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.
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.
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?)
That article is about:
Data anonymization is often undertaken in two ways. First, some personal identifiers like our names and social security numbers might be deleted. Second, other categories of personal information might be modified—such as obscuring our bank account numbers.
Neither of those is what PPA does.
Of course, they’re right that history has shown that this isn’t easy. Hence:
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.
I was there, during the first advertising push of the mid/late 90s, where visiting the wrong website - or even the right one on the wrong day - spawned “uncloseable” pop-ups and pop-unders… uncloseable because as soon as you tried to dismiss the window, that action triggered a half-dozen more to spawn.
Eventually, the weight of all the browser windows would cause not only the browser to grind to a halt, but even the computer as a whole (single-thread CPUs & minimal RAM, nat), such that your only possible recovery path was to conduct a hard restart of the entire system, your unsaved work be damned.
I feel for those businesses whose only possible funding strategy is via ads, but that well was lethally poisoned for me decades ago. I jumped onto the world’s first adblocker the moment it became available for Phoenix (now Firefox), and I have never looked back. The only way I will ever stop using adblocking is to stop using the Internet entirely.
Isn’t AdBlock Plus the one that takes money from advertisers to have their ads whitelisted by the ad-blocker?
Fuck this guy.
That’s true but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be right.
I would argue that PPA is analogous to what ABP implemented. It seems to be a case of multiple people arriving at the same conclusion as how to try and fix the problem, contextually.
Sorry if this is a silly question, but how is a good adblocker like Ublock Origin not the answer? I don’t care if ad-supported websites go under. I’m fine with everything becoming subscription and donation based. I don’t want to see ads and am OK with fewer websites as a consequence.
We’re not the target audience because we use uBlock. This is about the general user.
Regarding subscriptions and donations, I recently brought it up here: https://lazysoci.al/post/14704065
But if we essentially paywall the Internet, there will be a lot of people left behind, as most can’t afford to donate or subscribe.
There’s a middleground: privacy respecting ads (like Mozilla is pushing w/ PPA) and microtransactions per page (e.g. pay whatever they would’ve made through ads, so a fraction of penny per view). I’m okay with either and think we should have both.
On one hand, hosting content online isnt free, so there should be some form of subsidization to offset that. But I feel like selling my privacy to massive firms so that they can analyze my habits to serve me ads about things I would be statistically more likely to buy is a bad solution to this problem.
I dont have a good fix, as the only 2 alternatives that seem to show up are paid subscriptions and decentralization. Which are both useful options, but not one that fits all cases.
Except there are tons of alternatives that actually work. I watch plenty of YT videos with paid sponsors and if it’s done well, I don’t skip the sections because they are interesting.
What people dislike is obnoxious advertising, not advertising per se. Unfortunately, most advertising is obnoxious.
In other words, reality has already shown us what is possible. But it would probably reduce certain types of ad revenue, and big ad companies (i.e., Google) don’t like that.
And also, these sponsors should be at least somewhat relevant to you (ofc does not always mean it is.) ex. I watch The Linux Experiment channel, and he has Tuxedo Computers as a sponsor, who make hardware for Linux. Perfect match.
Other example is on mozilla’s developer platform (developer.mozilla.org), where the ads are not intrusive plus these are relevant for developers.
I just dont understand why cant we have these types of ads, instead of the tracking bullshit we have currently.
