLoC 2.0, just leave the dang web as it is, some people will block ads and some won't, and FB will just have to deal with it? I'm honestly shocked Mozilla is even entertaining this nonsense.

jefftk 5y ago
FLoC was a proposal for targeted advertising ("how do you figure out who to show your ads to?"), and FLoC 2.0 is the Topics API proposal: https://github.com/jkarlin/topics https://github.com/jkarlin/topics Mozilla's proposal here is for conversion tracking ("how do you figure out whether your ads are working?"). It is an alternative to proposals by Apple (https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-measurement-pcm/ https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-meas...) and Google (https://github.com/WICG/conversion-measurement-api https://github.com/WICG/conversion-measurement-api) (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

kvark 5y ago

I don't think Mozilla is in the right to decide whether advertising should exist or not. Firefox provides a fair choice - you can install adblocking solutions and mess with your content view of the web as much as necessary. But there is still value in improving the ethics of advertising that other people see.

pronlover723 5y ago

I believe ads on a website are free speech. If I want to put ads on my site it's MY site. Feel free to block the ads or also feel free to just not visit but, with rare exceptions, I don't won't some regulation about what content I can put on MY site. Separately, I'm less against regulation that bans sharing data but I don't know where to draw the line. It seems reasonable for me to keep logs on my site. It seems reasonable to ask my friend Brenda who's way better at statistics than me to use my logs to tell me insights about my site. Brenda starts an LLC or Corp and now suddenly there's regulations? You could say, "well, Brenda can't share it" but in the same way, Brenda might ask Jill who has better knowledge in certain areas of statistics to help out. And so the chain grows.

ohgodplsno 5y ago
You're not just putting ads your site. If that was the case, selling banner ads would be fine. What you are doing is forcing me into a worldwide tracking network that would make the Stasi's wet dreams look like nothing. So, no, it's not free speech, it's you personally attacking every single user.

CivBase 5y ago

> Do you agree that advertising on the Internet should exist? Yes, but not targeted advertising. The mechanism which serves the ad should not try to collect information on the user and tailor the ad to them. As far as I can tell, there is no way to do that without creating a system that inevitably allow someone to identify and track people without their consent.

ProAm 5y ago

> Do you agree that advertising on the Internet should exist? It's not the advertising, is the intrusive, extensive, cross-site, cross-industry, non-opt-out, forever tracking that is the problem. We've normalized that the two go hand in hand and are ok.

freediver 5y ago
It is also just the advertising, even without any tracking. Ads invade far more than privacy. Every ad is influencing you in a way, and exposure to thousands of ads will influence you thousand times.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Yes, but if it's also less personally targeted (like, for example, focusing on fitting in with the subject of the site/post you're currently reading instead), then the influence will be lessened. We would be going back more towards trade magazine ads, which isn't such a bad thing in comparison.
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  That sounds more like a stance against marketing in general, which I’d say is a bit out of scope here, and likely a minority stance.
  - freediver 5y ago
    Not really. I am all for opt-in advertising. What we normally have is ads by default, that you can not even opt-out of.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> Facebook is - in my mind - a bad actor. There's no way around it. But Facebook is also one of the biggest platforms for advertising in the world. They don’t have to be. I’ve tried to be supportive of Mozilla and Firefox, but partnering with Facebook is the straw that breaks this camel’s back. They’re a firm with a history of lying that starts at the top. Like attracts like. Guess it’s back to Chromium…

fartcannon 5y ago
Chromium is worse though. And directly supports Googles plan to eliminate competition. Let's see how much you like a google only internet? You won't. At all. The move here is to financially support a fork of Firefox. The issue is picking which one.
dralley 5y ago
Months ago Chrome / Chromium were pushing FLOC. I'm willing to withhold judgement until we see the end product but I hope Mozilla can do better than Google did.

pseudalopex 5y ago

> In the end it seems to come down to one question everyone has to answer for themselves: Do you agree that advertising on the Internet should exist? There are other questions. What is the evidence Facebook won't track as much as possible no matter how much browsers give them? Did advertising exist before this kind of tracking?

dTal 5y ago

>This probably also means people have to be willing to accept that they have to pay for more things. Someone has to foot the bill after all. I don't buy this. My entire OS is free. Libre and as-in-beer. No ads. No telemetry. Much of it even requires nontrivial infrastructure to maintain - build farms, package servers - and nontrivial human maintenance. A perplexing economic mystery, by capitalist standards, and yet here we are. Are websites fundamentally different? I say no. In fact I've visited many labor-of-love websites with no ads. They tend to be the best ones, too. An ad-free web would sink many business models, to be sure, but I can't say I can bring myself to care about that.

m463 5y ago

The problem is "advertising" is an ambiguous term (like "freedom" or "justice") that is used to obfuscate what is happening. Advertising to consumers is "show me a picture of a product" yet to the advertising companies it is tracking and forming a detailed dossier for every person on the planet and selling it to the highest bidder.

arepublicadoceu 5y ago

> This probably also means people have to be willing to accept that they have to pay for more things. Someone has to foot the bill after all. Or decide that 95% of what we consume today is absolutely irrelevant and not worth to pay and do something better with our lives, like literally anything [insert hobby here].

account42 5y ago
For many of us, 95% of what we consume today is also user generated content where the creator gets nothing out of the ads and instead all profit goes to another middleman. This notion that people won't create things wihout monetisation is ridiculous.