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Comment by crankylinuxuser | Hacker News Reader

You know.... I'm still waiting for Adtech companies to request realtime log shipping on the backend. You'd set up each server type (Apache, HAProxy, Nginx, IIS, etc) as a log ingester type. And from there, you ask the server admin to install a telegraf like tool that securely sends data to endpoint.

Doing this would allow websites to remove all appearances of tracking code. It just wouldn't be there. Sure makes for some strong plausible deniability.

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It's too easy to perform click fraud when advertisers only rely on server logs and nobody would pay for advertising on such sites.

Advertisers pay because companies like Google are willing to fingerprint your hardware, run machine learning models on your mouse movement, analyze your browsing history and make you jump through captchas to ensure you're actually human.

Removing front-end JS would be extra nice for speeding up page loads, too.

Please don't give them ideas.

I'm sure the people working in Adtech (primarily google) have already thought of this long ago. It's only stopped by the fact that many websites are just frontends and have no backend access.

The real obstacle is that solution involves trusting the publisher. The biggest reason ads are so bloated these days is all the companies that advertisers, publishers and ad networks tack in to try catch anyone cheating anyone else (in terms of JS at least, obviously higher res video content also contributes, but at least nominally most ad companies try pick something appropriate for the connection as starting playback quickly is in their interest too)

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