7 ms·
Right, so there is a genuine moral case for Mozilla doing this. It depends why you hate ads: A: the main problem with ads is tracking and privacy invasion B:
by ajb 2y ago
Right, so there is a genuine moral case for Mozilla doing this. It depends why you hate ads:
A: the main problem with ads is tracking and privacy invasion
B: the main problem with ads is manipulation and seizure of my attention
If you only care about A, you might like this approach, as in principle if it works and becomes standard, then the pressure from the ad industry to track everything will be easier to resist, as 1) they will have less incentive, and 2) the argument that tracking is essential is undermined, so it may be possible eventually to ban it.
Of course, that assumes that you trust that this is better for your privacy than tracking. After all, it does feel a bit like tracking... If it's done properly then your individual data is not sprayed to a thousand dodgy ad brokers, but only to one company who tells advertisers not about you personally, but just whether their ad is working.
The question is, does it work? Are they doing it properly? Do they have the correct incentives to keep doing it properly in the long term? Can advertisers just undermine it by giving everyone's ads a different ID? Also, your threat model may include that this aggregator company is hacked, or that the government secretly forces it to share the data with them.
Nevertheless, I think that Mozilla probably genuinely think this is better for privacy. And there is a case that there is.
A big issue however its that at present the constituency for Firefox includes people who care about B. This doesn't undermine that directly, but it does mean that Mozilla have an incentive not to care about it.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoC. the main problem _is_ ads Mozilla assumes ads are required. Ad blockers assume ads are not required. Ad blockers are probably more popular than Firefox. The original web did not have targeted ads and did not require ads to exist. It has never faced an existential threat due to "not enough data collection and targeted advertising". Ad blockers are correct.
- immibis 2y agoMozilla is an ad company by its revenue sources.
- whamlastxmas 2y agoBy this logic, every TV station and website whose main revenue is ads are also ad companies, which I don’t think is accurate.
- harrisi 2y agoWhy not? What else would you call them?
- michaelt 2y agoWe'd call them TV stations. I mean, we call social media companies social media companies despite them being ad funded. We call newspapers newspapers despite them being ad funded. We call sports teams sports teams despite them being ad funded.
- alexvoda 2y agoAnd we have also learned to use taxonomies and hierarchies and sets. Therefore the intersection between the set tv stations and the set ad companies is the set ad-funded tv stations. Ad-funded tv stations are a subcategory of the larger ad companies category.
- Gud 2y agoIf their revenue is from advertising, they’re in the advertising business. There are other business models out there.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y agoThe CEO of the biggest French TV channel once said "We’re selling eyeballs to advertisers," so yes, it’s accurate.
- h0l0cube 2y agoI agree that TV stations and websites don't have to be purely vessels for advertising, but in today's climate of slim margins – due to an expectation that everything is 'free' – and sliding ethics, advertising lends more and more bias to operations. And that bias has been there as long as there has been advertiser funded operations. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/news_hole https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/news_hole We could just return to a culture of paying for things (that are conspicuously not tracked) and this whole imposition of advertising in our daily consumption can go away. But the vast majority of people simply don't care.
- shrimp_emoji 2y agoMozilla is an ad company under the new leadership, hence the assumption. And exactly: I reject C. I reject the monetization of the web. It didn't need to happen; we just wanted it to happen in our greed. We bit the apple. Money is the root of all evil. It ruins everything.
- disgruntledphd2 2y agoWho pays for the servers?
- Rinzler89 2y agoHopefully nobody. The internet and servers existed before targeted advertising was a thing. The only thing targeted advertising enabled is trillion dollar valuations for some shareholders.
- disgruntledphd2 2y agoServers cost money though. And generally, they cost proportionately more the more users you have. This means that the standard information wants to be free/free software arguments ultimately have costs to cover (like, you used to need to pay for GNU tools to cover the cost of postage and storage). Any approach that ignores this economics is just gonna fail (and that would be sad).
- amelius 2y agoD. the main problem with ads is that they stimulate more unnecessary consumption Ads are the wrong monetization model for the web. Instead of paying for information directly, you are now paying for information by buying something physical (most ads are about physical items). In this resource-limited world, this is clearly ridiculous.
- nullindividual 2y ago> D. the main problem with ads is that they stimulate more unnecessary consumption Yes! If our culture(s) weren't so damned full of pure consumerism, forgetting the first 'R' in Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, we'd potentially be living in a healthier ecosystem. And honestly, having gone from living with a hoarder to living with a tad more than essentials where I can see the damned floor in my house, it's such a f-ing relief.
- BadHumans 2y agoNot all ads are for physical goods.
- johnnyanmac 2y agohonestly the worst, most persistant ads are for games. The pump millions into it because they can utilize whales to make billions. Which means more ads.
- heresie-dabord 2y ago> D. the main problem with ads is that they stimulate more unnecessary consumption The main problem with ads is... I do not want them. My computer, my electricity, my network, my ISP contract, my privacy, my life and my decision. This is a fork of Firefox that I support: https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/
- Barrin92 2y agoConsumers vote with their wallets and will virtually always take a free product with ads over anything else, so taking a dogmatic stance against ads is just going to be financial suicide. Ad blockers simply live on borrowed time until they're banned or made unusable. In which case if a competitor springs up, at some point they need money, which means they'll need to serve ads. Like say Brave, which blocks ads and then ... serves you their own ads. The original web is irrelevant because it didn't sustain large economies. It's like comparing radio hobbyists to the central TV station, the economics change when you have to actually pay employees and serve a mass market.
- lolinder 2y ago> The original web is irrelevant because it didn't sustain large economies. It's like comparing radio hobbyists to the central TV station, the economics change when you have to actually pay employees and serve a mass market. A large number of us wish that we could go back to a web that didn't exist primarily to sustain large economies. Back to a web that existed for academics and enthusiasts, a web where modern HN discussions would have been ranked in the lower half of quality instead of the top 5%. That web existed as late as 2010 (already as a bit of an enclave, but a thriving one). It was killed by ad-funded social media and some of us are still bitter about it.
- Barrin92 2y agoMultiple things exist on the internet at once right, I mean we're having this discussion on an old-school website right now, it didn't go away, that's the nice thing about the internet, pretty much unlimited space. But it also strikes me as very odd if not elitist to say you'd wish for a web when it consisted of academics and enthusiasts. Because for everyone who doesn't come from money or academia, like me, the fact that there's a real economy underpinning the web now means I have a job that actually feeds my family. (I in particular don't work for an ad company for what it's worth). It's one major business model that keeps the lights on in a lot of places and to say we should all be enthusiasts, who in this industry do a lot of work and get almost no compensation just doesn't work for most people. And is also just bad for software in general.
- ajb 2y agoI'm a bit puzzled by this comment. By saying you have an option "C" you are indicating that there is some other factor, intrinsic to ads, that you object to. Which is a valid position - others have mentioned some- but, you don't say what that factor is. My curiosity is piqued! Can you elucidate?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agohttps://github.com/piki/netcat/raw/master/scripts/web https://github.com/piki/netcat/raw/master/scripts/web The web is not TV. At least it did not begin that way. The above is from the mid-1990s when the web was nothing like TV, not even close. The first paragraph is prophetic. For a "non-profit" organisation, Mozilla is extremely focused on making/keeping the web a source of profits for a selected few. Giant websites calling themselves "tech companies" are nothing like newspapers. Newspapers sold a product: journalism. Readers paid for newspapers. These giant websites do not sell a product. They do not hire journalists to produce news. These websites are free. If they chanrged for access few people would pay. They use the products of other peoples' labor as bait to lure in ad targets because the product of their own labor has no such value, it draws no significant audience. They are intermediaries, middlemen. Mozilla wants to encourage and protect this behaviour, not change it. Make ads "private". Mozilla is along for the ride. Keep the money flowing.
- ajb 2y agoI was around in the 90's, yes. If newspapers are your model of a better alternative - pre internet, newspapers were funded largely by advertising. Yes, they also took subs and sales, but they could not operate on that alone. A very large amount of product and service discovery -not just consumer, but B2B -happened by means of ads (including classifieds) in newspapers and professional magazines. Have a look at a 19th century issue of "The Engineer" or "The Builder", it's very enlightening. If we want to get rid of the current internet giants, we need to figure out what can replace them so effectively that businesses dump them like they did the newspapers.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoIf want to use analogies when discussing the (unnecessary) presence of advertising on a computer network, the presence or (regulated) absence of advertising on highways and in public outdoor areas is a better analogy. The internet (and web) are supposed to be a public resource. It is nothing like a privately-owned TV network or newspaper. A client for accessing the web does not need to support advertising.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoIt's possible to use a computer network for commercial transactions. For example, use the network to transfer data to browse selections of products and services, make payments and complete purchases. It's also possible to use a computer network for advertising. For example, putting ads one every page of every website so when a www user is reading some noncommercial page, ads are everywhere. Or when a www user is communicating about noncommercial topics over someone else's website,^1 ads are everywhere. 1. A dumb idea because of "tech" company surveillance and ads IMHO, the two are not mutually inclusive. Perhaps there are only so many widgets that can be sold over the web. But with ads, there is no limit. The ads are not there to provide "free" services despite the messaging from Silicon Valley. The ads are there so that so-called "tech" companies can make money. They do not even have any widgets to sell. They have nothing that web users will pay for. Thus, surveillance and ads. A common retort every time someone mentions that the original web had no ads usually goes something like "The early web sucked" or "I don't wan't to go back to the early web". But that is not the point of mentioning the original web. With today's hardware, there is no going back. The internet is incredibly fast now. It does not have to suck anymore. The point of mentioning the early web without all the ads is that bogus claims by entities like Mozilla that "the web needs ads to survive" or by Google that they are "making the web faster" while still delivering same/more ads are pure nonsense. The web does not need ads. Ads are what makes the web slow. Google deliberately adds delay to webpages when they "load" so ad auctions can take place. At the same time, it is common to HN commenters reminiscing about the early web and complaining about the current web.
- MyFedora 2y ago> if it works and becomes standard We're talking about Firefox here. Advertisers care about browsers that most people use, and Firefox isn't one of them.
- danieljacksonno 2y agothis standard is also pushed by Google and Chrome, AFAIK
- robin_reala 2y agoChrome has a different standard called Topics.
- ring-c 2y agoC: Ad use my network and my hardware
- BadHumans 2y agoI never understood this argument. You agree to see ads when you use a service someone provides you for free. You are within your right to block ads but they also have every right to show them.
- leni536 2y agoThey have every right to not show their main content. Some content providers do that, but it's weirdly unpopular.
- BadHumans 2y agoThis has nothing to do with what I'm saying.
- leni536 2y ago> You are within your right to block ads but they also have every right to show them. No, they don't have the right to show them. They don't own my computer and my display, what's show on my display is entirely up to me and my browser that I own and control. However they have every right to choose what data they send my way, including their main content.
- macNchz 2y agoFar above and beyond issues of privacy and attention, my primary concern with internet ads today is malicious content. There is simply too high a volume of deceptive—or outright malware-laden—ads to feel comfortable allowing them to render in my browser. It’s not even an edge case hiding in dark corners of the internet, search ads at the top of Google results are consistently used for phishing and other fraud. The incentives are all wrong for ad networks to address the issue. As long as websites use third-party networks which themselves let anyone sign up and buy ads, it will continue. Doing too much vetting of ads or KYC on advertisers cuts into the bottom line. I don’t think all that much about privacy issues with ad measurement, because all of my browsers, those of the friends and family I advise, and those of the companies whose security policies I am responsible for, will block ads for the foreseeable future.
- fsflover 2y ago> my primary concern with internet ads today is malicious content I use Qubes OS [0] and open random websites in its auto-configured disposable VMs. Makes this problem irrelevant. [0] https://qubes-os.org https://qubes-os.org
- Trompair 2y agoC: the main problem with ads is they serve as one of the most prevalent infection vectors for malware. The tracking and seizure of attention are of lesser concern to me personally.
- zzo38computer 2y agoThere are multiple kind of problems. One of these is that they use your power, and waste your network bandwidth, to try to force to display them and to track you and other stuff. Their use of your power in this way is like theft; they are stealing your power for their own use (even though such theft is not being done directly). Although you could (at least sometimes) block them, they often make it unnecessarily inefficient and difficult. Other problems include both A and B above, but these are separate problems. There are additional problems as well, such as deceptive advertising, and others. (TV shows that display advertising within the show is also a problem, but again that is a separate problem than any of the above.)