This language to make consent popups sound good is suspicious. Not being interrupted while you're browsing is good. A browser setting that people can turn off once, for all participating websites, is good.
The browser would only have to ask once, and then it would still just be "one browser setting", except you'd be notified it exists, as soon as it exits. So what's the point here, other than trotting out the same old stuff nut about cookie banners?
On update, "this is the thing, and that thing is enabled by default, is that okay? Otherwise, click no, then it gets turned off. If you change your mind later, it's under settings -> thing"
It's not complicated, and blaming laws that enforce human rights to avoid the most basic craftsmanship is suspicious.
Such as HN? Honest question, for all I know they're breaking EU law and nobody cares. Or maybe they don't.
Anyway, pouet.net doesn't have one. It links to a ton of group sites, many European, try to count the ones that don't have a cookie banner.
For fun, I did a quick and dirty test on the HN front page at the time of this comment, out of 30 links, I counted 11 cookie banners. Let's say I missed a few (a bunch of the ones I counted were a small bar at the top or the bottom, easy to miss, not even sure if they blocked the page), let's say it's 20 out of 30. One third of all websites is still a huuuuuuge amount of websites.
I took privacy seriously before I "had to". So for me, nothing changed. Why would it? You can have a link in the footer to opt into tracking. If actually "value consent" and all that. It's a complete non-issue for most sites that have banners, they could just stop being creeps and it'd be fine. But they don't want to stop, they want to annoy users as much as legally possible and then funnel the annoyance at the laws protecting those users against them.
"Have you heard about this new thing, you have to wear something around your ankle and can't be a school teacher and stuff like that? Yeah it's really insane, how will children learn anything, ever again?"
"Wait, what are you even talking about? Have you done something?"
Of course there's corner cases, of course this can also be a hassle for sites that aren't "creeps". But generally? The same generic false claims, over and over? Just no.
>Problem one: Over-rating search, social, and app store ads
Isn't this a problem with today's ad attribution system? The author doesn't try to argue how the new system makes it worse.
>Problem two: Incentives for extra tracking
Same as above. It sounds like he's against attribution in general, which is an okay position to have, but I'd rather he say this upfront and more directly rather than spending 1k+ words on what essentially can be boiled down to "I hate Attribution Level 1 because it's attribution, and attribution is bad in general", and implying the issues he has are issues with Attribution Level 1 specifically.
Search, social and app store ads are over rated in that a lot of brands should probably decrease their investment, but things like programmatic display ads are absolutely not under rated. The correct number of dollars that should be spent on those placements is close to zero.
I guess from the advertiser's perspective this standard could be a concern, because the loss of cookie-based tracking might make it harder for them to develop alternative attribution tracking methods that don't have the same data quality problems.
The mistake is assuming this replaces anything instead of becoming just one more piece of the tracking puzzle.
Even if it did "replace" cookies or whatever, it's strictly worse than "before" because it's giving advertising a front seat in the browser. My browser should be doing precisely nothing to help you attribute your ad impressions or whatever. But now Mozilla et al have to waste their time maintaining and augmenting this opaque piece of mathematical faff.
If not you aren't really working towards them paying a lot for ads, right?
Nobody "wants" ads, but they do want the free content they get today, which are funded by ads.
You don't need pervasive and invasive tracking and wholesale trading of your data to display advertising.
Why can't it?
No idea what it's replacing. Cookies is a red herring. Tracking involves more than just cookies.
I'd like to see AppsFlyer work on this as well. Moving mobile attribution to device based would be a huge privacy benefit. But it might be quite difficult for a company like AppsFlyer to do this, so it might need to end up being pushed by Apple and Google, but as both advertising companies, they might be even less incentivized for this kind of local tracking.
Here is a more honest summary:
"This proposal hurts us, small advertisement networks and professional marketers. Reject it, or we will ramp up the tracking to compensate for the lost opportunities!"
?
This feels like a good sign, to me. I get far more worried when I see the likes of Meta, Google, Spotify, Epic etc team up.
- Mozilla, Meta, Google, Facebook
- VP of "monetization technology" company, "Marketing data expert"
We need to eliminate private companies from our browsers in general. Many years ago they called it "acceptable ads".
Advertising needs to be over now.
Interestingly $1,200 is roughly 3.5% of what the average American spends per year (roughly $78k), and $1200 is roughly 15% of the average American's discretionary spending. That doesn't seem too crazy to me as a cost for the main driver of the matching and branding system of the capitalist economy of the United States.
Imagine if all google results were ranked purely based on advertising potential... this is already starting to happen and it clearly makes google noticeably worse.
Not only is it bad for people and society, but it also undermines the whole idea of open and fair competition in a capitalist system - why do I need to make my product better if I can just spam advertising and dishonest marketing instead?
In the "advertising led" model of customer discovery, businesses advertise to essentially tell the market that they exist and provide a service. They do so by paying for advertising space across various mediums. This includes everything from their store signage to Craigslist ads, to TV and sophisticated digital advertising.
Most modern advertising is an auction where businesses compete to serve their message to customers the algorithms think are most likely to be interested.
This function - of matching users that might be interested in products to businesses providing products - is at this point hugely scaled.
People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. That, they say, would be the ideal method of product discovery, along with word of mouth.
However, that runs immediately into the same problem that communism has historically. Who actually controls these directories, which would be a huge source of power for society? I posit that that it is impossible to centralize this effectively, and that the most likely most effective method for idea and product dispersal is something close to modern marketing and advertising.
If we can build a (centralized or decentralized) system capable of querying/serving content based on price and ad revenue projections, we can also build system capable of querying/serving content based on relevance, ratings, reviews and any number of parameters.
You seem to imply that advertising and marketing give us some kind of advantage in terms of (de) centralization, but that's really not true. The whole purpose of advertising is MAKE people look at ads despite the fact that almost nobody actually enjoys or values looking at ads, whether it's run as a centralized or decentralized model is an implementation detail.
> Technically, the way it works is that a script running on a site with ads asks the browser to record an ad impression. Then the browser keeps a record of ads seen from all the sites you visit. Later, when you buy something, the retail site can ask the browser to generate a “conversion report” that can be passed to a centralized aggregation service.
If so, you can’t be tied to a specific purchase but you can be so tightly grouped it’s basically the same.
Combined with the other 200+ tracking points from your machine... Yes, yes you can be identified.