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…
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. :)