4 ms·

> If it does not block browsers that spoof their identity then what the hell does it do? They mentioned recognizing which ads where viewed and clicked by humans

> If it does not block browsers that spoof their identity then what the hell does it do? They mentioned recognizing which ads where viewed and clicked by humans. Stood out as the thing they really want.

matheusmoreira 3y ago
They want the browser to be their corporate agents rather than our user agents. They think the browser is just a vehicle for their ads.
danShumway 3y ago
That's what we're getting at though: if you don't block browsers that spoof their identity, then you don't know that the browser isn't acting as a robot and clicking on ads in place of a human. The only way this proposal is valuable for reducing ad fraud is if it blocks browser automation.
- pawelmurias 3y ago
  You can recognize a browser as suspicious and not pay for or flag the ad clicks it makes without blocking access.
  - danShumway 3y ago
    We might be talking past each other. I'm talking about what browsers Google blocks, ie what browsers don't get attestation tokens. If Google isn't blocking extensions, ad fraud can still happen and your ad server won't recognize the browser as suspicious because it will have an attestation token. If Google isn't blocking spoofed browsers from attestation, they won't look suspicious. They'll have normal attestation tokens. Allowing a browser to spoof their identity as Chrome means there isn't really any distinction between a trusted and untrusted browser. ---- To your specific point though, let's imagine that Google does block those browsers in the sense that it marks them as untrusted, but it's up to the individual ad networks to figure out if they want to block those requests or not. If the idea here is that ad networks will recognize that a browser is unapproved and will still serve it the content anyway but just auto-discard the data that's coming out of it, I would really strongly suggest that is not a very likely outcome. You're telling me if I use Firefox and it doesn't implement this API, every ad company will just stop tracking me and will discard any ad numbers they get from me? If Safari ends up not implementing this API ad-clicks on Safari will just get automatically flagged as spam? No ad network is going to want to do that, especially if automatic hold-backs get involved. A policy that guaranteed lowers your monetizable impressions/clicks by at least 5-15%, even though you know for a fact that many of those clicks are coming from real users? I have a really hard time believing any ad network would accept that.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

They want the browser to be their corporate agents rather than our user agents. They think the browser is just a vehicle for their ads.

danShumway 3y ago

That's what we're getting at though: if you don't block browsers that spoof their identity, then you don't know that the browser isn't acting as a robot and clicking on ads in place of a human. The only way this proposal is valuable for reducing ad fraud is if it blocks browser automation.

pawelmurias 3y ago
You can recognize a browser as suspicious and not pay for or flag the ad clicks it makes without blocking access.
- danShumway 3y ago
  We might be talking past each other. I'm talking about what browsers Google blocks, ie what browsers don't get attestation tokens. If Google isn't blocking extensions, ad fraud can still happen and your ad server won't recognize the browser as suspicious because it will have an attestation token. If Google isn't blocking spoofed browsers from attestation, they won't look suspicious. They'll have normal attestation tokens. Allowing a browser to spoof their identity as Chrome means there isn't really any distinction between a trusted and untrusted browser. ---- To your specific point though, let's imagine that Google does block those browsers in the sense that it marks them as untrusted, but it's up to the individual ad networks to figure out if they want to block those requests or not. If the idea here is that ad networks will recognize that a browser is unapproved and will still serve it the content anyway but just auto-discard the data that's coming out of it, I would really strongly suggest that is not a very likely outcome. You're telling me if I use Firefox and it doesn't implement this API, every ad company will just stop tracking me and will discard any ad numbers they get from me? If Safari ends up not implementing this API ad-clicks on Safari will just get automatically flagged as spam? No ad network is going to want to do that, especially if automatic hold-backs get involved. A policy that guaranteed lowers your monetizable impressions/clicks by at least 5-15%, even though you know for a fact that many of those clicks are coming from real users? I have a really hard time believing any ad network would accept that.