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Comment by negus | Hacker News Reader

It is not that easy.

Consider Mozilla, the privacy maniacs. Even they let proprietary and intrusive DRM plugin inside, though it is totally contradicts FOSS approach https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7746585

This is life -- you have to take other parties interests into account or you will be buried.

Start block all tracking garbage by default and sites will ban your users, forcing them to choose another product.

Speaking about Google: when you're (unlike Apple) making most of your revenue from ads, any hostile action to ad industry will be considered hypocrisy and unfair competition

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Privacy ≠ FOSS.

DRM is an entirely different problem to that of privacy. While DRM is disgusting, a threat to open source as we know it and overall harmful to humanity as a whole, it does not inherently violate privacy.

Thus, saying "Even [the privacy maniacs] let proprietary and intrusive DRM plugin inside" doesn't make any sense.

Do you know anything about this DRM plugin? Why would you think it does not work in private mode? What would you say about long-living unique user id that it associate with your device that can be read? It does violate your privacy as well

AFAIK in firefox DRM plugins are sandboxed

Can we just stop for a second and ask whether advertising is required to support publishers at all?

Even if this question sounds naive, I feel like we should from time to time take a step back and review our situation.

> Speaking about Google: when you're (unlike Apple) making most of your revenue from ads, any hostile action to ad industry will be considered hypocrisy and unfair competition

I can agree with that (esp. given their monopoly), but the truth is not black and white here: there's a difference between applying the same measures equally to everyone and leaving a bunch of escape hatches for yourself, e.g. that time when Chrome decided to exclude certain Google cookies from the "Clear all cookies" screen.

> Can we just stop for a second and ask whether advertising is required to support publishers at all?

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.

> 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.

That's how it USED to work on the web and still does in some parts. Until Google (and others) started selling increasingly accurate demographic and behavioural targeting. Now advertisers are addicted to targeting 50+ females who like baking, cats, have at least one grandchild and who have recently shown an interest in Easy Bake Ovens.

Is this working for them? I find it hard to believe that targeting more and more specific groups is actually worth the money for them. Is it really worth it to whatever company makes Easy Bake Ovens to pay for that kind of specific advertising? It seems (naively) that they would be better off finding out where their customers congregate and just buying ads there, without the extra cruft.

I mean, logically it should be worth it because they pay for it, but part of me is wondering if the ad companies are conning their customers on this.

I see what you mean, but I struggle to understand how is this a larger point?

I dislike ads for two reasons:

- highly targeted ads can impact my behaviour in ways I’m not aware of (existing vs. created needs, emotions vs. rational decisions) - it’s an invasion on our personal (internet) and public (your street, your neighbourhood) spaces.

The points above allow for manipulation at a unprecedented scale.

Again, this is more of a mental exercise, a problem I like to revisit from time to time, but if we take the points above into account, removing targeting doesn’t solve the issue completely.

I do think that contextual targeting is a more viable alternative, unless it becomes a rebranded version of behavioural (which is already happening).

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I think this is an important (larger) point because we don't need to pretend that this move would completely upend the ad industry. It will just slightly change it, and revert it to how it worked for the hundreds of years that preceded ~2005. I think ceding the argument that this change "breaks" advertising is the wrong move. I think it's important to keep focus of what we do want to break: the sleazy practice of tracking individuals so that they can be targeted for specific ads. That's gross, and absolutely deserves to go away. Publishers can continue to be supported by advertisements. There are tons of mailing lists that already work this way, and several very popular websites (e.g., Daring Fireball)

Privacy and ethics around proprietary software, while obviously related (in that open software is obviously more transparent), are largely orthogonal. You can have closed/proprietary software that respects privacy (Apple), and you can have open software that doesn't (Chrome).

This just smells of whataboutism.

As for your hypothesis that websites will start blocking browsers that ban tracking and so forth, frankly, that remains to be seen, and my bet is we'd never actually see that happen in practice. The optics are just too toxic. Surveillance capitalism survives because people don't know it's happening. Banning a browser like Firefox would call attention to an infrastructure and ecosystem that those individuals don't want to talk about in public.

Edit: As an aside, if sites did start banning privacy-conscious browsers like Firefox, I'd just stop going to those sites. In that respect, I'd actually perversely appreciate something like this: It'd finally make it blatantly obvious who is and isn't collecting and profiting from data about me and my actions online without my permission.

> As for your hypothesis that websites will start blocking browsers that ban tracking and so forth, frankly, that remains to be seen, and my bet is we'd never actually see that happen in practice.

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

As I said in my edit: I'm actually fine with that (though I stand by my skepticism that it'd actually happen), as it's a clear and unambiguous signal that tells me which sites respect my privacy and which ones don't.

California now has a low that is similar to the EU law in many ways, and other states will soon, so those sites will soon have to block Americans as well, based on where they live if they can determine it, and soon they'll have to just give up and follow the law.

You're talking about CCPA, and I completely agree, GDPR-style privacy regimes are clearly the way the regulatory world is moving. It's just a matter of time at this point.

> if sites did start banning privacy-conscious browsers like Firefox, I'd just stop going to those sites.

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.

The DRM is totally different though. Not having it means certain sites can’t be used.

And ad supporters say that not providing facilities for personalized ads means sites wouldn't be able to exist.

Ad supporters are wrong about this as a blanket statement. There are tons of useful sites that exist, many for years or decades, without any advertising at all.

Some sites would go behind paywalls, some would cease to exist, and some will just run nontargeted ads, but some would do none of those things.

I’m not saying they wouldn’t be able to exist though. I’m saying you wouldn’t be able to use them. Firefox does not have the market share to be able to force change there, they’d only be making the experience shittier for their users. You’re welcome to turn the feature off if you don’t like it.

There is no difference.

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.

Users demand browsers support Netflix and other streaming services which, unfortunately, requires supporting DRM. This is a case of Mozilla putting users first, despite it violating some of their core philosophy.

This is how it should work, users come first.

It's also a choice users are empowered to make.

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.

Additionally they pushed against it initially, and implemented it late. And now it's downloaded separately the first time you approve it's use. Users can disable it in settings.

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