Hacker News Reader

Comment by c16 | Hacker News Reader

A quick google on RTB:

> Bidstream data, short for bidstream location data, is any data connected to a publisher’s bid request. This includes data on the website or app, the ad format, as well as the visitor’s device type and their IP address.

>This information is passed to the advertiser in order to allow them to decide whether to bid for the ad unit via real-time bidding (RTB).

I had no idea this data was getting shared with so many people before the ads were even shown. All the more reason to ad block / dns ad block.

View on HN

There's a variant called "header bidding" that got a bit of positive PR during an antitrust investigation of Google last year, e.g.:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/cma_ec_blue_jedi/

"The innovation of header bidding "promised to bypass Google's stranglehold on the exchange market," as detailed in a complaint filed in the US in a New York district court last year."

But note that it's just a way to blast your personal info across even more ad networks!

Privacy and "free and open market" are opposing forces here - the most private way to implement personalised ads is that all bids and targeting info is kept by a single ad exchange who matches and serves ads without sending personal info back to the advertisers. (Though not really because it's still strictly better to just block all personalized ads, of course.)

Do adblocks actually lie or spoof to the extent that adblocking isn't literally just making it all invisible despite the fact its still going on?

I'm suspecting there are server-side scripts on many sites which relay data to the RTB system? So blocking ads won't prevent this data from being transmitted then?

https://digiday.com/marketing/wtf-is-server-side-conversion-...

https://sanjeev-pandey.medium.com/ad-tracking-in-server-side...

This jives with my intuition and it leads me to the point where I believe we need to stop with all this "imposed honesty". Software needs to start lying and quit being so fortright with that and those who have zero entitlement to it or who can be simply be bypassed. Isn't that the whole logical finale of the whole web integrity/TPM crap? Making everything even more like China?

I agree: browsers need to start lying. We as a society should bite the bullet and start lying by honey potting as often as possible. If every web site also ran a WordPress login Honeypot, an ssh Honeypot like endlessh, and everyone answered every spam phone call, those activities would cease to be profitable. I bet a 25% answer and waste spammer time rate would eliminate phone scams in a few months.

Does anyone else notice how going on the internet is literally like being traffic stopped at every goddamn stop?! You spend more time being forced to "identify" or "be profiled" and you almost spend as much time being stopped and scolded and forced to comply than whatever you were even looking for in the first place

Edit: license and registration == ip address (whats the deal with MAC addys?) browser fingerprint (gonna need to take your prints pre-charge)

Edit: there was an article a while back about how the commercial hellishness of thr internet (which this is all a big part of) is driving folks to less advertisey/closed walls like HN, private groups (Discord, Matrix), etc. I don't see why everyone can't do something similar to HN and cut the rest of the bullshit but I feel like yCombinator "gets" way more requisite or accrued value by offering this forun than it actually costs or hurts them

Reply on news.ycombinator.com