DuckDuckGo Proposes the “Do-Not-Track Act of 2019”
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As for the problem, it really comes down to making money: Data is sold to inform targeted adverts. An additional requirement is that the ad company needs to know how much to pay the ad host. Also remember that ad blockers came about mostly as a result of reducing web bloat and reducing the fight for the users attention.
Nobody in their right mind would agree to this without some sensible solution in place. Servers cost money to run and content is usually not free to create.
That's the part that needs to go away. I think the original version of Google had the right idea. The content of the page determines the ads.
Billions of dollars that have been spent on brilliant engineers, bandwidth, and CPU cycles to improve ad targeting by a fraction of a percent here and another fraction there. I can't help but feel like the big winners in the web of the past two decades are ad companies and not creators. Even the term content creator points to this. Ads are what is important and the stuff they go around is just content.
We've devalued creative work to the point of absurdity.
They have 1st-party access to user profiles which is why they're so good compared to independent parties which use more anonymous profiles. This is why 3rd-party audience data is poor and will get poorer while Google and Facebook will be more entrenched because of GDPR and similar laws. So there will be a move to context for some ads, but not most of the ones you see.
Do you know a number on the difference between targeted and untargeted search (not display) ads? If I search for "instant pot," I'm probably looking to buy an instant pot. How much does knowing my entire search and browsing history help the advertiser? I'm sure Google has these numbers, and equally sure they aren't sharing.
It looks like there may be big differences for display ads (2-3x?), but for search?
Keep in mind that display ads are wildly ineffective to begin with. Targeted ads may raise your click through rate from 0.2% to 0.6% but that isn't good enough to justify the massive privacy loss and use of bandwidth, server time, engineering talent, etc...
That's the saddest part. A lot of talented people could be working on important problems, but instead they're trying to make people click on ads a tenth of a percent more, so they will buy Crest slightly more often than Colgate.
I guess it's no worse than going into finance: just another way for someone with talent and ambition to make a boatload of money while providing almost no value to society (and sometimes negative value). Still, one could hope that talented people would sacrifice a bit of lucre to do some good. The inventors of Arpanet don't have rocket companies, but I bet they're living comfortably.
And what about all the other stuff that you get for free, including the majority of the content on the internet? What about all the other services like Gmail and the technical projects that have been opensourced? What about all the people who got rich and went on to invest in or start their own companies?
There's no "right" thing to work on. It's like asking why do we have astronauts in space [1] when there are problems here on earth. The truth is that it takes all kinds of people to make this world work and we're all better off if people get to do what they want to do, and hopefully it happens to be what they like doing too.
1. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html
I'm not against ad-supported businesses, but I'll bet Google would have made plenty of money off plain old search ads, probably enough to make Gmail free for everyone. If not, they could have charged a few bucks a month, or shown untargeted ads. In any case, they wouldn't have had an enormous database of PII, just waiting to be hacked or mined in more malicious ways when the ad bubble pops (e.g. credit reports, insurance).
> There's no "right" thing to work on.
Really[1]? We're paying hucksters 5-10x what we're paying teachers now. If that's what the market demands, then the market is twisted.
[1] http://www.metrolyrics.com/wernher-von-braun-lyrics-tom-lehr...
I prefer that we all have the freedom that you can actually choose to do that, or not.
Wow... Thats cormac mccarthy level bleak but at least honest and I hope not to live in the world your labor may bring into being.
EdTech is mostly just a scam to siphon public school money to private companies. I'd rather just lobby my school district to pay teachers more.
What's the most "right" thing then and why aren't you working on it already? I assume curing cancer is somewhere on that list? Let us all know when you'll be getting to it.
It's only free if you think that the details of your life aren't worth anything (I specifically object to advertising targeted to individuals, I have no problem with ads similar to ones you find in a magazine or print newspaper).
Without any discussion, ad companies asserted that they have the right to spy on users and track them in almost every area of their lives online and off. I think we are finally starting to push back in the other direction. Europe has GDPR and I think it's only a matter of time before we have something similar in the US. IMHO companies should only be allowed to collect and use information on individuals in ways that each individual decides to allow.
> There's no "right" thing to work on.
But there are plenty of wrong things to work on.
The problem is that once some are tracking, the non-tracking become less profitable, leading everyone to track. But if nobody can track...
To be honest I would be happier running a company which made $1,000,000 per year profit than a company which had to race to make more and more profits each year. That's the rub, though, if you have investors you need to keep growing and at some point growth requires you to abandon even the most basic pretense of ethical behavior.
Will people just make ad free browsers elsewhere that don't respect this? Yes, of course. But hopefully these will be few or niché, as even now many users do not mind personalized tracking and many don't want to move to a new browser.
And yes, content has to to be paid for. If content creators do not want to work for free, let them find alternate revenue streams or cease creating. (And the second is an option.)
The alternative is tantamount to saying creators or their paymasters have a right to personally track me simply because they created content that I happened upon, and it's the de facto situation right now, albeit with a vigorous arms race of advertisers and ad blockers.
I don’t want to read the content created with incentive to sell me to advertisers. The quality of such content is also questionable.
Yes- and you know who makes a lot of money out of servers and content? ISPs. If they want to keep making that money, perhaps they can fork out some of it to cover the costs of running the infrastructure and the content that keeps them in the money.
Imagine a scheme in which any traffic has to be bought/paid by the ISP, which is financed by your monthly subscription. So if you open an url, you're gonna have to pay a tiny amount for the request.
But it's probably too easy to game. Just write a malware that keeps downloading from your servers. It would make hijacked chrome extensions insanely profitable. And just imagine the money Mirai's Creator could've gotten with this...
It would also make bigger websites more profitable than lean and clean pages.
So I guess you're right. Not a good idea.
It would be cool if it worked though. sometimes I wish capitalism wouldn't pervert any system at the cost of society. Too bad there aren't any alternatives that actually seem to work.
Only if you adopt the mainstream, incorrect definition of what capitalism is. To put the correct definition into laymen terms, capitalism is essentially paying someone less than the value that they produce. A privately-held and operated Ponzi scheme with nearly everyone on the bottom. That's what all the talk about "mode of production" is about. The term does not hold exclusive domain on profit or enterprise. There were markets under feudalism.
To address your second point, there are plenty of alternatives that work. There's even one that's currently showing itself as being outright superior. Look into worker owned cooperatives such as Mondragon in Spain. Both Microsoft and GE have sent representatives there to figure out why their quality level is so high and so consistent.
If it came down to simply targeting, the original DNT proposal would have succeeded. If someone cares enough about not seeing targeted ads that they're willing to opt-in for this setting, then probably not much value in targeting that way anyway.
The issue came down to things like measurement, ad spam & the rest. Basically things that involve tracking but not targeting. The advertising side wanted to still allow these things if DNT was set, but there were vocal voices saying DNT must be strict & not allow those tracking cases either.
Propose a legislation that has zero chance of ever coming into effect and then watch as all of your target audience pat you on the back for all the great work.
Problem of course is that this isn't how legislation gets passed in the US. Especially these days when you have Democrats, Republicans and the President all with completely different stances on privacy. And of course a 2020 election with a President who is relying almost exclusively on digital marketing and would be hurt by this legislation.
If this was a SuperPAC with a high profile lobbying firm then you could take all of this a little more seriously.
Even though affiliate links are a low hanging fruit in regards to making money with search engines, it is not made transparent by DuckDuckGo.
They also use all the data they can get, they just tell us they get rid of the identifying information as fast as possible (IP address). I wouldn't be surprised if, from a privacy-standpoint, using Google and DDG as a non-logged in user is basically the same, especially if you use google with an ad blocker. The process of Google ads is basically to have a profile based on cookie data, which the user can easily control.
With regards to the ads, nothing is changing in terms of ad privacy/tracking or our privacy policy in general. Ads should just become more relevant."
Have you noticed "improving.duckduckgo.com", the analytics service that logs all requests ?
"To be clear, this means we cannot ever tell what individual people are doing since everyone is anonymous"
Oh, except the IP address, right. Fun fact (experiment now removed): https://web.archive.org/web/20180910042004im_/http://image.b...
Except, it is not, because the data profiles still exist.
In that way, Google could advertize itself as being anonymous, as they probably delete IP addresses relatively quickly as well.
Might be tough persuading everyone to turn off adblocking even it became law.
On the other hand, the Democratic Party seems eager to stick it to the Silicon Valley, so they may at least use a similar proposal as a way to negotiate with the big tech.