6 ms·

The EFF might not like it, and most internet users might not like it either, but being able to track users pays for most of the free content we consume on the i

by steve19 11y ago

The EFF might not like it, and most internet users might not like it either, but being able to track users pays for most of the free content we consume on the internet. Thats just the reality. Less pragmatic people might argue "micro payments" or some such idea, but the fact is people have never really paid for news. News has always been subsidised heavily by advertising. Almost everyone who argues this is running an Adblocker. Also third party cookies (and ads) are something any internet user can disable in a few clicks.

nosnoopcharter 11y ago
Whatever you think of advertising, it doesn't have to enable government spying. Moving ads to HTTPS would solve the eavesdropping problem. Google has already announced it's doing just that. Also, it's not that simple for an Internet user to stop tracking or advertising. According to an academic paper from a few years back, there are dozens of ways to track a user, and many protections aren't very effective. https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/files/publication/files/trackingsurvey12.pdf https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/files/publication/files/tracki...
- hobs 11y ago
  If entities on the internet are incentivized to track you, its likely the government can get the data whether or not it is encrypted in transit. (NSL, Hacking the company, blackmail, bribery, legal/business/tax threats, other court order)
  - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
    (NSL, Hacking the company, blackmail, bribery, legal/business/tax threats, other court order) That's how things used to work. The government has always wanted to track specific people for specific reasons. Perhaps 1% (debatable) of the population. Like it or not, they will keep doing that. What is abhorrent to me is that the government has decided to track 100% of the people 100% of the time. That's what everyone is fighting against.
teamhappy 11y ago
How is proposing a solution for an acute problem "less pragmatic" than proceeding as if nothing changed? It's true that we never payed for news, but news isn't what it used to be either. News is written by your friends these days, not companies (I'm exaggerating, but still). Micro payments seem to be the best replacement we currently have. They're not just useful for blogs an the like, but also open source software development — and with Bitcoin around, we might not even need services like Flattr all together. The pragmatic thing to do is to give micro payments a fair shot.
higherpurpose 11y ago
I believe advertising based on tracking users across websites is more of a recent phenomenon. I don't really have a problem with a contextual ad based on what I'm currently looking at. I have a problem with ads that are contextual based on everything I've been visiting for the past month. I doubt the effectiveness of the ad is drastically improved in the second case. But even if it's improved only by 10%, the ad industry would rather aggressively violate users' privacy to get that extra 10%.
c22 11y ago
Before this was the norm I used to consume tons of free content from the internet, frankly most of it was higher quality too.
weland 11y ago
There was plenty of high-quality content before tracking user became something worth paying for. Being able to track users pays for most of the crap content on the Internet -- much of which is there to support tracking users, not the other way 'round. It can go the way of the dodo as far as I'm concerned.
fl0wenol 11y ago
Whatever it is that is being paid for by participation in ad networks or affiliate programs tracking users... I don't want it. They can just go away or pivot or whatever. I'm sure 95% of it is crap, and if I cared to save the other 5% that got caught up in it and didn't have a plan B, maybe I'd suggest they open a Patreon or something.
beedogs 11y ago
Most of the free content we consume on the Internet is garbage, and if it all up and disappeared tomorrow, we'd be better off for it. I block tracking cookies as a matter of course, and I wish everyone did the same.
venomsnake 11y ago
I don't want content to be free. I want it to be reasonably priced, and to have easy ways to pay anonymously. Some variation of bitcoin would do wonders for that.
belorn 11y ago
News in Sweden was and is still mostly being paid by a pseudo-tax, one which is currently heavily discussed to be reformed into a real tax instead of the old system that was based on TV ownership. Few is actually promoting the idea of removing it competently and relying fully on ad supported news. If we removed all state supported media, and removed any kind of donation based journalism, and blogs done on a volunteer basis, and patreon, and ignored the vacuum that ad supported news would create if they all when away, then maybe, maybe, news as free content would go away? Of course, review sites and similar news which informs people about products will still be there. People don't need to be tracked if they chose to seek up content which a company is willing to support.
realusername 11y ago
It used indeed to pay for the content. But the amount of money paid to the websites decreased so much in the past few years it's not the case anymore. These days, advertising is mostly only worth it for clickbait article generators. Every website with a few employee with actual content you see on the internet has at least one or two other ways to get money because advertising is not paying enough these days.
- nl 11y ago
  That simply isn't true. Take a fairly well respected tech publication like ArsTechnica. Their revenue is almost completely based on advertising[1] to the point that they experimented with blocking people using ad blockers[2] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_Technica#Revenue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_Technica#Revenue [2] http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/03/how-ars-technica-made-the-ask-of-ad-blocking-readers/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/03/how-ars-technica-made-the-a...
  - realusername 11y ago
    They are absolutely not representative of the average website, it's a massively popular website (look at the Alexa rank) and of course advertising works for this kind of websites because you have some leverage to negociate. I'm talking about the majority here. (And even them started to try paid membership, it really tells you the current state of advertising.)
forgottenpass 11y ago
A popular practice is popular because of business incentives? Well, no shit. Everything in the status quo is there for a reason. If there wasn't incentive to do things, nobody would do it or it'd be easy to kill. The point of organizations like the EFF is to not give up the importance of externalities as soon as someone offers a rationalization that the internalities are nice.
jasonkostempski 11y ago
People make money off some advertising that doesn't/couldn't do tracking at the individual level. Why must internet ads include tracking of individuals? Just because they can? 2 companies could work out an agreement to show a static image that links to a specific page somewhere for some amount of time for a certain price and it could be hosted in the same domain as the content. Granted, it's not as convenient as the drop-in scripts. New sites would have to prove themselves before anyone would want to advertise with them and known sites would have to keep producing quality content if they want to keep their high paying advertisers. Maybe there's a third-party that collects a small fee to verify agreements are being followed if trust hasn't been established or comes into question.
fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
Just so you know. I don't particularly mind many ads, even targeted ads; on rare occasions I've even found them helpful. I do mind being followed around and stalked though.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  How do you propose that they target you without first understanding you?
  - fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
    By obtaining permission or establishing a mutually beneficial relationship that is fully disclosed, revocable, and that I have some degree of control over. Not with some catch all disclaimer "By continuing to use this site you hereby agree to allow us or our partners to follow you around and log your behavior and sell your dossier as a product and or service..." Most of all, by fucking off if I tick the box that says fuck off I don't want to be stalked right now/ever. An example of a thing that I don't mind is if Amazon or some company that I have a relationship with noticed the frequency that I buy certain things like pet food or some other consumable and started placing relevant ads at about the time I might need to buy it again. I'd also like to be able to reject certain suppliers. I don't necessarily want them selling that info to the vendor(s), at least not without anonymizing it. An example of a thing that I recently found amusing/annoying is that I purchased a large ticket home appliance recently, and for a week or more after that purchase there was a huge increase in ads for that particular large ticket item, as if I might buy more of them or something. An example of a thing that I absolutely don't want is to tracked by companies / affiliate networks / whatever that I have no relationship with, and who basically just follow me around and sell a dossier of my browsing habits to anyone and everyone who wants it. Even if that means I can't have cat videos for free, or have to pay a little more for stuff.
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      I agree with all of this. It is just impractical - hence adblocking... > An example of a thing that I recently found amusing/annoying is that I purchased a large ticket home appliance recently, and for a week or more after that purchase there was a huge increase in ads for that particular large ticket item, as if I might buy more of them or something. This is actually solid marketing. They are trying to re-enforce in your mind that you made a good purchase. This should prevent buyers remorse and is aimed to manipulate you into telling other people how great your new whatever is.
mrweasel 11y ago
I sort of agree with you, but I do remember having newspapers that didn't have ads, or at least extremely few. The bottom line is, in my mind, that if you can't make money selling your product, and needs to resort to ads to make a profit, then your products existence isn't justified. Displaying ads move money from profitable product, typically physical one, to products that doesn't provide any real value of their own. The Internet is ruined in some degree, because we never paid for anything initially, so when companies moved in, it was expected that their stuff would be free to. Now we're stuck in a situation where the online only companies for the most part can't make money, without pimping the wares of companies with physical products, or selling their users data.
- TylerE 11y ago
  Don't forget, Classifies are advertising, and used to be a HUGE part of the newspaper revenue stream. Post-Ebay/Craig's List, not so much.
  - mrweasel 11y ago
    In the US perhaps, not so much here in Denmark, but a valid point though.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    Newspapers really fucked themselves by sticking to unnamed old-school practices: $15-$50 for 2-3 lines in print, no online-only option for more copy and lower price. They could have simply out-Craigslisted Craigslist with online but chose not to. In the process the abandoned the market completely.
    - TylerE 11y ago
      I used to work in the biz. We tried. We found any price > $0 to be nonviable.
      - dredmorbius 11y ago
        So has Craigslist. All adverts are free, with the following exceptions: Help-wanted employment ads. Housing, in New York City. I believe a few other classifications, including "for sale by dealer" ads in some markets may also be paid. The point is that most of your advertising activity does little but make a market: providing liquidity and interest in the classifieds market itself. Within a select number of classifications, there are sufficient numbers of large players, readily identified and monetized, that you can support the rest of the operation. Newspapers were basing forward models on past, not recognizing what had changed, or that it was simply necessary to support the classifieds marketplace itself on net, not to equitably charge every last comer. What happened was that everyone fled. Curiously, Craigslist is starting to get upended in specific classifications where other services can beat their offerings, not on price but on quality. Personals, some jobs classifications, "by dealer categories" (furniture's been worthless for years and years, etc. The problem for CL has always been that it relied on low-tech and pretty coarsely-operating crap filters, and increasingly those classifications are overrun. The marginal cost of provision fell. No, classifieds weren't going to remain the cash cow they once were, but some market remained.

by steve19 11y ago

nosnoopcharter 11y ago

Whatever you think of advertising, it doesn't have to enable government spying. Moving ads to HTTPS would solve the eavesdropping problem. Google has already announced it's doing just that. Also, it's not that simple for an Internet user to stop tracking or advertising. According to an academic paper from a few years back, there are dozens of ways to track a user, and many protections aren't very effective. https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/files/publication/files/trackingsurvey12.pdf https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/files/publication/files/tracki...

hobs 11y ago
If entities on the internet are incentivized to track you, its likely the government can get the data whether or not it is encrypted in transit. (NSL, Hacking the company, blackmail, bribery, legal/business/tax threats, other court order)
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  (NSL, Hacking the company, blackmail, bribery, legal/business/tax threats, other court order) That's how things used to work. The government has always wanted to track specific people for specific reasons. Perhaps 1% (debatable) of the population. Like it or not, they will keep doing that. What is abhorrent to me is that the government has decided to track 100% of the people 100% of the time. That's what everyone is fighting against.

teamhappy 11y ago

How is proposing a solution for an acute problem "less pragmatic" than proceeding as if nothing changed? It's true that we never payed for news, but news isn't what it used to be either. News is written by your friends these days, not companies (I'm exaggerating, but still). Micro payments seem to be the best replacement we currently have. They're not just useful for blogs an the like, but also open source software development — and with Bitcoin around, we might not even need services like Flattr all together. The pragmatic thing to do is to give micro payments a fair shot.

higherpurpose 11y ago

I believe advertising based on tracking users across websites is more of a recent phenomenon. I don't really have a problem with a contextual ad based on what I'm currently looking at. I have a problem with ads that are contextual based on everything I've been visiting for the past month. I doubt the effectiveness of the ad is drastically improved in the second case. But even if it's improved only by 10%, the ad industry would rather aggressively violate users' privacy to get that extra 10%.

c22 11y ago

Before this was the norm I used to consume tons of free content from the internet, frankly most of it was higher quality too.

weland 11y ago

There was plenty of high-quality content before tracking user became something worth paying for. Being able to track users pays for most of the crap content on the Internet -- much of which is there to support tracking users, not the other way 'round. It can go the way of the dodo as far as I'm concerned.

fl0wenol 11y ago

Whatever it is that is being paid for by participation in ad networks or affiliate programs tracking users... I don't want it. They can just go away or pivot or whatever. I'm sure 95% of it is crap, and if I cared to save the other 5% that got caught up in it and didn't have a plan B, maybe I'd suggest they open a Patreon or something.

beedogs 11y ago

Most of the free content we consume on the Internet is garbage, and if it all up and disappeared tomorrow, we'd be better off for it. I block tracking cookies as a matter of course, and I wish everyone did the same.

venomsnake 11y ago

I don't want content to be free. I want it to be reasonably priced, and to have easy ways to pay anonymously. Some variation of bitcoin would do wonders for that.

belorn 11y ago

News in Sweden was and is still mostly being paid by a pseudo-tax, one which is currently heavily discussed to be reformed into a real tax instead of the old system that was based on TV ownership. Few is actually promoting the idea of removing it competently and relying fully on ad supported news. If we removed all state supported media, and removed any kind of donation based journalism, and blogs done on a volunteer basis, and patreon, and ignored the vacuum that ad supported news would create if they all when away, then maybe, maybe, news as free content would go away? Of course, review sites and similar news which informs people about products will still be there. People don't need to be tracked if they chose to seek up content which a company is willing to support.

realusername 11y ago

It used indeed to pay for the content. But the amount of money paid to the websites decreased so much in the past few years it's not the case anymore. These days, advertising is mostly only worth it for clickbait article generators. Every website with a few employee with actual content you see on the internet has at least one or two other ways to get money because advertising is not paying enough these days.

nl 11y ago
That simply isn't true. Take a fairly well respected tech publication like ArsTechnica. Their revenue is almost completely based on advertising[1] to the point that they experimented with blocking people using ad blockers[2] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_Technica#Revenue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_Technica#Revenue [2] http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/03/how-ars-technica-made-the-ask-of-ad-blocking-readers/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/03/how-ars-technica-made-the-a...
- realusername 11y ago
  They are absolutely not representative of the average website, it's a massively popular website (look at the Alexa rank) and of course advertising works for this kind of websites because you have some leverage to negociate. I'm talking about the majority here. (And even them started to try paid membership, it really tells you the current state of advertising.)

forgottenpass 11y ago

A popular practice is popular because of business incentives? Well, no shit. Everything in the status quo is there for a reason. If there wasn't incentive to do things, nobody would do it or it'd be easy to kill. The point of organizations like the EFF is to not give up the importance of externalities as soon as someone offers a rationalization that the internalities are nice.

jasonkostempski 11y ago

People make money off some advertising that doesn't/couldn't do tracking at the individual level. Why must internet ads include tracking of individuals? Just because they can? 2 companies could work out an agreement to show a static image that links to a specific page somewhere for some amount of time for a certain price and it could be hosted in the same domain as the content. Granted, it's not as convenient as the drop-in scripts. New sites would have to prove themselves before anyone would want to advertise with them and known sites would have to keep producing quality content if they want to keep their high paying advertisers. Maybe there's a third-party that collects a small fee to verify agreements are being followed if trust hasn't been established or comes into question.

fnordfnordfnord 11y ago

Just so you know. I don't particularly mind many ads, even targeted ads; on rare occasions I've even found them helpful. I do mind being followed around and stalked though.

JupiterMoon 11y ago
How do you propose that they target you without first understanding you?
- fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
  By obtaining permission or establishing a mutually beneficial relationship that is fully disclosed, revocable, and that I have some degree of control over. Not with some catch all disclaimer "By continuing to use this site you hereby agree to allow us or our partners to follow you around and log your behavior and sell your dossier as a product and or service..." Most of all, by fucking off if I tick the box that says fuck off I don't want to be stalked right now/ever. An example of a thing that I don't mind is if Amazon or some company that I have a relationship with noticed the frequency that I buy certain things like pet food or some other consumable and started placing relevant ads at about the time I might need to buy it again. I'd also like to be able to reject certain suppliers. I don't necessarily want them selling that info to the vendor(s), at least not without anonymizing it. An example of a thing that I recently found amusing/annoying is that I purchased a large ticket home appliance recently, and for a week or more after that purchase there was a huge increase in ads for that particular large ticket item, as if I might buy more of them or something. An example of a thing that I absolutely don't want is to tracked by companies / affiliate networks / whatever that I have no relationship with, and who basically just follow me around and sell a dossier of my browsing habits to anyone and everyone who wants it. Even if that means I can't have cat videos for free, or have to pay a little more for stuff.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    I agree with all of this. It is just impractical - hence adblocking... > An example of a thing that I recently found amusing/annoying is that I purchased a large ticket home appliance recently, and for a week or more after that purchase there was a huge increase in ads for that particular large ticket item, as if I might buy more of them or something. This is actually solid marketing. They are trying to re-enforce in your mind that you made a good purchase. This should prevent buyers remorse and is aimed to manipulate you into telling other people how great your new whatever is.

mrweasel 11y ago

I sort of agree with you, but I do remember having newspapers that didn't have ads, or at least extremely few. The bottom line is, in my mind, that if you can't make money selling your product, and needs to resort to ads to make a profit, then your products existence isn't justified. Displaying ads move money from profitable product, typically physical one, to products that doesn't provide any real value of their own. The Internet is ruined in some degree, because we never paid for anything initially, so when companies moved in, it was expected that their stuff would be free to. Now we're stuck in a situation where the online only companies for the most part can't make money, without pimping the wares of companies with physical products, or selling their users data.

TylerE 11y ago
Don't forget, Classifies are advertising, and used to be a HUGE part of the newspaper revenue stream. Post-Ebay/Craig's List, not so much.
- mrweasel 11y ago
  In the US perhaps, not so much here in Denmark, but a valid point though.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Newspapers really fucked themselves by sticking to unnamed old-school practices: $15-$50 for 2-3 lines in print, no online-only option for more copy and lower price. They could have simply out-Craigslisted Craigslist with online but chose not to. In the process the abandoned the market completely.
  - TylerE 11y ago
    I used to work in the biz. We tried. We found any price > $0 to be nonviable.
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      So has Craigslist. All adverts are free, with the following exceptions: Help-wanted employment ads. Housing, in New York City. I believe a few other classifications, including "for sale by dealer" ads in some markets may also be paid. The point is that most of your advertising activity does little but make a market: providing liquidity and interest in the classifieds market itself. Within a select number of classifications, there are sufficient numbers of large players, readily identified and monetized, that you can support the rest of the operation. Newspapers were basing forward models on past, not recognizing what had changed, or that it was simply necessary to support the classifieds marketplace itself on net, not to equitably charge every last comer. What happened was that everyone fled. Curiously, Craigslist is starting to get upended in specific classifications where other services can beat their offerings, not on price but on quality. Personals, some jobs classifications, "by dealer categories" (furniture's been worthless for years and years, etc. The problem for CL has always been that it relied on low-tech and pretty coarsely-operating crap filters, and increasingly those classifications are overrun. The marginal cost of provision fell. No, classifieds weren't going to remain the cash cow they once were, but some market remained.