Building a more private web: A path towards making third party cookies obsolete

You forgot to mention them abusing children and planing terror attacks.

This might very well be true for what I know, but the general idea that optional privacy leads to more hostile environments seems to have been conclusively destroyed by HN and certain other forums, especially when compared to Facebook.

This is exactly what happened during the first dot com crash when we went from $35 CPM banner ads to $1. Suddenly, ads were slathered on every page or websites simply disappeared. What we really need is a deal that works well for all three parties: advertisers, consumers and content providers. Google Adsense was this perfect solution for a while (until it got optimized to max profitability).

Maybe online advertising is like social networks and can only enjoy brief moments of relative balance before the cycle starts anew.

As I understand it today, I can view an ad on a random site and have a cookie with my unique ID in it saved. If I view other network ads, they know it's me and update my profile. Then when I check out, the site I'm buying from reads this cookie and reports back that it worked based on impressions.

AFAIK this won't be easy to replace if a random eCommerce store is blocked from reading Facebook et al cookies, it won't be able to report back reliably. You could do something like submit their email address or other data to Facebook and see if you get a hit, but that's probably illegal in many places without permission. And in most cases, the cookie from the ads will be blocked as it's third party (but would be able to be written for ads shown on-platform, which doesn't really matter since they can track server side anyway).

But clicks are very easy, you just tie a unique ID to the ad URL and have the landing page and checkout page track that. No cookies needed. It can report back in real time or later to update stats.

But these discussions will soon go into "how easy it should be to opt in?". Should it be a pop up like "allow location" or something more complex as enabling CORS.

Not very reliable when user disables it or uses client that does not support it.

HTTP headers are malleable yet I still see the big tech companies appearing to treat them as reliably identifying a program/device. A new user-agent string or set of HTTP headers is not necessarily a new program/device.

Edit: comment was either edited, or I’m going senile. In any case: Chrome does allow blocking all cookies as well, and has from the first release. Fingerprinting isn’t easily avoided, but they have taken some steps to make it harder.

But it’s a somewhat eloquent term, in a way.

(It refers to getting sexually aroused, but only mildly)

Analytics uses first-party cookies for its core functionality. There are optional features where it connects to a third-party cookie from another Google service, e.g. connecting to the DV360 cookie to pull in demographic information.

These sites that can't be used without DRM plugin do not provide you a way around DRM because you're ruining their business model (at least they think so, or their content providers).

The same goes with ads. If your browser start for example blocking ads at sites that live from it (like New York Times website), website administration will eventually ban your browser at all.

The result of the GDPR regulAtions resulted in a moderate number of us websites refusing access to EU residents rather than attempt to comply. I think it's an entirely reasonably assumption that said sites would block a browser which attempted a similar idea

I already do this -- if a site doesn't work with my defenses against the ad industry up, then I don't go back to that site.

Just as all this tracking protection stuff is optional but ships out of the box in a configuration that's deemed the most beneficial to the user, DRM, while enabled by default, can be disabled by simply uninstalling the plugin.

As I say: it just smells of whataboutism.

I think this misses a larger point: advertising on its own requires absolutely no tracking at all. Consider print publications. They still virtually all advertise. And their ads generally relate, in some way, to the demographics who read the publications. There's no reason that approach can't also work on the web.

The problem we're facing today is the notion that advertisers should be able to uniquely target individuals with specific ads. That's a new idea that I think we, as a society, need to reject.

Many (most?) are happy to provide their personal information "by default" in exchange for better ad targeting, lower prices, etc.

Past results are that the advertising-supported Internet is enormously lucrative. Things are changing though. We will find out what happens when it happens.

Compatibility is important, even for the market leader, because if they break too many websites too quickly, that will push people to switch browsers like nothing else. Especially if it's a big website people use every day.

Chrome does have a somewhat easier time taking the lead on deprecating things but it often requires multi-year campaigns and gradual steps. (Consider the campaigns to kill NSAPI and Flash.) This is needed even for Google to maintain compatibility with its own websites.

The analogy to markets still works. Ebay can change the rules to be more buyer-friendly but not so much that too many sellers leave, because buyer-friendly rules don't matter if you can't find the thing you want to buy.

An example of the market breaking down is major news sites blocking Chrome's Incognito mode, despite Chrome's gradual attempts to make fingerprinting harder.

A tremendous amount of resources are wasted on adtech - bandwidth, latency, which ultimately are accounted for in non-renewable time. Just compare using hacker news on mobile to reddit. I have a newish iPhone and reddit is basically unusable. Plausibly it’s a net-neutral situation, the downsides balancing out the upsides.

Similar evaluations can be made in the gaming space, comparing paid, freemium, and advertising driven. It wasn’t until fairly recently that advertising was even a viable revenue source for game developers.

The larger question perhaps is who loses their audience when they can no longer buy targeted advertising? Hint: it’s not the giant brands who blast billions of dollar blindly on mass advertising campaigns and can purchase Super Bowl commercials.

Disclaimer, a significant proration of the money I’ve made in the past decade + was from digital advertising.

$300B is no way negligible by any mean and businesses are tightly coupled so the impact will propagate across everywhere. For instance, almost every functional search engines are powered by advertisement in some way (even DDG); how would you use the internet without a search engine?

I fear that we would see a huge wave of advertising in disguise and other not necessarily more transparent forms of indirect funding and influencing.

For instance, there would suddenly be a very big incentive for product companies to become media companies themselves to make the distinction between reporting, advertising and simply describing their own product go away.

I believe an advertising ban would have a very large number of unintended and undesirable consequences.

> In particular, Google:

> has required manufacturers to pre-install the Google Search app and browser app (Chrome), as a condition for licensing Google's app store (the Play Store);