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Comment by cjpearson | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate that almost none of the PPA criticisms actually go into depth on why its implementation isn't sufficiently private. It seems there's no desire to actually improve privacy, they'd rather just kill the feature.

If killing PPA meant the internet would suddenly be advertising free, I would be 110% on board, but that's not going to happen. Advertising is the dominant business model on the web and it's not going away. The alternative to privacy respecting advertising is the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today.

Yes, on an individual level you can mostly opt-out of this surveillance nightmare by using pi hole, uBlock origin, AdGuard etc. I do so myself. But keep in mind that this solution only works because of the 95% of users who do not use these tools and thus subsidize your browsing.

They deserve privacy too. So I'm holding out hope that Mozilla and others can succeed in developing a truly privacy protecting solution.

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> I'm holding out hope that Mozilla and others can succeed in developing a truly privacy protecting solution

You're holding out for the feature built by former Facebook ad executives, who started the company Mozilla bought [1] to help advertisers get around Apple's ATT [2], to develop a privacy-respecting standard?

What you describe can be done. But it would need to happen at a public-interest group, e.g. Wikimedia or noyb. Not an ad seller.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-facebook-execs-launch-st...

I consider Mozilla to be a public interest group. It's understandable that Meta's involvement is seen as a red flag, but if you want it to actually happen, part of this process will involve cooperating with advertisers. In the end any proposal should be judged primarily on its merits rather than its authors.

> part of this process will involve cooperating with advertisers

There is a massive difference between cooperating with an advertiser and buying one.

> any proposal should be judged primarily on its merits rather than its authors

Sure. But when we're discussing hypothetical proposals, track record is all we've got.

The evidence of Google's history shows that when you buy an advertiser, you're being reverse-acquired.

> I consider Mozilla to be a public interest group

It should be but it is in bed with Google and founded by dirty money.

I mean, there seem to be some resistance internally, but the leadership seem to be bought.

Being a public interest group doesn't mean they have my interests in mind. Consider that both the National Right to Life Committee and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund are public interest group, even though they have strongly different views of what best benefits the public.

Why should we cooperate when advertisers and others didn't cooperate and respect the Do Not Track (DNT) header?

I want zero tracking and zero user profiling. I'm okay with context advertising. If the internet can't survive without profiling, then it's got a worse business model than broadcast TV.

Mozilla should be a public interest group, but it serves a mess of conflicting interests because of its structure and leadership.

A public interest group would give no quarter to advertisers.

> I consider Mozilla to be a public interest group.

It's not longer the case. It was a few years ago, but not nowadays.

Why would an ad company ever use this instead of tracking users? Even if it exceeded <5% of users (or whatever Firefox has these days), why not just keep tracking and add this one more data point? It's a little like how "if you aren't paying, you're the product" turned into "if you pay, you're still the product".

This.

I never read any discussion about the obvious question: Who guarantees that enabling Privacy-Preserving Ad Measurement will keep all the other tracking away from me? No one! I've never read anything at all about the thought process behind this.

As you said, with current (EU) law and regulations, it's just one more data point.

So it's worth nothing.

Because it's easier and because it makes it impossible to make a case for any other kind of tracking under laws like GDPR once this exists.

People running ads in paper and public signs should just sue advertisers for anti-competitive tracking technologies as they have no way to compete against that.

Well of course it would have to go beyond Firefox to be effective. But if PPA can show that advertising can function without surveillance, then the business case for surveillance-based advertising goes away. This would make it easier for governments and browsers to more aggressively limit surveillance. Those who continue to use surveillance instead of or in combination with PPA would be seen as bad actors.

> Those who continue to use surveillance instead of or in combination with PPA would be seen as bad actors.

The current ad industry can hardly be seen as worse actors than they already are. Yet it doesn't seem to deter them in any way.

> But if PPA can show that advertising can function without surveillance

It cannot show that advertising can function without surveillance because PPA is surveillance (with privacy enhancements built in).

If it succeeds, it means that surveillance will be even further baked into things.

> It's unfortunate that almost none of the PPA criticisms actually go into depth on why its implementation isn't sufficiently private. It seems there's no desire to actually improve privacy, they'd rather just kill the feature.

For me, yes absolutely.

> If killing PPA meant the internet would suddenly be advertising free, I would be 110% on board, but that's not going to happen. Advertising is the dominant business model on the web and it's not going away. The alternative to privacy respecting advertising is the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today.

I'm done playing ball with the ad industry and I have lost all trust in them. They will grab what they want to grab. It will provide less data than the current solutions so the ad industry will just continue with what they have.

> Advertising is the dominant business model on the web and it's not going away.

Not sure it's as strong as you suggest. I read the recent fight between Youtube vs Addblocker more as a weakness and a bit of hope that it might make YT less user friendly and could help other platforms.

> They deserve privacy too.

I agree so helps them install blocker and stuff like Consent-O-Matic instead of sneaking in features to help advertiser on their browser ... Using PPA does not bring any privacy unless I missed a meta anouncement that they disable tracking when ppa is activated ?

Blocking ads only works because just a small percentage of users block ads. It's a free-rider situation and someone has to pay. If everyone blocks ads then sites will either counter ad blockers or if that's not possible, implement a pay wall.

I'm all for pay walls. Privacy respecting service would finally have a chance.

The problem for me with paywalls is that you have to give a lot of information in order to pay. So you still don't have privacy.

Maybe services should take Monero. I know some that do.

This protects your wallet's privacy, but as a user who needs to log in to their systems you can still be tracked, even if they can't tell how much money you had on some specific wallet.

For paywalls, too?

Gnu Taler

No, people who block ads aren't free-riders. If blocking would stomp out the mass of low quality bot sites and some of currently "free" services, I wouldn't complain too loudly.

This is the usual PR response from the ad industry.

The web existed before ads and was funded by people that cared and were interested in something.

Now it's funded by ad companies and those don't care about anything but sales and have no interest in anything but money.

The useful internet made and used by people with interests and investment on a personal level is mostly dead. Replaced with shovelware and filler content to place intrusive ads around. Content has become the payload for ads, the more the better. Quality doesn't matter anymore, just deliver payloads with ads.

I think the economic problems of the advertising industry shouldn't be of interest to my user agent. On the contrary, technically browsers could have more anti-tracking capabilities and I think even ad fraud is fully permissible.

There are problem with the attention economy and a lot of people suffer under it. Artist and journalists come to mind immediately.

In the end I am now seriously looking for alternatives to Firefox because I believe that Mozilla has list it in recent times.

> actually go into depth on why its implementation isn't sufficiently private.

What depth is required? PPA means that my browser is doing the spying instead of a third party directly. That's certainly a privacy improvement, but I don't consider it sufficient.

"Sufficiently private" is a subjective call. I don't want to be spied on. Whether or not there are technological "privacy preserving" features baked into it doesn't alter that fundamental fact.

All that said, this isn't a bad enough move to get me to stop using Firefox, as long as I can keep it disabled. It does mean that I have to view Firefox with suspicion, though. I can't consider the browser to be my "user agent" anymore.

Why do we need tracking for advertising though? I wouldn't mind ads based on the page content (as much). Social media websites know their users anyways, no need IMO to track users across other websites.

> subsidize your browsing

Well, I do not have the option to pay for a privacy preserving browser, so I don't.

https://ladybird.org might be an option in the future

> It's unfortunate that almost none of the PPA criticisms actually go into depth on why its implementation isn't sufficiently private

This is a pretty in-depth criticism.

https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/07/14/mozilla-di...

Personally, though, I believe the onus is on Mozilla to convince us that PPA is worth the effort, to show us exactly what data gets sent to their servers... Not on the user to explain why something that they, as less technically experienced, might see as various degrees of black box.

PPA does not "preserve" or improve privacy; it only reduces it. Your narrative is a lie.

Killing PPA directly increases privacy.

> because of the 95% of users who do not use these tools and thus subsidize your browsing

We had open source browsers before.

They are not subsidizing the browser, but the content you consume through the browser. Firefox is free and will always be free.

> The alternative to privacy respecting advertising is the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today.

That's just not true.

TV, newspapers and magazines supported themselves just fine using zero tracking on the advertising they ran. That is still an alternative for websites today. We could shut down every single method of tracking user's actions in a browser, and WidgetCo would still pay to advertise using static ads on the widgetclub.com website with no more privacy invasive data that the webserver page views and the click throughs to their destination urls.

Doing that would make _some_ of the forms of advertising polluting the web these days uneconomical, but seeing fewer Temu ads or "sponsored content" or "around the web" blocks filled with scams, conspiracy theories, and political donation begging at the bottom of every page on half the websites is a good outcome not a bad one.

The idea that advertisers are owed any more data than that, or that the developers of web browsers need to bend to the will of the surveillance capitalists is insane.

Sure, if you choose to run a "free" web browser developed by the DoubleClick advertising company (masquerading as a web search company), then I guess you have to expect the browser to serve that advertising companies interests more than your own.

But most of us expect more than that from Mozilla. They are _supposed_ to be on our side.

> The idea that advertisers are owed any more data than that, or that the developers of web browsers need to bend to the will of the surveillance capitalists is insane.

It's a zero sum game. If others are doing it, then their advertising is more effective, the advertising cost per sale is lower, they are more competitive, and so every company is forced to do the same.

But if nobody is able to do it, then there will be no great loss for the consumer. Advertisers could argue that the inherent advertising overhead of every product is slightly higher and so consumers would have to pay higher prices. I would argue that this is a reasonable price to pay for privacy across the board, just as we all have to pay for the implementation of regulations that mandate safe products.

So we can expect advertisers to push for competitive reasons, but equally if we comprehensively resist so as not to favour competition that isn't similarly restricted, then I agree with you that there is no actual threat to commerce.

I think this is true, companies just want to advertise on equal footing at least. So disabling tracking would only hit only those that ride on the advertising budgets of companies.

If I ask in our advertising department, they do SEO "because the other do that too".

> So disabling tracking would only hit only those that ride on the advertising budgets of companies.

Reading this, it occurs to me that there's another group that would be hit: the tracking "industry" that has sprung up. They would become redundant. Perhaps that's why they're so vocal.

> TV ... supported [itself] just fine using zero tracking on the advertising they ran

... by hijacking our audio-visual attention with deliberately obnoxious ad content for a third of each hour of our down-time.

> newspapers and magazines supported themselves just fine using zero tracking on the advertising they ran

..., in addition to their primarily revenue stream which was the money that customers paid for a copy of the newspaper or magazine.

> TV, newspapers and magazines supported themselves just fine using zero tracking on the advertising they ran.

False, false, demonstrably false.

Get familiar with concepts such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_to_action_(marketing)

Any business who places an ad may simply inquire of their customers "How'd you hear about us?" and they would be able to gauge the reach of a particular placement. Furthermore, anytime a coupon is published, clipped and used at that business, they are going to know where it came from, and so there's your tracking, on paper, no electronic voodoo necessary.

Now when we get to radio and TV, the calls to action were even more immediate and measurable. The stations themselves ran promotions where hundreds, thousands clamored to phone in and be the correct-numbered caller. The advertisements ran specials and promotions and "tell 'em Joe sent ya!" type stuff. They could give a special number or they could run at a special time. The business knew exactly what ad correlated to those callers.

Infomercials are classic calls to action. You purchase time, you run the ad, and you give an hour or so window for callers to get a great deal. The calls roll into your switchboard and you correlate them. Then you buy the next round of ads based on your successes.

I guarantee that there has never, ever been a time when advertisers were unable or unwilling to collect metrics on responses to ads. Especially when marketing costs money, that investment needs to be based on facts and statistics.

You had me until the end. They won't, incentives for everyone involved surpass their greatest dreams or capability.

While we're worrying about how money keeps flowing, there are actual adversaries.

"Privacy preserving Advertising" is bullshit. Just do context based ads.

Oh you're in a car subreddit? Maybe show car ads... instead of hyper personalized diet ads for my fat ass...

Advertising is not hard to do without collecting tons of data, it's just a little bit more expensive if you can't target that well. I don't care. Only they care about that.

PPA is about attribution. It doesn't determine ad types you're seeing like Google's Topics. What it's for is having an allegedly private way to determine if you actually bought a product based on an ad you've seen. Marketeers love having that data so they can determine if their ads are effective to trigger purchases (called "conversions")

I'm not in favour of PPA by the way. I turned it off everywhere. But I just wanted to highlight this.

I pay the ads they are watching. I am completely against the advertisement business

Honestly yes

> To make matters worse, Mozilla has turned on its “privacy preserving attribution” by default. Users have not been informed about this move, nor have they been asked for their consent to be tracked by Firefox.

So more privacy by default is bad? What kind of inverted logic is that?

Obviously

At some point, this exagerated antagonism causes more troubles than it solves

This is the same logic of people who think rent controls do anything but cause more problems than it "solves"

> So more privacy by default is bad?

Is this necessarily the case, though?

1. Does this bypass user's cookie blocking measures (e.g. PiHole, ad blockers)? If so, it's reducing those users' privacy and opting them in by default.

2. If the user was previously interacting with GDPR-compliant websites only, is this reducing their privacy? They're not given the opportunity to consent or revoke consent to this collection of their data.

3. What are the implications of a data breach of Mozilla's servers? Would this have a greater negative impact on users' privacy than a breach of a single website?

> Does this bypass user's cookie blocking measures (e.g. PiHole, ad blockers)? If so, it's reducing those users' privacy and opting them in by default.

This is a nonsensical way to act upon this. You don't make collective choices putting the exceptions in front of the general case.

3. well it is not better than most brokers out there right?

> exceptions

By some (possibly spurious) Google search results, there may be ~900 million ad block users, so not exactly "exceptions." That number seems possible: consider there are 3.5 billion people that use Chrome (i.e. took steps to switch from their default browser, in most cases).

> 3.

Good point, I admit.

> So more privacy by default is bad?

It's not more privacy, though. It's more tracking. Just because the word "privacy" appears in the title, does not make it so.

I blame Mozilla for the way this feature is presented.

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