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> As I remember, the Do Not Track (DNT) header was motivated by the same ideal, and it failed totally, as one should expect. Microsoft decided to turn on DNT b

> As I remember, the Do Not Track (DNT) header was motivated by the same ideal, and it failed totally, as one should expect. Microsoft decided to turn on DNT by default in Windows 8 / MSIE 10, which led to a violation of the DNT standard and a complicated debacle which rendered the whole thing pointless. It was a silly idea and an even sillier outcome, but that does not make the ideal itself silly. > They won't stop Then we can rip this out later, or submit a patch to opt everyone out. I trust Mozilla to accept such a patch much more than I do Google. It's not irreversible, it's an ongoing negotiation. > Thought experiment: Your thought experiment ignores the rationale Mozilla provided. I think ideally we would be notified on first upgrade / out of box that we are opted in to sharing our preferences with advertisers in a limited way, with a nice obvious "Opt out" button in that notification. That way, legitimate advertisers get the limited conversion rate information they desperately want from enough people who aren't interested one way or the other, and those who are diametrically opposed to the entire concept are perfectly able to turn it off before their first browsing action. But I also don't think they'd build an interface this extensive for what they describe as a limited test run against a handful of allow-listed sites for exploratory and standards-determining reasons. I would have liked to at least see a heads-up upon the activation of this system in those cases, since that seems easy enough to build for a test run.

throwaway81523 2y ago
> Then we can rip this out later, or submit a patch to opt everyone out. I trust Mozilla to accept such a patch much more than I do Google. It's not irreversible, it's an ongoing negotiation. Like removing the UI option to turn off Javascript? In fact they've now made it near impossible to turn off Javascript in a running window. (You can turn it off before it begins to run, but it used to be possible to turn it off after it had already started running, say to populate a page that you wanted to look at). When has a revenue-generating "test" ever been reversed? Anyway, what info that advertisers are currently getting, will be withheld from them under the new regime? If they will get everything they got before, plus more stuff besides, that can only make things worse. Most of us think that it's plenty bad already. > That way, legitimate advertisers get the limited conversion rate information they desperately want from enough people who aren't interested one way or the other, and those who are diametrically opposed to the entire concept are perfectly able to turn it off before their first browsing action. By that logic, it's ideal for the Mafia to recognize a "do not kidnap" button that anyone diametrically opposed to kidnapping could choose to wear. They are then free to kidnap anyone not wearing the button. I could accept it being the other way around (they can kidnap you if you wear an opt-in button) though I'd hope they get few takers. In fact, the statistical "great unwashed" info does tons of damage in its own right, and that's why it's not ok to simply exclude a few self-selected outliers. Shoshana Zuboff's book "Surveillance Capitalism" goes into this. They want to make behavioural predictions about whole populations, and "differential privacy" is one of the obfuscations they use to sell invasions that enable that. Disclaimer: I haven't read the book yet--it's been on my list for a long time. I got the above info (about predicting population behaviour) from reading an online interview with the author. IDK if she mentions differential privacy specifically. That conflict is my own interpretation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

throwaway81523 2y ago

> Then we can rip this out later, or submit a patch to opt everyone out. I trust Mozilla to accept such a patch much more than I do Google. It's not irreversible, it's an ongoing negotiation. Like removing the UI option to turn off Javascript? In fact they've now made it near impossible to turn off Javascript in a running window. (You can turn it off before it begins to run, but it used to be possible to turn it off after it had already started running, say to populate a page that you wanted to look at). When has a revenue-generating "test" ever been reversed? Anyway, what info that advertisers are currently getting, will be withheld from them under the new regime? If they will get everything they got before, plus more stuff besides, that can only make things worse. Most of us think that it's plenty bad already. > That way, legitimate advertisers get the limited conversion rate information they desperately want from enough people who aren't interested one way or the other, and those who are diametrically opposed to the entire concept are perfectly able to turn it off before their first browsing action. By that logic, it's ideal for the Mafia to recognize a "do not kidnap" button that anyone diametrically opposed to kidnapping could choose to wear. They are then free to kidnap anyone not wearing the button. I could accept it being the other way around (they can kidnap you if you wear an opt-in button) though I'd hope they get few takers. In fact, the statistical "great unwashed" info does tons of damage in its own right, and that's why it's not ok to simply exclude a few self-selected outliers. Shoshana Zuboff's book "Surveillance Capitalism" goes into this. They want to make behavioural predictions about whole populations, and "differential privacy" is one of the obfuscations they use to sell invasions that enable that. Disclaimer: I haven't read the book yet--it's been on my list for a long time. I got the above info (about predicting population behaviour) from reading an online interview with the author. IDK if she mentions differential privacy specifically. That conflict is my own interpretation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism