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Comment by yuhong | Hacker News Reader

browsers themselves offered built-in mechanisms to support advertising that respect privacy & performance?

I wonder which kinds of proposals you would suggest. It should also cover analytics.

Well, some of the proposals flip the relationship on ads. For example, rather than getting access to fine-grained personal data about readers, a marketer gets some coarse data like general location (eg. midwest US) and language. Using that, they propose a set of ads to the browser, and the browser decides which might be relevant based on what it knows about you. The browser keeps the personal data to itself, though. Marketers get some analytics on the response to their ads, but not full-on tracking.

Good idea, actually.

Sounds like a good idea...I fear though it may be technically impossible.

Say you write/fork/create a browser that can do this, in order to really work, you have to disable (by default) all ads.

To do this, technically, that means you have to break all third party site interaction. No third party scripts, no jquery includes, etc. etc.

I could see it maybe as a value-added service which competes with traditional ad-based marketing, i.e. aimed at folks who have very strict anti-ad systems put into place. Only issue being is those same folks may also not wish to use said browser...

So I don't think this is possible, even if its a nice idea. You'd basically have to rebuild the web to do this. The only way it could flourish would be as an independent network of its own.

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