Polaris Privacy Initiative to Accelerate User-focused Privacy Online

Mozilla used to run job ads: "Work for mankind, not for the man". That's now about as relevant as Google's "Don't be evil."

but as one example, the amount of person-hours that go into building a functional NoScript surrogate that can be used to block google analytics tracking without breaking the functionality of major websites is significant, and most 'ad blockers' either don't block the most common trackers because they've been paid off by advertisers (adblock plus) or only block one or a handful of many known means of tracking users (e.g. the last time i looked at disconnect.me, it didn't touch TLS-based identifiers like SessionID, tickets, etc. that Google is thought to use).

i think we have to move past some of the opacity/ambiguity that undermined previous attempts to reconcile the interests of users and advertisers, too. for example in the eyes of PrivacyBadger, an advertising company hosting jQuery or a font basically meant that my preferences about the same company tracking me, persistently, across most of the world's major websites could be trivially circumvented as long as that company could interpolate their server logs with other information. privacybadger probably still improved many users' privacy, but i think there's a lot of nuance that's extremely important to clarify as mozilla's work on this progresses.

it's a big fight, but an important one.

As someone who works in the industry I understand and respect the desire of privacy advocates to push back against practices they disagree with, but the view advanced by many that the ad industry would work just fine if ads could not be targeted based on behavior seems willfully wrongheaded.

If advertisers can't target based on behavior, they can't get high enough click rates and conversion rates. If they can't get those, their advertising is unprofitable. If their advertising is unprofitable they will stop buying it.

And who underwrites the underwriters? We do! It's a lie that ads give people content and services for free (explained below). If Mozilla truly wants to fight for users, it needs to end its reliance on advertising revenue, and help invent honest ways for content and service creators to get paid by end users. We are a creative industry. We can find ways to do this while also keeping access open to the fraction of the population that can't afford to pay (which per below would only be people who don't buy advertised products).

I know this truth is hard to swallow for an industry that has grown so dependent on ads. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." But if we are to do the right thing, we have to really think about the truth:

1. The advertisers who pay web providers get their money from us, added to the prices of other things we consume. There is no free lunch.

2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too.

3. We pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because ad-supported web providers live or die by giving advertisers what they want (and what we want indirectly and secondarily). This includes both the cost of lost privacy as well as business, editorial and design decisions that optimize for advertising revenue. As has been said, they are using us as products more than treating us as their paying customers. Let me restate to be extra clear: WE are the paying customer, but we don't look like that to their finance department.

4. We pay for all the collateral damage of advertising, such as the tremendous amount of link-bait and other garbage that advertising perversely incentivizes.

5. We pay the social costs. Whether or not you agree with the social costs laid out in the above article, I'm sure most can agree democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising undermines democracy[1] and the free market[2]. Advertising is predominantly about manipulation and deceit. I believe the social costs are the most expensive.

Added together, we end users are paying a lot more for "free" product than if we could just straight up pay for it. And even we non-users are paying the social costs and collateral damage.

Ads are simply a sneaky and dishonest way to get at end users' money without them realizing it.

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[This is a condensed version of a more detailed case with reference links that I made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773]

[1] You don't need me to explain. We all know that money often overwhelmingly decides who gets to run in an election, plays a big part in who wins, and influences what legislation they introduce, support or fight.

[2] http://www.chaosisgood.com/2013/03/how-advertising-undermine...

Should something like Sandstorm take off, then we're still stuck with an application distribution model that destroys the split between client/server that allows a diverse set of clients to exist, destroys the ability for clients to be versioned independently of the server, and destroys the ability for clients to manage data in a way that it can't be read/captured/stolen by the server.

There are also many third-party add-ons out there: NoScript, Privacy Badger, Disconnect, DoNotTrackMe, Ghostery, etc. I don't think we want to compete with them but rather give them all more powerful tools to create more anti-tracking options for users. (EDITED to remove pronouns, fix misspells)