Mozilla becoming active in online advertising
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
I wish Mozilla the best. It would be great if they could be successful in advocating for web ads that consist of, say, a jpeg and an href, but I don't think that's ever going to happen.
The core of the problem is really in this very paragraph:
> Right now, the tradeoffs people are asked to make online are too significant. Yes, advertising enables free access to most of what the internet provides, but the lack of practical control we all have over how our data is collected and shared is unacceptable. And solutions to this problem that simply rely on handing more of our data to a few gigantic private companies are not really solutions that help the people who use the internet, at all.
There is no solution to this. You can't advertise effectively and profitably without personal information. No matter how much you try to chop up and anonymize data, it's still personal and even in the absence of information you can wind up collecting a lot of data about someone (as browser fingerprinting does often times). The more information you have, the more is paid. Not even Apple avoids this, despite their privacy claims, and they too see there's far more money to be made as an ad network than letting Google gobble up the space.
But as much as I personally dislike this, my guess will be that this is the most successful (financially) change Mozilla enacts.
We can't really test the alternatives effectively, without getting an adequate mass of ad buyers and ad sellers to be willing to try un-/less- targeted.
Then people complain about seeing diaper ads when they don't even have a baby.
Some extremist will come along and assert that just means we shouldn't allow advertising at all...
The opposite is worse.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
> One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.
A cashier at the corner store can deduce as much by paying attention to their customers. When you check out at the grocery store with pizza dough, pepperoni and cheese in your basket - the cashier might deduce you're making pizza and even suggest trying a particular brand of sauce or whatever.
Relevant, targeted ads are actually a lot less annoying to most people because they're relevant.
A corner store cashier does not have the raw processing power and money of an ad network. If they tracked one customer with as much of vigilance as the average ad network, they should probably get slapped with a restraining order.
You are conflating two different things - stores retargeting existing customers and recommending products they think are relevant vs. ad networks like Google that track you across channels so that they may serve the most relevant ads to you based on your interests.
Neither are bad, and both are necessary. Tampon advertisements, for example, have no effect on men - men would find it annoying to see tampon adverts constantly because they are not part of the market.
Why would an advertiser want to advertise to people who will never make a purchase or care about their products? If you're a hiker though, it's really fitting to get advertisements for hiking gear and equipment.
Ad networks that track you are necessary?
To answer your question - yes. If you want relevant ads for items you might be interested in, then advertisers need to know what you are interested in. It's that simple.
Your own cited article about Target is evidence of why this is a good thing.
Your position that advertising is manipulative and unnecessary is disconnected with reality as well.
Yes, you've just explained why people may go to a different store, where they are a stranger, when they want to buy something they don't want the local cashier to know about.
The classic example is a 16 year old who buys condoms at a store where no one is likely to recognize him, but others include buying adult diapers, buying a single plunger, and buying hard liquor.
The cashier at the new store might figure out what's going on, but does not know who "you" are.
Which is why the example you quoted is called contextual marketing - it's based on a very small context of the things you are currently buying.
That link, however, expands beyond that to user profiling with 'So Target started sending coupons for baby items to customers according to their pregnancy scores'.
> targeted ads are actually a lot less annoying to most people because they're relevant.
"Targeted ads' includes targeted based on context advertising and targeted based on user profiling.
The g'g'parent comment was specifically about advertising 'without personal information', which is only one type of targeted ads. Please do not use language which confuses the two as it makes it seem like you don't understand the relevant issues.
So you admit to being an extremist then. You probably find problems with a great deal of the modern world as well.
You can't buy things online with cash. Your opinion on what people do online is therefore, colored significantly and is definitely out of touch with most people's experiences.
A person who only uses cash cannot purchase things online either. This entire thread is about online shopping/advertising.
A person who only uses cash has no relevant opinion on this topic.
Color me skeptical.
1. If I search for diapers, and get ads for diapers, the usual pattern is to show the ads above the real search results, which tricks people into buying more expensive and/or lower quality products (after all, why else would the company need to pay to show up at the top of the search results?).
2. If I search for diapers on one site and get shown ads on a different site, then it follows that companies are trading information about me behind my back, which is not okay from a privacy perspective.
> why else would the company need to pay to show up at the top of the search results?
I dare say you do not understand how search results have worked for the past two decades.
> then it follows that companies are trading information about me behind my back
That is not how it works.
It used to be completely normal to get all of our news and entertainment through a small number of curated channels. What works for advertising in that environment won't necessarily work in the massively different news and entertainment environment we now have.
Four TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS), plus independents.
Several dozen radio networks.
Shortwave if you are really into world news like the BBC or Radio Moscow.
The local newspaper. A big city used to have several. If you are in a small place you might also subscribe to the nearest big city paper, and/or the New York Times or other major city paper.
I knew people who received the local paper via mail from the small town they came from. Every one of those is a potential news source, though for major news they mostly used wire news services.
And then there's the weekly and monthly news magazines (Time, The Economist, etc.)
That's far less of a bottleneck on news distribution than we have now, where a couple of advertising companies dominate the entire market.
I cannot believe that a digital marketplace, which has less overhead than a physical one, requires user tracking and behavioral marketing in order to survive.
I find it much easier to believe that user tracking and behavioral marketing gives the ability to out-compete more ethical context-based marketing, just like how companies which dump their waste right into the river can out-compete companies which treat their waste first.
Before the 90s, there were one or two orders of magnitude more channels for information than there are now. There may be a bunch of brands now, but all the people who own, run, and make the final decision about what goes on them could fit in my bathroom.
Seeing our new, concentrated media culture as diverse requires the intentional deception of ignoring that this claimed diversity is delivered through precariously employed independent contracting "content providers" who all have to pass through half a dozen gatekeepers who have complete control of their income and message at any time, with no oversight (except through various forms of informal government intimidation.)
It's not "what works for advertising," it's what works for the tiny number of incestuous oligarchs with media publishing arms and the politicians they pay for. It's also a matchmaking problem: publications used to have subjects, and advertise things related to those subjects. Now the content is generic, fact-free jingoistic sludge that people are tricked into reading by manipulatively vague headlines, advertising random shit that happened to win a realtime auction.
I absolutely promise that you could keep your fishing website afloat advertising fishing gear, but only if the market and fishing gear manufacturers were operating individually and rationally, rather than based on calculations motivated by complex ownership structures and market manipulation.
The solution is to pay for the tools you use.
There are plenty of successful creators (e.g., on YouTube) that do exactly that, by getting advertisers to sponsor them. From what I understand, it seems to work pretty well. Those advertisements obviously can't use personal information, since they're part of the video.
There are some general ones who won't use targeted personal advertising, but for the most part, this personal information is why you will never see gym supplements being advertised on feminine beauty channels (despite channels being open to the money), or mascara products advertised on a gamer channel (again, despite them being open to the $$$).
> we do this fully acknowledging our expanded focus on online advertising won’t be embraced by everyone in our community
I'm glad that they acknowledge this! And deciding to to something that is unpopular isn't a sin or anything. They can do whatever they like. I'm just a bit saddened that this direction means that my trust level with Mozilla and Firefox has to be greatly reduced.
But times change, and often for the worse. Such is life.
Betting on this not happening is probably a better decision than most of the ones Mozilla has made over the past decade.
It could happen but it's really unlikely for anything to be compliant, compatible, and make enough of a dent to last.
This is exactly what comes to my mind. When Google acquired DoubleClick, they positioned it as a net good for everybody in terms of privacy. DoubleClick was notoriously awful in those terms. Google said (and people, including myself, believed) that by owning them, Google can make them into something better.
Instead, DoubleClick made Google into something much, much worse.
I would love to hear from Mozilla what they're doing to avoid a similar fate.
> We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market.
Oh, really? Come on. Nobody is applauding this.
I get it, Firefox users aren't customers, so they are the product. But repeatedly sabotaging their product with these constant blunders doesn't seem like a good strategy.
Instead of leading Mozilla down a couple highly-focused paths, their leadership decided to take every single path, including social issues and more that have nothing to do with technology, web browsers, or the things that make Mozilla money.
The worst part is, they half-assed almost all of those distractions too.
Today, Mozilla is kind of like those Hollywood Actor memes - doesn't know when to say no and continues to dilute their brand in the process.
Mozilla is a flailing, dying beast because of gross negligence.
Now, Mozilla says they're going to change online advertising! Yeah, no they're not... more distractions.
I think it's irresponsible for a government to expect its citizens to use a web interface when it doesn't officially support any browser which isn't a user-tracking advertising platform.
Just how stupid do they think we are?