Ask HN: If I disable JavaScript, am I worth less to advertisers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If I disable JavaScript, am I worth less to advertisers?

10 pointschrischapman10 comments

The question was prompted by this HN post today (Browser Fingerprinting Without JavaScript)[1]. The article suggests I could still be tracked so I started wondering about the effects of JavaScript (JS) on advertisers.

Hypothesis: Tracking primarily benefits advertisers. Adverts are primarily delivered in the browser by JS. By disabling JS, my value to advertisers is diminished. As data collectors can't sell my data at a profit, they should stop collecting my data.

Is that hypothesis valid?

My own motivation for disabling JavaScript was simply to avoid experimental DHTML stuff (like wierd mouse effects) back in the day - not privacy or tracking - but I'm still really happy with that choice - I get to browse a quieter web. But has it made me less worth while to track?

If it was just me as a NoJS user, advertisers wouldn't bother about it. But imagine if Halloween was the start of an annual 'NoJS Week' during which everyone disabled JS. Would worldwide advertising spend drop and if so, by how much? 1%? 10%? 90%? And what kind of drop would we see in sales?

1. As a tracked human, do I have an advertising value? 2. Is my advertising value less than someone who enables JS? 3. Do advertisers measure this? 4. Are there just too few NoJS users for this to matter? 5. If I disable JS, am I still worth tracking?

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29042791

Sure, you would probably be worth less to advertisers.

But the web would probably worth a lot less to you because so many web sites will be broken.

That's actually a really good point. I hadn't thought of that. I just wonder which parts would be broken? The good parts or the bad parts? I don't have a problem with advertising per se - in fact, I'm pretty much in favour of it. It does fund a heck of a lot of useful, good stuff. I just struggle with the 'in your face' kind of advertising. JavaScript, for some reason, lends itself to that.

I just wonder which parts would be broken?

Both parts --- all parts. Most web sites depend on Javascript in some way.

The "bad" kind of advertising is the personalized, algorithm driven kind built around privacy invasion.

If you go to a pet supply site, an ad for dog food is reasonable, perhaps even appreciated. This is the "good", informative kind of advertising.

But just because you bought dog food, you shouldn't be bombarded with ads for cat litter on a site that deals with cell phones.

This is mainly just an annoyance, the private data behind it is subject to abuse and there no good reason to believe this "bad" advertising is any more effective than the "good" advertising. But the "bad" ads are more profitable for the ad networks.

My advice --- check out the Brave browser. It offers a simple, easy way to block most of the bad and replace it with good advertising --- no global tracking or privacy invasion required. And unfriend Facebook and say goodbye to all things Google.

I browse without JS on and off, and I don't miss the sites which are broken without it.

I've found "broken without JS" to be highly correlated with crappy, low-effort, waste-of-my-time, clickbait content, and I feel that avoiding those sites is a net benefit to me.

IME you just stop going there or whitelist the required scripts.

> 2. Is my advertising value less than someone who enables JS?

Definitely. Because they have less information about you, and also because most websites don't even know how to display advertisement to people like us who don't use JS :)

> 4. Are there just too few NoJS users for this to matter?

I believe so. I'm no insider to this *** industry, but i believe they currently don't employ much noscript-proof fingerprinting. That's why they are currently moving to a model of serving their scripts from 1st party domain (via CNAME) to defeat 3rd-party origin blocking. If more and more people disabled JS, they would certainly care more to track us.

All in all, if you want a tracking-proof protocol, you should check out Gemini. If you want a tracking-proof web browser, you should check out the Tor Browser. If you're like me and would like some form of modern web minus client side scripting and without any tracking venue, i guess all we can do now is cry :)

I don't think I have a need to use Tor but I have seen Gemini mentioned several times here on HN. I definitely need to look into it a bit more. Thanks for that.

Just nitpicking: i think everybody needs to use Tor because Tor Browser is closer in spirit and practice to the original WWW as a document browser. You are reading documents, not the other way around.

TBB uses tor network, which is good to conceal your location from remote services (why should your mail provider know if you logged in from home or from your friend's?!). But beyond that, TBB has amazing anti-fingerprinting techniques and built-in noscript.

I recommend you try it out just for the sake of curiosity. I personally wouldn't dream to use another browser nowadays that the unfiltered web sucks so much and a single page can eat all of my CPUs if JS is enabled.

I never got onto the nojs movement because back in the day cookies and http headers were enough to track you, so why bother. Tracking you to death with a mountain of js is just a combination of sloppy and superfluous.

I would prefer a peer to peer experience for online content opposed to the webs client/server model. Then there are no third parties tracking you.

> DHTML

Now there's a word I haven't heard for a decade...

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