The founder of AdBlock Plus weighs in on PPA:
Privacy on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population. Advertising on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population.
Yet any attempt to improve this situation is met with fierce resistance by the lucky 10% who know how to navigate their way around the falltraps. Because the internet shouldn’t have tracking! The internet shouldn’t have ads! And any step towards a compromise is a capital offense. I mean, if it slightly benefits the advertisers as well, then it must be evil.
It seems that no solution short of eliminating tracking and advertising on the web altogether is going to be accepted. That we live with an ad-supported web and that fact of life cannot be wished away or change overnight – who cares?
And every attempt to improve the status quo even marginally inevitably fails. So the horribly broken state we have today prevails.
This is so frustrating. I’m just happy I no longer have anything to do with that…
We didn’t used to have tracking, you know? You used to just put up a billboard or put an ad in the newspaper and you just hoped it’d lead to new customers.
It’s a bit weird that the advertising people implemented fine gained tracking without asking anyone and now we’re just expected to pretend there’s no other way for advertising to work.
Even back then people tried to find ways to measure the effectiveness of the campaigns. For example, you’d get a discount if you passed a coupon or a coupon code, which would tell the seller that your purchase was in response to the ad.
Sure, but you couldn’t analyse an individual’s purchasing behaviour over time and show just that person ads for baby clothes because you think they got pregnant.
Right. And the proposed system doesn’t allow for that either, as I understand it. Instead, you show ads for baby clothes next to an article about how to burp your baby, and then learn how many people buy baby clothes via that article without knowing anything about the people reading that article.
In theory, yes – it’s all aggregated and anonoymized. In practice, it’s much more fine-grained than that, and ad companies under scrutiny have shown that their data can be deconvolved back to individual clients
Where did you get that from? That doesn’t match at all what I have read. (At least not when it comes to this system - but maybe you’re talking about Google’s Topics API?)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/11/debunking-myth-anonymous-data
That article is about:
Neither of those is what PPA does.
Of course, they’re right that history has shown that this isn’t easy. Hence:
Fundamentally what the alternative is, is to propose that you remain the sole owner of your privacy at the cost of sharing with advertisers that you have, say, 6 generic topics you’re interested in. Like motorsports. It, with the millions or billions of others looking. The ad tracking currently knows everything about everyone and then works out if motorsports is an effective ad for you individually based on their profile of you.
For me, I’m fine with the current system. For my family though, they’re just using phones and tablets with their default browser, blissfully unaware that there’s no privacy. Then their data gets leaked out.
I know it’s an extreme kind of case, but domestic abuse victims are always my thought when you think of a counter to “well I’ve got nothing to hide”. Those people if they’re unsure about privacy, will err on the side of caution. They stay trapped.
In conclusion, I’d rather move the needle forward for those who are at risk. Those who installing anti-tracking plugins would put at further risk. Where installing odd browsers make them a target. We can find perfection later. Make the Web safer now.
Plenty of people could justifiably take the opposite stance. But even just for my grandparents, they shouldn’t be tracked the way they are. They’re prime candidates for scams, and giving away privacy is one data leak away from a successful scam.
Kind of off topic to what you said I realise. :)
There was a hell of a lot less competition back then too. Don’t pretend like advertising itself is the only thing that’s changed.
In one sense there was some level of tracking, just not to the extent there is today. Fairly early on they stopped just throwing up billboards and hoping the right people would see them. They generally weren’t putting billboards for luxury cars up in the slums. Advertisers would try to place ads in the neighborhoods of their targeted socioeconomic demographic. Media companies started funding surveys to learn who their readers or viewers or listeners were. If you’re an American you may have heard of the Nielsen ratings for TV or less likely the Arbitron ratings for radio. Those companies would use statistical sampling to send journals to households in a market and over the period of a week or several weeks ask the household to record every TV show they watched or every radio station they listened to. They would also ask what age each person was, gender, how much money did they earn, what level of education had they completed, etc. With enough responses the companies could say, “okay, only 10% of the people in this market were watching this show, but 60% of the men between the age of 35-54 who were watching TV at that time were watching this show.” If an advertiser wanted that demographic, that’s the show they would pick. Newspapers would even change the fliers they would put in the newspaper depending on what part of the city they were going to. Discount stores for the poor neighborhoods, jewelers for the rich.
Of course, unless you were filling out the survey journal or had the reporting box on your TV, they weren’t tracking you directly. But you were being targeted based on your neighbors who had responded and more public demographic data about your age and likely income. This started surprisingly early on, because most business owners couldn’t afford to do a lot of slapping something up and hoping they’d get new business; they wanted to have some reason to be confident they’d see a return on their investment. It wasn’t anywhere near as invasive as what online tracking has become today, but that’s what advertisers have long wanted.