6 ms·

Interesting the Mozilla board interpreted "ease off the Google reliance money" to mean "become Google" The core of the problem is really in this very paragraph

Interesting the Mozilla board interpreted "ease off the Google reliance money" to mean "become Google" The core of the problem is really in this very paragraph: > Right now, the tradeoffs people are asked to make online are too significant. Yes, advertising enables free access to most of what the internet provides, but the lack of practical control we all have over how our data is collected and shared is unacceptable. And solutions to this problem that simply rely on handing more of our data to a few gigantic private companies are not really solutions that help the people who use the internet, at all. There is no solution to this. You can't advertise effectively and profitably without personal information. No matter how much you try to chop up and anonymize data, it's still personal and even in the absence of information you can wind up collecting a lot of data about someone (as browser fingerprinting does often times). The more information you have, the more is paid. Not even Apple avoids this, despite their privacy claims, and they too see there's far more money to be made as an ad network than letting Google gobble up the space. But as much as I personally dislike this, my guess will be that this is the most successful (financially) change Mozilla enacts.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago
I worry that this accepts the premise/the marketing spiel big advertisement is selling. We can't really test the alternatives effectively, without getting an adequate mass of ad buyers and ad sellers to be willing to try un-/less- targeted.
wmwragg 2y ago
It used to be completely normal, and profitable, to effectively advertise without personal information. The idea that this is now required for advertising is just wrong, and shouldn't be accepted as such
- Alupis 2y ago
  > The idea that this is now required for advertising is just wrong, and shouldn't be accepted as such Then people complain about seeing diaper ads when they don't even have a baby. Some extremist will come along and assert that just means we shouldn't allow advertising at all...
  - mossTechnician 2y ago
    > Then people complain about seeing diaper ads when they don't even have a baby. The opposite is worse. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
    - Alupis 2y ago
      I don't see how your cited article is "worse" in any way. They used intuition to deduce what items a customer might be interested in based on their other purchases. > One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. A cashier at the corner store can deduce as much by paying attention to their customers. When you check out at the grocery store with pizza dough, pepperoni and cheese in your basket - the cashier might deduce you're making pizza and even suggest trying a particular brand of sauce or whatever. Relevant, targeted ads are actually a lot less annoying to most people because they're relevant.
      - mossTechnician 2y ago
        I personally don't buy into the notion that advertisement is inherently good or necessary. Especially when the "best" ads effectively manipulate emotions and remain in people's subconscious. A corner store cashier does not have the raw processing power and money of an ad network. If they tracked one customer with as much of vigilance as the average ad network, they should probably get slapped with a restraining order.
        Alupis 2y ago
        The article you linked to, regarding Target, is exactly what your corner store cashier is doing. There is literally no difference. You are conflating two different things - stores retargeting existing customers and recommending products they think are relevant vs. ad networks like Google that track you across channels so that they may serve the most relevant ads to you based on your interests. Neither are bad, and both are necessary. Tampon advertisements, for example, have no effect on men - men would find it annoying to see tampon adverts constantly because they are not part of the market. Why would an advertiser want to advertise to people who will never make a purchase or care about their products? If you're a hiker though, it's really fitting to get advertisements for hiking gear and equipment.
- tzs 2y ago
  > It used to be completely normal, and profitable, to effectively advertise without personal information. It used to be completely normal to get all of our news and entertainment through a small number of curated channels. What works for advertising in that environment won't necessarily work in the massively different news and entertainment environment we now have.
  - eesmith 2y ago
    "Small" means what? Four TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS), plus independents. Several dozen radio networks. Shortwave if you are really into world news like the BBC or Radio Moscow. The local newspaper. A big city used to have several. If you are in a small place you might also subscribe to the nearest big city paper, and/or the New York Times or other major city paper. I knew people who received the local paper via mail from the small town they came from. Every one of those is a potential news source, though for major news they mostly used wire news services. And then there's the weekly and monthly news magazines (Time, The Economist, etc.) That's far less of a bottleneck on news distribution than we have now, where a couple of advertising companies dominate the entire market. I cannot believe that a digital marketplace, which has less overhead than a physical one, requires user tracking and behavioral marketing in order to survive. I find it much easier to believe that user tracking and behavioral marketing gives the ability to out-compete more ethical context-based marketing, just like how companies which dump their waste right into the river can out-compete companies which treat their waste first.
  - pessimizer 2y ago
    > It used to be completely normal to get all of our news and entertainment through a small number of curated channels. Before the 90s, there were one or two orders of magnitude more channels for information than there are now. There may be a bunch of brands now, but all the people who own, run, and make the final decision about what goes on them could fit in my bathroom. Seeing our new, concentrated media culture as diverse requires the intentional deception of ignoring that this claimed diversity is delivered through precariously employed independent contracting "content providers" who all have to pass through half a dozen gatekeepers who have complete control of their income and message at any time, with no oversight (except through various forms of informal government intimidation.) It's not "what works for advertising," it's what works for the tiny number of incestuous oligarchs with media publishing arms and the politicians they pay for. It's also a matchmaking problem: publications used to have subjects, and advertise things related to those subjects. Now the content is generic, fact-free jingoistic sludge that people are tricked into reading by manipulatively vague headlines, advertising random shit that happened to win a realtime auction. I absolutely promise that you could keep your fishing website afloat advertising fishing gear, but only if the market and fishing gear manufacturers were operating individually and rationally, rather than based on calculations motivated by complex ownership structures and market manipulation.
- lovethevoid 2y ago
  It was never normal or profitable to advertise without personal information online. One of the first selling points to companies making the transition digitally was because things could get so much more personalized than just seeing a basic billboard in person.
krunck 2y ago
> advertising enables free access The solution is to pay for the tools you use.
WCSTombs 2y ago
> You can't advertise effectively and profitably without personal information. There are plenty of successful creators (e.g., on YouTube) that do exactly that, by getting advertisers to sponsor them. From what I understand, it seems to work pretty well. Those advertisements obviously can't use personal information, since they're part of the video.
- lovethevoid 2y ago
  They do use personal information, and YouTube provides creators (and their ad partners) with a lot of personal information. It makes it very easy for a company to note what channels have fanbases that are for eg. 18-24 year old straight males who mostly live in the midwest, are single, play video games, use android phones, likes/dislikes xyz, uses these sites, etc. and advertise things to them. There are some general ones who won't use targeted personal advertising, but for the most part, this personal information is why you will never see gym supplements being advertised on feminine beauty channels (despite channels being open to the money), or mascara products advertised on a gamer channel (again, despite them being open to the $$$).

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

I worry that this accepts the premise/the marketing spiel big advertisement is selling. We can't really test the alternatives effectively, without getting an adequate mass of ad buyers and ad sellers to be willing to try un-/less- targeted.

wmwragg 2y ago

It used to be completely normal, and profitable, to effectively advertise without personal information. The idea that this is now required for advertising is just wrong, and shouldn't be accepted as such

Alupis 2y ago
> The idea that this is now required for advertising is just wrong, and shouldn't be accepted as such Then people complain about seeing diaper ads when they don't even have a baby. Some extremist will come along and assert that just means we shouldn't allow advertising at all...
- mossTechnician 2y ago
  > Then people complain about seeing diaper ads when they don't even have a baby. The opposite is worse. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
  - Alupis 2y ago
    I don't see how your cited article is "worse" in any way. They used intuition to deduce what items a customer might be interested in based on their other purchases. > One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. A cashier at the corner store can deduce as much by paying attention to their customers. When you check out at the grocery store with pizza dough, pepperoni and cheese in your basket - the cashier might deduce you're making pizza and even suggest trying a particular brand of sauce or whatever. Relevant, targeted ads are actually a lot less annoying to most people because they're relevant.
    - mossTechnician 2y ago
      I personally don't buy into the notion that advertisement is inherently good or necessary. Especially when the "best" ads effectively manipulate emotions and remain in people's subconscious. A corner store cashier does not have the raw processing power and money of an ad network. If they tracked one customer with as much of vigilance as the average ad network, they should probably get slapped with a restraining order.
      - Alupis 2y ago
        The article you linked to, regarding Target, is exactly what your corner store cashier is doing. There is literally no difference. You are conflating two different things - stores retargeting existing customers and recommending products they think are relevant vs. ad networks like Google that track you across channels so that they may serve the most relevant ads to you based on your interests. Neither are bad, and both are necessary. Tampon advertisements, for example, have no effect on men - men would find it annoying to see tampon adverts constantly because they are not part of the market. Why would an advertiser want to advertise to people who will never make a purchase or care about their products? If you're a hiker though, it's really fitting to get advertisements for hiking gear and equipment.
tzs 2y ago
> It used to be completely normal, and profitable, to effectively advertise without personal information. It used to be completely normal to get all of our news and entertainment through a small number of curated channels. What works for advertising in that environment won't necessarily work in the massively different news and entertainment environment we now have.
- eesmith 2y ago
  "Small" means what? Four TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS), plus independents. Several dozen radio networks. Shortwave if you are really into world news like the BBC or Radio Moscow. The local newspaper. A big city used to have several. If you are in a small place you might also subscribe to the nearest big city paper, and/or the New York Times or other major city paper. I knew people who received the local paper via mail from the small town they came from. Every one of those is a potential news source, though for major news they mostly used wire news services. And then there's the weekly and monthly news magazines (Time, The Economist, etc.) That's far less of a bottleneck on news distribution than we have now, where a couple of advertising companies dominate the entire market. I cannot believe that a digital marketplace, which has less overhead than a physical one, requires user tracking and behavioral marketing in order to survive. I find it much easier to believe that user tracking and behavioral marketing gives the ability to out-compete more ethical context-based marketing, just like how companies which dump their waste right into the river can out-compete companies which treat their waste first.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  > It used to be completely normal to get all of our news and entertainment through a small number of curated channels. Before the 90s, there were one or two orders of magnitude more channels for information than there are now. There may be a bunch of brands now, but all the people who own, run, and make the final decision about what goes on them could fit in my bathroom. Seeing our new, concentrated media culture as diverse requires the intentional deception of ignoring that this claimed diversity is delivered through precariously employed independent contracting "content providers" who all have to pass through half a dozen gatekeepers who have complete control of their income and message at any time, with no oversight (except through various forms of informal government intimidation.) It's not "what works for advertising," it's what works for the tiny number of incestuous oligarchs with media publishing arms and the politicians they pay for. It's also a matchmaking problem: publications used to have subjects, and advertise things related to those subjects. Now the content is generic, fact-free jingoistic sludge that people are tricked into reading by manipulatively vague headlines, advertising random shit that happened to win a realtime auction. I absolutely promise that you could keep your fishing website afloat advertising fishing gear, but only if the market and fishing gear manufacturers were operating individually and rationally, rather than based on calculations motivated by complex ownership structures and market manipulation.
lovethevoid 2y ago
It was never normal or profitable to advertise without personal information online. One of the first selling points to companies making the transition digitally was because things could get so much more personalized than just seeing a basic billboard in person.

krunck 2y ago

> advertising enables free access The solution is to pay for the tools you use.

WCSTombs 2y ago

> You can't advertise effectively and profitably without personal information. There are plenty of successful creators (e.g., on YouTube) that do exactly that, by getting advertisers to sponsor them. From what I understand, it seems to work pretty well. Those advertisements obviously can't use personal information, since they're part of the video.

lovethevoid 2y ago
They do use personal information, and YouTube provides creators (and their ad partners) with a lot of personal information. It makes it very easy for a company to note what channels have fanbases that are for eg. 18-24 year old straight males who mostly live in the midwest, are single, play video games, use android phones, likes/dislikes xyz, uses these sites, etc. and advertise things to them. There are some general ones who won't use targeted personal advertising, but for the most part, this personal information is why you will never see gym supplements being advertised on feminine beauty channels (despite channels being open to the money), or mascara products advertised on a gamer channel (again, despite them being open to the $$$).