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Attribution is necessary for advertising to work at all. If you don't have attribution that is independent of the ad platform you bought ads from, then the ad p

Attribution is necessary for advertising to work at all. If you don't have attribution that is independent of the ad platform you bought ads from, then the ad platform will defraud you[0]. This is separate from ad tracking where you build up interest profiles on users, or ad remarketing where sites can buy ads from people who have visited them in the past[1]. Most of these private attribution systems are specifically designed so that the people running the ad can count how many people clicked their ads, but not who clicked them or what other things they did. Safari had a proposal in which you could only have a certain number of campaigns running per domain, so you couldn't set up a separate """campaign""" for each user and fingerprint them all at once. I don't know how the Mozilla proposal differs. Whether or not user-agents should care about this sort of thing is an orthogonal question. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/29/google_trueview_skepticism/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/29/google_trueview_skept... [1] Remarketing in particular is responsible for the "feeling of being seen" from modern ads where you search for one thing and get 10,000 ads for the thing for the next week

deely3 3y ago
> Attribution is necessary for advertising to work at all. Something strange. So, radio advertisement, billboards, video panels, and absolutely any other type of advertisement is a scam that exists for few decades and still going good?
- arghwhat 3y ago
  Those ads existed regardless of observers. The buyer of a billboard can go see that the ad is on the billboard, or that it plays on the radio. This is quite different than the current design of online ads, where which ad to show is only decided when the ad loads and reloads. Not that it matters that much - online ads are a total scam anyway. Particularly google's search ads, which 9 times out of 10 is just a copy of the first search result - but now in a version where they get money for the click.
  - zo1 3y ago
    So it's a conveniently self-imposed "problem", because websites could also just "sell adspace" like a billboard that anyone could confirm was displaying what was paid for. But instead of that, they created a problem of showing ads "dynamically" thereby necessitating the need to track users. Interesting.
    - arghwhat 3y ago
      Partly true - but it might also have been seen as a better way to utilize the "random" ad spaces available. I do recall it being common for internet ads to be sold directly like billboards back in the day, before the action model took over, especially for higher value sites that could be likened to the prime real estate of a billboard on a city square or key highway with their guaranteed literal traffic. But such direct deals probably didn't scale well, and definitely left smaller sites wanting to earn some extra revenue in the dust. There was a time when ads weren't as shit as they are now - most wouldn't worry about a banner ad or two on their favorite forum.
    - warkdarrior 3y ago
      How would you, the ad buyer, confirm that the websites are really showing your ads to all, not just to you?
      - deely3 3y ago
        By verifying it using public resources? I agree that it convenient to be able to see each ad information, but that doesn't mean that it should be this way.
- hamandcheese 3y ago
  Radio and TV have ratings and viewership estimations, billboards and video panels presumably have a knowable amount of vehicle/foot traffic. These things are independently verifiable to anyone so inclined. When buying internet ad space, though, the information asymmetry is vastly different.
  - deely3 3y ago
    As far as I understand nothing prevent us from introducing independent verification for online ads?
    - hamandcheese 3y ago
      How? Sure, you can go look for yourself, but that will never tell you if the other million users are seeing the same ad.
- K0nserv 3y ago
  Not really so, I have a friend who did lots of complicated modelling to estimated the effectiveness of ads in the real world for the their job.
djbusby 3y ago
Who gives a shit if advertising works. Just stop fscking with my web experience. User Agent. Not advertiser agent, not government agent. USER AGENT!
throw_a_grenade 3y ago
> Attribution is necessary for advertising to work at all. Yes, and since "attribution" as defined here is incompatible with user's privacy (which is a human right), therefore advertising should fail. Can it please fail early and fail often?
taneq 3y ago
It absolutely is not necessary, and up until recently it wasn’t even possible (barring customer surveys and the like.) It’s just very convenient for advertising services, at the expense of everyone’s privacy.
ohgodplsno 3y ago
>Attribution is necessary for advertising to work at all. No, attribution is what advertisers want, to do the least amount of work possible to blast you with ads that attack your deepest weaknesses, all under the pretense of "personalization". > then the ad platform will defraud you[0] Cool. How is that my problem as a user ? Grow a set of balls and sue the ad platform.
- rocqua 3y ago
  Attribution is not about personalization. It's about proving to advertisement customers that their ads were seen and were useful. This still involves a big privacy breach. But it will not "blast you with ads that attack your deepest weaknesses, all under the pretense of "personalization"." Instead it will tell advertisers how effective their blast was, and help argue that Google isn't defrauding them.
  - nobody9999 3y ago
    >Instead it will tell advertisers how effective their blast was, and help argue that Google isn't defrauding them. Okay. So this is about validating ad effectiveness and minimizing ad fraud, right? Assuming that's your point (apologies if I'm missing something important), what does that have to do with me or my private property? Advertisers have business relationships with advertising platforms. Advertisers might also have a business relationship with me, assuming I choose to purchase their product(s). But the advertising platform has no business relationship with me (assuming I'm not buying ads on that platform). As such, why do I have to give data, CPU cycles and privacy so the advertising platform can provide metrics about ad effectiveness and fraud? None of that has anything to do with me, and I don't wish to give up those things (especially my privacy) on the devices I own. It's unethical for these rapacious scumbags to limit what I can do on my devices (which are my private property) If I refuse to provide third (the ad platform) and fourth (the advertisers) parties specific information about who I am and what I see or don't see (which is what a permanent identifier in secure storage would do) when I visit a site of my choosing. I'll say it again to make sure I'm clear: I don't care about advertisers or ad platforms. They can go an play with each other all they want -- but don't limit what I can do on my devices because it will make you more money. Fuck. That. Noise. Edit: Clarified prose.
dhx 3y ago
Others have already addressed "Attribution is necessary for advertising to work at all." so I'll address the remainder of the issue. What prevents any of the following solutions from providing assurance to advertising clients, without also destroying the Internet and general purpose computing: 1. Building trust with advertising clients be treating them with respect, honesty and transparency. If your clients don't trust your advertising network and were demanding assurances in the form of WEI and similar proposals, surely it's obvious there are bigger problems. The advertising client would likely have dropped the advertising network long ago but can't due to monopolies existing. 2. Advertising networks undergo independent audits (results available to clients) and become more transparent to clients in how their advertising spend is being used. 3. Advertising clients survey users at checkout to ask whether they found the product/service from an advert, or whether they recall seeing an advertising campaign and where they remember seeing it. 4. Advertising clients host advertisements at ads.company.example (in a few highly restricted formats) so they can keep track of impressions themselves. 5. (still a bad idea, based on user surveys, but one which Google et al should have considered for minimisation of data collection and privacy impact) Browsers collect advertising metrics during use and when a user makes a transaction at an online store, the online store asks the user (via the browser) for permission to obtain those saved advertising metrics to provide only to the online store. Users can review the entirety of information sent to the online store before it is sent. Advertising networks don't have a need to access browsing history for everyone on the Internet in real time. 6. Online stores and similar continue to rotate their marketing spend through various advertising networks and marketing campaigns, checking their own metrics to see if advertising campaigns have been having an impact. Campaigns could include marketing using the Internet but outside the reach of Google et al such as use of campaign-specific coupons and products marketed through product review websites, referral schemes, influencers, etc.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  1. There isn't any honesty or transparency in the ad industry, it's scams all the way down. This was the case way before today's current wave of platform monopolization, but Google owning everything makes it way worse. 2. Great, they should do that, but good luck doing that when the data you need to audit is on a bajillion client machines. 3. People do that already 4. This became a thing a while back as a way to defeat third-party tracking blockers in browsers 5. This is literally the attribution system you're arguing against 6. They do that already. But good luck finding an ad marketplace that Google and Facebook don't have their fingers already in. Also... > What prevents any of the following solutions from providing assurance to advertising clients, without also destroying the Internet and general purpose computing I was replying to a comment asking why Mozilla supports Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA). None of what I said should be taken as support for Web Integrity, which is cancer.
account42 3y ago
Assuming this is true (it's not), how is any of this the problem of the User Agent?

deely3 3y ago

> Attribution is necessary for advertising to work at all. Something strange. So, radio advertisement, billboards, video panels, and absolutely any other type of advertisement is a scam that exists for few decades and still going good?

arghwhat 3y ago
Those ads existed regardless of observers. The buyer of a billboard can go see that the ad is on the billboard, or that it plays on the radio. This is quite different than the current design of online ads, where which ad to show is only decided when the ad loads and reloads. Not that it matters that much - online ads are a total scam anyway. Particularly google's search ads, which 9 times out of 10 is just a copy of the first search result - but now in a version where they get money for the click.
- zo1 3y ago
  So it's a conveniently self-imposed "problem", because websites could also just "sell adspace" like a billboard that anyone could confirm was displaying what was paid for. But instead of that, they created a problem of showing ads "dynamically" thereby necessitating the need to track users. Interesting.
  - arghwhat 3y ago
    Partly true - but it might also have been seen as a better way to utilize the "random" ad spaces available. I do recall it being common for internet ads to be sold directly like billboards back in the day, before the action model took over, especially for higher value sites that could be likened to the prime real estate of a billboard on a city square or key highway with their guaranteed literal traffic. But such direct deals probably didn't scale well, and definitely left smaller sites wanting to earn some extra revenue in the dust. There was a time when ads weren't as shit as they are now - most wouldn't worry about a banner ad or two on their favorite forum.
  - warkdarrior 3y ago
    How would you, the ad buyer, confirm that the websites are really showing your ads to all, not just to you?
    - deely3 3y ago
      By verifying it using public resources? I agree that it convenient to be able to see each ad information, but that doesn't mean that it should be this way.
hamandcheese 3y ago
Radio and TV have ratings and viewership estimations, billboards and video panels presumably have a knowable amount of vehicle/foot traffic. These things are independently verifiable to anyone so inclined. When buying internet ad space, though, the information asymmetry is vastly different.
- deely3 3y ago
  As far as I understand nothing prevent us from introducing independent verification for online ads?
  - hamandcheese 3y ago
    How? Sure, you can go look for yourself, but that will never tell you if the other million users are seeing the same ad.
K0nserv 3y ago
Not really so, I have a friend who did lots of complicated modelling to estimated the effectiveness of ads in the real world for the their job.

djbusby 3y ago

Who gives a shit if advertising works. Just stop fscking with my web experience. User Agent. Not advertiser agent, not government agent. USER AGENT!

throw_a_grenade 3y ago

> Attribution is necessary for advertising to work at all. Yes, and since "attribution" as defined here is incompatible with user's privacy (which is a human right), therefore advertising should fail. Can it please fail early and fail often?

taneq 3y ago

It absolutely is not necessary, and up until recently it wasn’t even possible (barring customer surveys and the like.) It’s just very convenient for advertising services, at the expense of everyone’s privacy.

ohgodplsno 3y ago

>Attribution is necessary for advertising to work at all. No, attribution is what advertisers want, to do the least amount of work possible to blast you with ads that attack your deepest weaknesses, all under the pretense of "personalization". > then the ad platform will defraud you[0] Cool. How is that my problem as a user ? Grow a set of balls and sue the ad platform.

rocqua 3y ago
Attribution is not about personalization. It's about proving to advertisement customers that their ads were seen and were useful. This still involves a big privacy breach. But it will not "blast you with ads that attack your deepest weaknesses, all under the pretense of "personalization"." Instead it will tell advertisers how effective their blast was, and help argue that Google isn't defrauding them.
- nobody9999 3y ago
  >Instead it will tell advertisers how effective their blast was, and help argue that Google isn't defrauding them. Okay. So this is about validating ad effectiveness and minimizing ad fraud, right? Assuming that's your point (apologies if I'm missing something important), what does that have to do with me or my private property? Advertisers have business relationships with advertising platforms. Advertisers might also have a business relationship with me, assuming I choose to purchase their product(s). But the advertising platform has no business relationship with me (assuming I'm not buying ads on that platform). As such, why do I have to give data, CPU cycles and privacy so the advertising platform can provide metrics about ad effectiveness and fraud? None of that has anything to do with me, and I don't wish to give up those things (especially my privacy) on the devices I own. It's unethical for these rapacious scumbags to limit what I can do on my devices (which are my private property) If I refuse to provide third (the ad platform) and fourth (the advertisers) parties specific information about who I am and what I see or don't see (which is what a permanent identifier in secure storage would do) when I visit a site of my choosing. I'll say it again to make sure I'm clear: I don't care about advertisers or ad platforms. They can go an play with each other all they want -- but don't limit what I can do on my devices because it will make you more money. Fuck. That. Noise. Edit: Clarified prose.

dhx 3y ago

Others have already addressed "Attribution is necessary for advertising to work at all." so I'll address the remainder of the issue. What prevents any of the following solutions from providing assurance to advertising clients, without also destroying the Internet and general purpose computing: 1. Building trust with advertising clients be treating them with respect, honesty and transparency. If your clients don't trust your advertising network and were demanding assurances in the form of WEI and similar proposals, surely it's obvious there are bigger problems. The advertising client would likely have dropped the advertising network long ago but can't due to monopolies existing. 2. Advertising networks undergo independent audits (results available to clients) and become more transparent to clients in how their advertising spend is being used. 3. Advertising clients survey users at checkout to ask whether they found the product/service from an advert, or whether they recall seeing an advertising campaign and where they remember seeing it. 4. Advertising clients host advertisements at ads.company.example (in a few highly restricted formats) so they can keep track of impressions themselves. 5. (still a bad idea, based on user surveys, but one which Google et al should have considered for minimisation of data collection and privacy impact) Browsers collect advertising metrics during use and when a user makes a transaction at an online store, the online store asks the user (via the browser) for permission to obtain those saved advertising metrics to provide only to the online store. Users can review the entirety of information sent to the online store before it is sent. Advertising networks don't have a need to access browsing history for everyone on the Internet in real time. 6. Online stores and similar continue to rotate their marketing spend through various advertising networks and marketing campaigns, checking their own metrics to see if advertising campaigns have been having an impact. Campaigns could include marketing using the Internet but outside the reach of Google et al such as use of campaign-specific coupons and products marketed through product review websites, referral schemes, influencers, etc.

kmeisthax 3y ago
1. There isn't any honesty or transparency in the ad industry, it's scams all the way down. This was the case way before today's current wave of platform monopolization, but Google owning everything makes it way worse. 2. Great, they should do that, but good luck doing that when the data you need to audit is on a bajillion client machines. 3. People do that already 4. This became a thing a while back as a way to defeat third-party tracking blockers in browsers 5. This is literally the attribution system you're arguing against 6. They do that already. But good luck finding an ad marketplace that Google and Facebook don't have their fingers already in. Also... > What prevents any of the following solutions from providing assurance to advertising clients, without also destroying the Internet and general purpose computing I was replying to a comment asking why Mozilla supports Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA). None of what I said should be taken as support for Web Integrity, which is cancer.

account42 3y ago

Assuming this is true (it's not), how is any of this the problem of the User Agent?