user17843

It's more like a mixture of context and client-targeting (referer for example)

I don't work in the field. I think part of the reason why my perspective diverges from yours is probably that your profession is extremely intransparent about what actually happens behind the curtain. Obviously people will speculate and err on the side of caution.

I should probably clarify that I did not mean to say that it doesn't work. What I meant is that it doesn't really work out for the publishers. The parties who profit are just first and foremost the platforms, then come the advertisers, and the publishers come last.

That explains the 1 trillion market cap. And also why Criteo didn't lose money after Apple blocked them from following their users.

I wonder if you can provide me to a study about the difference between Apple/Safari users and Google/Chrome users when it comes to advertising effectiveness, because since Safari users can not be tracked, that means according to your statement the revenue from Safari users would be way less.

because I never see any ads :P

20-30 percent of people use ad-blockers, and I think I already know the demographics compared to the exposed population.

But for a serious argument, I refer to the studies on delayed gratification and the association with education and upbringing.

Aren't A/B tests super short-term and specific to single advertisers? In the end the money in the system is limited, and if one competitor achieves a high level of revenue via A/B testing, someone else probably loses that amount of money.

I wonder whether Ad-tech has seen a reduction in revenue after Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Protection, as these users can not be tracked via cookies.

This source claims there was no significant dip for Criteo for example:

https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/08/01/despite-apple-s-game...

there are state-sponsered media like BBC, etc.

Probably.

I think it's a downward spiral, it only works because each player is forced to play along due to fundamentals of game theory.

So what we are seeing is that the methods become more ruthless every day, but everyone needs to conform, and it's a race to the bottom.

The end result is spending-fatigue and numbness in response to normal ads that are not hyper-addictive.

I also think it does not really pay off for publishers. It only really pays off for the middle men and those players who sell unethical products aimed at manipulation.

All of this money and effort to create something that has never scientifically been proven to work: Super-targeted ads, instead of contextual ads.

The context is already there. Each article on a newspaper already provides the context.

What is the true purpose of this? The true purpose is psychological control and manipulation, as well as making additional money with the data beyond ads.

Psychological manipulation gives the ability to actually create demand. And this is what this is about, because that's the only way to actually increase revenue in a meaningful way.

If you can target a person everywhere on all channels, and all the time, you can do things that are not possible with simple contextual ads, and the profiles that are being created are for lots of different purposes, not for ads.

I wait for the day some newspaper actually does an in-depth investigative study into the level of manipulation that drives sales in ad-tech, because I suspect that the entire system feeds off low-educated and poor people, for example lower-class stressed-out people who struggle to lose weight and are prone to manipulative ads. This is the target audience that you can manipulate into spending 500$ instead of 50$.

Should be easy to avoid with simply using another cookie jar or blocking third-party cookies. It seems the direct connection can only be made when a user is logged into a facebook or google profile. Otherwise the data can not be connected to a personal account without some degree of uncertainty and illegality.

G and F could use other data, like the browser fingerprint, OS information and the IP address to associate the data, which may be illegal, at least in Europe. Thus they probably use some other technique, for example creating pseudonymous shadow profiles and associating them based on similarity. In their front-end the data would just show clusters of profiles, which means they can claim they do not collect personal data, but from a quick glance it would be obvious to see connections between a user and "anonymous" clusters, if the similarity borders on 100%.

Thus a good practice would be to use a different Operating system and browser, together with the usual protective measures.

The functionality is part of every decent password manager, which takes care of basically all your passwords, not the ones stored in your browser. So I don't understand the enthusiasm.

There is "sexism" on both sides. Powerful women use it against powerless men, and vice versa.

Ignoring one aspect over the other won't lead to lasting solutions. Since more men are leaders than women (men are naturally inclined to be leaders), the percentage of men enriching themselves at the expense of women is accordingly.

Google Protest has also been going on for many things that aren't related to gender, for example AI and their China project.

It doesn't sound like scraping. What they do is they fetch the prices for their own products when the users browses a competitor. The prices of their competitors' products are already in the open, they won't need them. What they need is the browsing history of their customers in order for whaterver they want to better understand about the shopping process.

Imho it isn't relevant. The implication of OP is that the fact that they are female paints Google in a bad light, not that they were protest leaders.

Corporations do not care about gender, it's all about power and control, and they do not care about the gender of those who they have to dismantle to keep it.

The Canadian Documentary "The Corporation" is a good example of how corporations behave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw

Dividing Media narratives help to keep people from realizing who's their common enemy.

More like software companies whose installers 'helpfully' install their browser extension behind the users back.

When there's a will, there is a way...

Maybe no one really knows anymore why the feature was implemented that way in the first place.

I think the post-mortem has shown that the biggest problem of mozilla is fragmentation of decision-making, and the existence of probably >50 small teams that do stuff without communicating.

It is highly likely that the certificate problem isn't the only negative consequence, and that we'll see more evidence of mismanagement in the future.

I have the feeling that for some reason mozilla has established a culture where information does not flow efficiently from top to bottom and vica versa, and it even looks like the management doesn't really exist.

When a small team is formed around a task without central oversight, reporting back to someone, it will tend to justify it's existence, even if it means doing unnecessary work.

I heard the last CEO who wanted to streamline the mozilla hierarchy back to efficiency was Brendan Eich and many people got uncomfortable when he started to demand that people actually work productively.

I think a honest post-mortem would have come to a painful conclusion: That the Mozilla of today is in no way able to compete anymore, and many employees have stopped doing real work. The company only lives on because it lives off it's massive market-share of the past.

I am convinced that, within 2 years, mozilla will be confronted with massive lay-offs, threatening the gecko engine. This incidence shows me that they haven't done anything to address their structural problems, probably because most people in the company are content with the place they have, and comfortable living off the massive google revenue.

I don't understand this logic at all, it baffles me.

Malware can do a lot of things, but I never heard of common software being designed under the assumption that malware has taken over the PC. The software I use is designed under the assumption that the user is intelligent enough to keep the computer malware free. Only the OS or explicit security software is designed to keep me from malware, but not my text editor, office software or browser.

It is a terrible excuse for ignoring user intent.

What's next? Disallowing to change the startpage from google.com because malware can change it? Disallowing downloads because users could download malware? Going that route would essentially take away the entire software in the end. Maybe at one point Firefox is only allowed to operate from within the cloud, where employees make sure it is 100% safe?

Also others have already said that one could add admin privilege to certain settings.

Someone please make a googlebot noindex web page with a list of participating websites, in an effort to make resistance against google go viral.

If Google is reduced to basically product ads and news it will lose its relevance as a search engine.

Chrome has been doing it since around 2016, it seems.

1. from the perspective of firefox forks (Waterfox has around 200-300k daily users, which is a lot in this context)

2. from the perspective of the entire web (Waterfox has only around 200-300k daily users, which isn't a lot in this context)

The topic we are talking about doesn't imply the question of no security vs. high security, it is way more nuanced, and most Waterfox users probably enjoy a very high level of security due to the content blockers they use.

Also I think my claim that browser diversity actually increases security of the bigger system as a whole is correct, because I did mention it is only valid for non-targeted attacks.

There would be no financially viable way I can think of of targeting waterfox users with code on a website, because there are basically no waterfox users. Even if you manage to include some malware code somewhere on the most used websites, you will probably not get more than a handful of waterfox users to compromise their system.

I have observed a big anti-waterfox and anti-fork atmosphere in the Firefox Community. I don't think the criticism of Waterfox is honest, because the browser has been doing exceptionally well (always including critical bugs) for a one-man project and every Firefox Fork should be welcomed.

The official response by Mozilla has always been to avoid ALL forks and ALL old versions like the plaque. I know why Mozilla wants to suppress them, but the community shouldn't. Waterfox is basically the result of the decision by Mozilla to abandon a part of their most loyal userbase.

In theory a diverse set of browsers actually increases security due to the lack of attack surfaces with which you can target a wide audience.

Because basically all attacks that you have to fear from normal browsing as an average user are actually non-targeted attacks, and those attacks usually focus on a large user-base, in order to be financially viable. Also a script-blocker is probably the only thing needed to reduce attack surface to basically zero for non-targeted attacks.

The security argument is actually the only case one can make against Waterfox. While it is partially valid, there are many other reasons why people use a browser, which is exactly why Waterfox has so many users. Not everyone wants to focus on high level and mostly theoretical security.

By the way, the founder of Waterfox has published an alpha-version based on Firefox 86 ESR.

and is just as much a danger to online privacy as the rest of the Large Technology Companies like Google and Facebook

how so?

and that's an assumption you make that requires evidence. Your claim is that there is not only this kind of identification happening, but that it happens even if I have the common tracking blockers. Otherwise the blocklist in this thread would be completely overkill, just as I said.

OK, but how do you account for changing IP-Addresses? You would need to take one identifier that never changes.

Maybe they have machine learning which combines a couple of factors and then create long-term profiles based on the likelihood of some data belonging to the same person.

That would be illegal though.

woah, I thought of seven too, before reading the article or the comments.

Where is your evidence?

Did you even read my comment? The typical pihole lists already include tracking domains.

What you imply is that if I visit youtube.com with tracking disabled, they still create a profile of me. Then tell me, what unique identifier do they use?

You contradict yourself. Google Purchase history requires a google account, they can't connect it to you if you are not logged in.

The reason google pushes the log-in in their browser is exactly because they want to be able to tie this all to your account.

This is overkill.

A way simpler solution is to simply not have a registered account with those companies. That's where the problems start, when they tie certain browsing and telemetry data to your true identity.

For everything else a good content blocker + the typical pihole list that include telemetry domains are enough protection.

I am registered with Apple and Amazon, and there's no way for me to change that because there is simply no one else that delivers this kind of value.

Long-term I could see the possibility of leaving Amazon, but there is a security-advantage when using amazon because otherwise I would leave all my personal data to countless small vendors who regularly get hacked, etc.

I'm so shocked about this, my Iphone almost slipped out of my hands while I googled the Microsoft ebook store, but then I asked Alexa and she said everything will be ok. My Tesla is now driving me to an analogue bookshop to show my full support against dependence on digital platforms over my daily life, I might even upload a protest video to Youtube.

That has long been resolved, and you probably know that. Your own link contains evidence that it has been resolved, so this is kind of absurd.

I think it would be more constructive it Firefox would include a better visualization of the extend of web tracking.

Mozilla had already tried something like this with an extension, it's called "Firefox Lightbeam".

With the next Firefox version, statistics about the number of trackers blocked will be included in Firefox, and I think a better version of Lightbeam (more lightweight, visually showing the difference between tracking protection on/off and excluding subdomains) should be included as well.