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Comment by alufers | Hacker News Reader

I'm kind of torn on this. The general idea that the user's browser tracks him by itself instead of utilizing cookies or fingerprinting seems like a step up for privacy. Obviously the devil is in the details - Google controls that whole algorithm, and there obviously is a conflict of interest.

But the alternative that the people who are against it are proposing is either to keep the status quo or kindly ask Google (and other ad companies) to stop existing, which is not gonna happen. They seem to ignore the fact that ad-tech is a huge industry and a large part of the internet relies on it. Basically the only way to make it go away would be to outlaw it.

(Also so nobody accuses me as being pro-ads: I hate ads and tracking, but sort of in a way like I hate being sick. I can reduce my exposure to ads and tracking (adblock, not using certain apps, etc.), but I know that complaining about it won't make it go away)

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> I hate ads and tracking, but sort of in a way like I hate being sick

What if the illness you hoped to avoid were leaking all your private behaviours to the world as though the sickness were the proper state of existence?

> ad-tech is a huge industry and a large part of the internet relies on it.

The Internet is not going away and advertising is not the Internet that we want.

They seem to ignore the fact that ad-tech is a huge industry and a large part of the internet relies on it. Basically the only way to make it go away would be to outlaw it.

Not necessarily. It will also go away - or more usefully, change its behaviour - if its current model becomes less cost effective. Apple restricted what apps could spy on and Facebook complained like a spoiled child but the sky did not fall. The evidence of effectiveness for all these tracking-based "personalised" ads is limited at best anyway. If you're running a search engine where users have literally just told you what kind of thing they're interested in right now or you're hosting videos where you know which video a user is about to watch or you're serving ads to be included within someone else's web page and you can tell what the content of that page is then you already have very useful information to help you choose which ads might be relevant without needing any additional user tracking at all.

Thank you for this. There seems to be layers of delusions throughout this comment section where it seems many people simply cannot imagine a functioning world sans some bit of questionable tech and its derivative marketing strategies that are barely 20-years old.

Context-based advertising, AKA “advertising”, has been around forever, and respected privacy to the extent that Gatorade only needed to know that people at gyms might be thirsty. Still sold a ton of slightly salty sugar water, and didn’t even suggest that they should be allowed to rummage through every customer’s gym bag, follow them home, take notes on their dinner choices and television habits, watch them sleep while taking their pulse, and then slip random notes to them throughout the day reminding them that their electrolytes were dangerously slightly on the lower side of average (code RED).

This API wont remove or deprecate the already existing tracking methods, third party cookies can be disabled but alternative practices have been developed a good while ago (and new ones are actively being found). Advertisement networks _will_ find a way (avoiding fingerprinting is impossible, unless all browser companies decide to merge; exposing hardware to the web is the new trend for web technologies, and hardware can be extremely unique especially when combined with an IP yada yada) without depending on Google, their competitor in advertising, for their own product. Google, however, will hand your search history out to any website for free(?)

The existence of this APIs will be very useful to argue that server-side data collection is not reasonable under GDPR anymore.

I hope it gets implemented because it will give significant ammunition to us in Europe to make server-side behaviour tracking marked as unreasonable under GDPR provisions.

How would that work in practice? I'm not sure what kind of "server-side data collection" you're arguing against here.

The one that's now moving to the client when it comes to Ad serve. This makes a case for an Ad network tracking data collection much weaker since GDPR demands minimum data collection to satisfy a given business goal.

This will make it much easier for is to argue that server side behaviour data collection is outright unnecessary and thus illegal for many ad services.

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