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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

In summary, Opera does proxying and caching for its mobile browser.

The article does very little to tell us why that's 'valuable' or indeed a secret.

The web requests would allow Opera to do some serious data-mining to sell advertising.

More especially since they hijack HTTPS sessions. I always thought that playing MITM and caching secure sessions created a strong incentive to behave badly.

They don't do that:

from

http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/03/13/

Your privacy is important

Even when Turbo is enabled, encrypted traffic does not go through our compression servers. This means that when you are on a SSL site, we bypass these traffic and let you communicate with the SSL site directly. Opera generates statistics of the usage of Opera Turbo, but these are aggregated numbers and no information can be linked to a single user. Opera does not store any users’ private information.

Presumably that is a feature of the desktop version?

http://www.opera.com/mobile/help/faq/#connection

"Is there any end-to-end security between my handset and — for example — paypal.com or my bank?"

"Opera Mini uses a transcoder server to translate HTML/CSS/JavaScript into a more compact format. It will also shrink any images to fit the screen of your handset. This translation step makes Opera Mini fast, small, and also very cheap to use. To be able to do this translation, the Opera Mini server needs to have access to the unencrypted version of the webpage. Therefore no end-to-end encryption between the client and the remote web server is possible.

If you need full end-to-end encryption, you should use a full web browser such as Opera Mobile."

Turbo and Mini aren't the same thing; Turbo mostly just compresses everything and lossily recompresses images to make them smaller, while Mini outright doesn't have a local HTML rendering engine.

Opera Mini tells you about that (and that the connection isn't actually protected) and discourage you from continue when you try to enter any https site.

"they hijack HTTPS sessions"

Trolling much? They aren't hijacking anything. Opera Mini is a thin client (which lets it run on just about any phone, including old and crappy ones), so they have no choice but to pass everything through the rendering engine on their servers.

I'm not buying it. ISPs have had access to way more request data for years and haven't had success selling advertising. Site owners, privacy advocates and net neutrality folks would freak out and shut it down in a heart beat.

"Behavioural advertising". Opera could potentially collect information on mobile users' browsing habits/history. Should it decide to sell this information to third parties it would be worth a lot.

If Opera decided to act on this it could be the most valuable part of its business model. GMail etc. have shown that people are willing to pay with their privacy.

Disclaimer: I'm interning (so I don't know anything special) for Opera, but the opinions here purely my own.

I was using Opera Mini on my mobile under the assumption that they value my privacy and do not store any data. If they would start doing this, it would outrage me enough that I might potentially even go back to Firefox on my desktop.

The article also says Opera is aware that doing this could destroy their business, for the reasons you give, so they plan not to.

Yeah people always say "They could sell data".

I don't really see who would buy behavioral data on peoples browsing habits. That's fairly worthless unless you have a clear route to monetize it and connect back to those users.

GMail has a clear route - they show advertising on gmail.

All Opera could do is mess around with web pages, inserting their own advertising, or messing with content. Which would enrage users and website owners alike. As soon as they try to monetize, people will stop using it.

I use Opera mini extensively on my phone, probably more than the Phone/SMS aspects. I would certainly opt in for all kinds of intrusive behaviour (behavioral advertising, changing ads, adding appropriate ads sometimes) to allow Opera to continue offering that proxying service for free and allocating development resources when required. ie. My Samsung B3310 doesn't let me rotate Opera Mini so using the keyboard is awkward but surely there are so many phones out there that it would take considerable resources for Opera to continue to respond to all the feedback.

I use AdThwart on my desktop Google Chrome though!

RIM does too. But it doesn't have the ability and/or the inclination to swap out ads.

Yes it does. Basically it says that opera intends to strip out ads from the pages it serves and replace them with new ads. Which new ads? Opera will simply auction the space to the highest bidder. Obviously this will only work for ads that go through its servers, but apparently it controls a large proportion of the mobile proxying/caching market. Sounds nice in theory, not sure whether it will hold up in practice. Note they state explicitly they will NOT perform behavioural advertising.

That's what I read on first glance, but then thought "haha nah that's illegal, immoral, and only a complete idiot would go down that route".

I'll believe it when I see it (And then I'll block access for Opera mini users to my website).

Out of interest, what's illegal about it?

You are wrong.

Opera will NOT strip out ads from pages.

What Opera will do is to let the owner of the page choose to serve ads to mobile browsers through Opera's ad network.

So any ads from Opera on a site will be because the owner of the site requested them.

Page 2

Yes, I read that. Care to summarize?

You build an ad network that 'performs arbitrage on competing ad networks'. Opera makes money on the margin that potential advertisers save. This works because Opera controls the pipeline from web to phone.

I might be particularly dense today, but I don't get the link between controlling the pipeline and building an arbitrage ad network. Why can't you do one without the other?

Edit: to spell out my confusion. If you want to arbitrage ads, content providers would (presumably) need to include your ads in their content one way or another, so I don't see what advantage controlling the pipeline gives you. If you just want to inject ads into the content you're serving simply because you control the pipeline, then you can just as well inject regular ads, I don't see where the arbitrage part comes in.

I haven't thought about this extensively, but quickly considering this, I'd imagine one would be able to target users with ad networks much as you can do that with ads today. Given a number of networks, display ads from the network most likely to get a click-through from the user under consideration.

I think a key point of arbitrage is that you do both of the transactions (the buying and the selling) at the same time.

This insulates the person doing the arbitrage from losing money because one or both of the markets changed (it is 'theoretically risk free').

So they would be theoretically be trading page impressions as they occur, to the highest bidder. Compare this to AdWords, which offers 'some amount of Cents' per impression.

You sell your adspace to opera, opera sells that AdSpace to someone else, dynamically based on market prices. (They could even sell it Google or whoever). Its like an ad stock market.

At least, that is my (very) speculative understanding.

edit: The key point is that they control the cache, so if you sell them ads and your page goes through the cache, they can insert it (whoever's ad it is) quickly. Otherwise it would be an extra level of indirection loading the ad.

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