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Comment by SCAQTony | Hacker News Reader

I would not mind ads at all but ads are not really ads: they are trackers, beacons, analytics, and privacy busting cookies with none of the above asking for permission. I am blocking about 2,000 different versions of all of the above according to Ghostery. EFF's Privacy Badger is blocking a bunch to. We are being digitally assaulted. We need this stuff!

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Most deep tracking done these days are not by means of ads being served, as the advertisers themselves lack the means of doing any meaningful analysis and don't have the reach, but rather tracking is done much more efficiently by very common utilities, like by Google Analytics, or the Facebook Like, Twitter's Tweet, or Google's +1 buttons. Heck, any third-party service can be a very good tracker. Are you also blocking Gravatar and Disqus? Because you should.

And nowadays you've got an "advertising ID" being exposed by the operating systems themselves, an ID that all apps can use to track your behavior across the net. I know of at least Windows 10, iOS and Android that do this. And this is actually a step up, as before the "advertising ID" apps were using much more persistent forms of identification.

And I'm all for being privacy conscious, personally I'm downright paranoid. But lets be honest, ad-blocking isn't about being privacy conscious.

> ad-blocking isn't about being privacy conscious

There are two kinds of readers in this world: those who can read with a bunch of gyrating monkeys, dancing squirrels or flashing crap in the sidebar, and those who can't. I'm one who can't. If the ads behaved themselves better, I might be able to tolerate them. As it is, I block all of them. It's quite jarring to use the web on a browser which doesn't block ads - I find it unusable, for page load-speed and composition reasons (ads constantly muscling in on the body text as they get dragged in).

> Heck, any third-party service can be a very good tracker. Are you also blocking Gravatar and Disqus?

GP mentioned Ghostery. AFAIK it does block these and many other non-ad third-party requests in its default configuration.

OK, I wrote that comment and I'm not a Ghostery user, so I don't know what it does by default. I'm not a Ghostery user because I do not trust it. Don't know the latest state of affairs, but the company developing Ghostery seemed fishy. I can trust either projects developed by non-profits committed to my interests, such as EFF or Mozilla, or projects developed by enthusiasts on GitHub.

Depending on the device, I am using Privacy Badger from EFF, Mozilla's Focus for iOS, or uBlock with the EasyPrivacy list. Was using AdBlock Plus in Firefox for Android, but it lacks the option to subscribe to third-party filter lists, an almost 2 year old ticket that still hasn't been fixed.

You may want to try ad-away for Android.

> But lets be honest, ad-blocking isn't about being privacy conscious.

Let's be honest, advertising is what pays for the whole menagerie of creepy snoops, therefore ad-blocking hurts even those creeps who track without ads of their own.

> tracking is done much more efficiently by very common utilities, like by Google Analytics, or the Facebook Like, Twitter's Tweet, or Google's +1 buttons

That's why Ghostery is blocking those for me.

I am sure that he meant these tools too, most if not all of which are on the adblocking lists.

> ... as the advertisers themselves lack the means of doing any meaningful analysis ...

What information/data do you have do back this claim in regard to the 'meaningful' analytics?

But adds are reason for the spying. There is no reason to collect all the data if they cannot monetize them. Currently there is no other way than adds.

WOW! Very insightful - I never knew I had an Advertising ID

Does this mean that you support Apple's iAd platform? It's basically what you want: Apple serves the ads themselves to the devices they already know about, and the third parties don't get to know a thing about those devices. (They just have to trust Apple to e.g. actually be matching their inventory to the demographics they request.)

This is how most advertising platforms work. Google and Facebook, for example, serve the ads themselves and don't give your information to the advertisers because that'd help the advertisers target you better without the help of Google. It still means they all collect and store a whole bunch of incredibly intrusive tracking information; for example, if I recall correctly iAd tracks and stores your GPS location to target you with ads.

I don't wont any single actor to have that much data about me. I block as much as possible. including stuff like Disqus or Gravatar.

Isn't it in-app advertising? If so then it's even worse. My understanding is that cookies are not shared across apps, so the advertiser on app1 cannot correlate your identity with the one on app2, defeating cross-app tracking (the app equivalent of cross-website tracking). If you make it a central, Appled owned (i.e. access to much more information) then you re-enable cross-apps tracking.

However since at least 3 majors versions of iOS, iAd have an opt-out switch to allegedly prevent any tracking. I even think this opt-ou switch is now an explicit part of the set-up procedure when you activate the phone.

You still have to trust Apple that this opt-out is effective. But I really see more harm than good for them should they actually be lying about that.

How is iAd different from say, Facebook or Google, except for the vast amount of data collected across sites, platforms and services by these companies? Don't Facebook and Google also match the user profiles that they create/manage with their ad inventory and display targeted ads? They're not really selling your personally identifiable information to advertisers, but instead provide only aggregate data about the reach. The advertisers have to trust Facebook or Google too for the matching.

[I'm talking purely about what these companies do, and not about malicious sites and other ad networks or about how safe the personal profile information really is.]

This is the opposite of what he wants as it furthers the effect of the tracking by centralising it to a single omnipotent vendor (as ads by Google currently are)

It sounds from your comment like you think that other ad networks (Google, Facebook, etc) _don't_ work this way? Sigh, I knew this would happen eventually as long as people kept cynically saying that ad networks "sell" your info to advertisers, knowing that those not familiar with the context would assume that meant that advertisers actually had access to the raw profile info.

As far as I understand, the usual approach executed by Google et al is first figure out your demographics data server-side, and then use that data to send targeted advertising to your device when it requests an ad.

Apple, meanwhile—having direct access to your phone's OS—just pre-download a full ad-inventory database to your device, and then your device, using demographics data stored only on the device, targets itself; Apple's servers don't learn anything about you, only what ads your phone decided to show you.

Your original comment was about _third parties_ getting access to ads, and that was what I was claiming doesn't apply to basically any large ad network. It sounds like what you're saying now is that all the handling of user data happens fully on device and the ad network itself doesn't have access to demographic data, which is definitely not true for Google/FB/etc.

That's interesting if true, but I'm pretty sure that's very, very wrong. Do you have any source for this? I tried Googling it and was unable to find anything saying that, and I would be pretty surprised if that's how it works (especially pre-downloading inventory), given my passing familiarity with how ad networks work. Especially since their privacy page (which talks about iAd)[1], makes no mention of something which would be a drastically different way of operating an ad network (and thus excellent for marketing onself as the privacy-conscious alternative).

[1] http://www.apple.com/privacy/

I am leaning towards it. An analogy would be, "How much blood do you want to give; an ounce or a pint?" you still are losing blood but a heck of a lot less.

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