The advertising cartel coming to your web browser

https://blog.zgp.org/the-advertising-cartel-coming-to-your-web-browser/

by speckx • 2 months ago

246 70 2 months ago

blog.zgp.org

gruez3• 2 months ago

I'm not sure what this blog is complaining about.

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.

Ajedi326• 2 months ago

Agreed, this can't be worse than what it's replacing. Still, the author has some interesting points I hadn't considered before.

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.

akersten• 2 months ago

Agreed, this can't be worse than what it's replacing.

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.

devmor2• 2 months ago

Agreed, this can't be worse than what it's replacing.

Why can't it?

crowcroft• 2 months ago

The issue is that problem one is real, but not in a way that's beneficial to other advertising products.

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.

AndrewKemendo• 2 months ago

So they “reinvented” HTTP cookies but with only advertisers?

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.

gruez3• 2 months ago

More importantly it's privacy preserving because it doesn't allow for bidirectional communication, which third party cookies could do.

Ajedi326• 2 months ago

Sort of. Cookies track you as an individual with a unique identifier. The conversion report only tracks anonymized aggregate statistics that can't be used to identify you as an individual.

troupo4• 2 months ago

The conversion report only tracks anonymized aggregate statistics that can't be used to identify you as an individual.

Combined with the other 200+ tracking points from your machine... Yes, yes you can be identified.

xmcp123• 2 months ago

This sounds a lot like “you’re getting analyzed by AI/ML, tied to a specific bucket of similar users, then your continued data expands the bucket, splitting off into different adhoc buckets of similar users”

If so, you can’t be tied to a specific purchase but you can be so tightly grouped it’s basically the same.

sandcat_• 2 months ago

When Meta, Google and Apple [and Mozilla] agree on a “privacy” feature, watch out.

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.

SirFatty• 2 months ago

And you think that they team up for your benefit?

theamk3• 2 months ago

Most people (and orgs) do things that benefit themselves. The question as a user, who is likely to be more aligned with you?

- Mozilla, Meta, Google, Facebook

- VP of "monetization technology" company, "Marketing data expert"

theamk3• 2 months ago

This seems like this is written by an advertiser who wants their profits, but pretending to care about privacy so they get users' support.

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!"

ddxv2• 2 months ago

I just spent an hour reading the WC3 proposal and I indeed think this is the core problem with it, and I came to agree with the original post here, this is a change that will benefit advertising networks and remove transparency for advertisers that want to verify ad networks.

As a user I do not mind when an advertiser (eg Nike) tracks what blog I came from to Nike website. My concern is a Meta / Google that tracks every site I was on and went to. So in this way, I think advertisers and users should be aligned.

skybrian• 2 months ago

Don’t look for a section on permissions or consent in that document, by the way. There isn’t one. And nothing about nerd lawyer stuff like “opt out of sale” or “objections to processing” in there, either. The Big Tech companies want a two-track system, where other companies’ ad features are required to do all the privacy regulation hassles, but the browser’s own built-in tracking feature is something that people have to find the right setting for and turn off.

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.

rho138• 2 months ago

That’s what the Do Not Track signal was for, but tech bros still don’t get consent sooooooooo…

customguy4• 2 months ago

You don't need cookie banners unless you want to track the user before they opted in on their own (maybe in the "website settings"). That's why countless websites have none.

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.

SpicyLemonZest2• 2 months ago

Is it the case that "countless websites have none"? Some websites, especially small ones operated outside of the EU, simply don't care about their obligations under European law. But in my experience it's extremely rare for European websites not to feature a cookie banner. It's not like it's just corporations: the official websites of the European Commission (https://commission.europa.eu/), the presidency of France (https://www.elysee.fr/), the chancellorship of Germany (https://www.bundeskanzler.de/bk-de/), etc. all have one.

avaer• 2 months ago

Except this didn't need to be a thing at all. Nobody wants ads.

You could have no interruptions, no consent popups, and no tracking, just don't have ads.

Trying to find logic or middle ground on this issue will never make sense, because the ad cartel is based on absurd fiction: that ads are good for people, rather than just being stochastic predation on the fraction who are not successfully able to turn off the malware.

So we arrive at the absurdity that the onus is on the users to defend themselves against the product, and how to present the options to them, so that a sufficient proportion of the prey doesn't do it.

cwillu2• 2 months ago

Hell, you can have the damn ad without any tracking, and you still wouldn't need the popup.

shevy-java• 2 months ago

called Attribution Level 1, as a standard feature of web browsers

We need to eliminate private companies from our browsers in general. Many years ago they called it "acceptable ads".

powerpcmac• 2 months ago

Closed immediately due to the invasive "using this site means you agree to our terms of service!!" Popup

monk_grilla• 2 months ago

Did you read it?

sporadicism• 2 months ago

You can tell who works in adtech

troupo4• 2 months ago

The next time anyone on HN says "GDPR should've been a setting in the browser", I'll just point them to this. This is what browser vendors are making as a default setting.

cm20123• 2 months ago

"The average person in the USA has about $1200/year spent on advertising intended to reach them. Where do you want “your” $1200 spent?"

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.

rpastuszak• 2 months ago

The cost is your attention, your mental health, as well as buying things you didn’t know you needed or didn’t know you didn’t need. It’s not a level playing field.

Timon3• 2 months ago

Don't forgot the cost of worse products. If you're an honest company trying to build the best product, and your competitors choose to milk their customers instead, they can still win more market share by spending more on advertising.

Of course it's possible for customers to find out about these practices by doing research - too bad the marketing industry manages to sabotage every halfway reliable indicator after a few years.

aleqs2• 2 months ago

Except it isn't a level/merit-based 'matching and branding system', it's exactly the opposite - people see what others pay for them to see (and what's most likely to influence the viewer in a generally detrimental way), not what's actually beneficial/useful to them.

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?

cm20123• 2 months ago

Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives.

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.

hdgvhicv3• 2 months ago

That’s $3.30 a day.

In the days this was mainly spent on tv advertising the average American would watch an hour of adverts for this $3.30 (3 hours of tv)

That’s a massive drain on the economy, think what could be produced if that hour is spent on even minimum wage output.

Hizonner• 2 months ago

Time to fire up the chaffing. Or the pitchforks and torches. Either one.

Advertising needs to be over now.

ddxv2• 2 months ago

I've been wanting to build something like this for mobile advertising attribution. Mobile attribution is much worse since it by nature needs to on a device / fingerprinting level track across apps, and since there is not HTTP direct connection between the apps, the tracking is much more broad. Companies like AppsFlyer are in 20% of apps and track everything that happens in those apps.

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.

jsrozner• 2 months ago

Following the overturning of Roe v Wade, it is clear that the US needs privacy enshrined in the Constitution. For example, it is absurd to imagine a state government trying to distinguish between an abortion and a miscarriage in order to potentially prosecute; this distinction is something that no one beyond the woman should have any right to know.

It's my view that the Founders did not think to directly mention privacy since they had no capacity to imagine technology as powerful as that which enables today's surveillance capitalists. But the sort of law that would establish a general right to privacy (or the kind of values that would lead us to establish one) would likely also hinder companies from aggregating user data for any purpose other than directly serving users. (And it would also hinder the government from surveilling its citizens.)

If such an amendment were considered, we'd all fast find that most techies aren't actually liberals. Oh wait, we saw that when they all turned to support Trump. Surprise, surprise.

I promise you that when consumer and enterprise funds dry up, every one of these AI companies will be placing ads and selling surveillance and drone tech to the government. Anthropic already dropped the part of its constitution that forbid collaboration of any kind with the military. The pressure to profitability is immense.

Today, purported morality is mostly (temporary) sophistry. Most folks will work for Zsuck or Palantir if the money is good enough.

utopiah• 2 months ago

Meanwhile the most popular browser is by... google, the largest advertising corporation on Earth.

They've been there for a while now. Sadly.

pjmlp2• 2 months ago

And then to make it worse, plenty of devs see no issue shipping it with their applications instead of proper OS frameworks.

chadgpt32• 2 months ago

Are there even any proper OS frameworks any more?

semiquaver• 2 months ago

This post is already getting too long, so I won’t cover all the extra problems besides the big two.
There’s no estimate of the environmental impact of all the extra processing

The “environmental impact” of this data processing is one of the “big two” problems with the proposal? Maybe this was just a backup filler argument but it is such a silly point that it immediately makes me question the entire article. This is a massive tell that someone is arguing in bad faith.

LocalH• 2 months ago

Coming? The advertising cartel has been coming for the web browser since Google bought DoubleClick in March 2008 and then released Chrome in September.

"Eternal September II" is when Chrome was first released to the public.

The advertising cartel coming to your web browser

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