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Comment by javaun | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I’m on the Polaris team at Mozilla. I understand your reticence on tracking. The news and other content we all enjoy on the open web is mostly underwritten by ads, as are the social networks activists use to coordinate. These sites need to get paid or they can’t keep doing what they do. It’s not the ads, it’s the tracking. While many users love seeing personalized content, an increasing number don’t. We’re trying to get to a place where websites respect users self-declared preferences on tracking, and users have better tools to enforce those preferences. It’s going to involve not just building tools and working with privacy advocates but also working with advertisers and publishers to help them benefit when they respect individual user wishes.

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this is extremely important and difficult work, and i support you and your team in working toward these and related goals, including financially.

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.

The news and other content we all enjoy is underwritten by tracking. The ads lose value without the tracking. The two are inextricably linked.

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.

This scenario assumes that the value of ads would be driven completely to zero if tracking were not possible. For any non-zero value advertisers will still back out as they stop seeing returns, at which point ad-space-sellers will be forced to lower to their rates. This is still fully capable of effectively driving low-margin ad-supported websites out of business, but it's not a doomsday scenario.

"This is still fully capable of effectively driving low-margin ad-supported websites out of business, but it's not a doomsday scenario."

Right. That's a scenario I wish the privacy advocate folks at places like Mozilla were more up front about.

Broadcast television still works and doesn't have these granular tracking abilities. I wonder if the principles they've used could be a blueprint to follow. The example will only be more relevant as market share shifts from broadcast tv to web-based alternatives.

Right. Also, the cost of computing has dropped so much in the last decade that running a social network without ads or tracking, such as Ello, is now possible. What we may see is a major social network that's like Craiglist - very cheap, a very small organization (30 people!), and very popular.

You can now beat "free with ads" on price. This is important.

> The ads lose value without the tracking. The two are inextricably linked.

[citation needed]

Fair's fair. I can only speak from experience having built a business selling behaviorally targeted ads and now working at a company doing so at a much larger scale.

> The news and other content we all enjoy on the open web is mostly underwritten by ads, as are the social networks activists use to coordinate.

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.

[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...

Mozilla is prototyping a content micropayment system tentatively called "Subscribe2Web". Here is a video presenting the ideas behind the project:

https://air.mozilla.org/subscribe2web/

this was fascinating to watch and i'm glad mozilla is thinking about this problem, but i don't see how this is much different from flattr.

subscribe2web doesn't yet seem to solve what to me is the key part of the problem: in order for me to pay to opt out of ads, i still have to link my payment information to someone with a relationship to mozilla or some one else, and enable them to track what i read in order to distribute the funds. that's not necessarily better than google analytics and google ads...it's just different. and when it gets baked into the browser by default, it's potentially even more problematic than the status quo in certain ways.

I suppose you want some sort of zero knowledge proof, so the browser can prove that the request is coming from a user who has paid without revealing who the user is.

$12.70/month, according to that Mozilla research, is the total value of advertising per user, which means that is the most we'd have to pay on average if could just pay directly, and in fact much less per my points above!

This is even less than I had estimated. I need to dig into this number further.

Thanks for the link. This issue is a project of mine and it helps me a lot.

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