Isn't AdBlock Plus the one that takes money from advertisers to have their ads whitelisted by the ad-blocker?
Fuck this guy.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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That's true but that doesn't mean that they can't be right.
I would argue that PPA is analogous to what ABP implemented. It seems to be a case of multiple people arriving at the same conclusion as how to try and fix the problem, contextually.
Sorry if this is a silly question, but how is a good adblocker like Ublock Origin not the answer? I don't care if ad-supported websites go under. I'm fine with everything becoming subscription and donation based. I don't want to see ads and am OK with fewer websites as a consequence.
We're not the target audience because we use uBlock. This is about the general user.
Regarding subscriptions and donations, I recently brought it up here: https://lazysoci.al/post/14704065
But if we essentially paywall the Internet, there will be a lot of people left behind, as most can't afford to donate or subscribe.
There's a middleground: privacy respecting ads (like Mozilla is pushing w/ PPA) and microtransactions per page (e.g. pay whatever they would've made through ads, so a fraction of penny per view). I'm okay with either and think we should have both.
I will happily put £10 a month into a pot, if I don't have to worry about how it gets distributed among the various instances I use and I think the same for lots of people, but someone needs to create that service.
I was there, during the first advertising push of the mid/late 90s, where visiting the wrong website - or even the right one on the wrong day - spawned “uncloseable” pop-ups and pop-unders… uncloseable because as soon as you tried to dismiss the window, that action triggered a half-dozen more to spawn.
Eventually, the weight of all the browser windows would cause not only the browser to grind to a halt, but even the computer as a whole (single-thread CPUs & minimal RAM, nat), such that your only possible recovery path was to conduct a hard restart of the entire system, your unsaved work be damned.
I feel for those businesses whose only possible funding strategy is via ads, but that well was lethally poisoned for me decades ago. I jumped onto the world’s first adblocker the moment it became available for Phoenix (now Firefox), and I have never looked back. The only way I will ever stop using adblocking is to stop using the Internet entirely.
Many ads are scams or malware too, which ad brokers don't want to address because they get paid. The "we need ad money to support our service" sounds close to the mobs protect racket given the security risks on some ads.
While I also hate ads, what I hate even more is the tracking. I would honestly be okay with ads that respected my privacy, like they largely did back in the early days of the web. I remember visiting sites and having ads that had nothing to do with my interests, probably because they were either randomly or staticly (based on page content) assigned.
We have the technology, however, to move beyond ads. We can do microtransactions and just pay a nominal fee per page view. I wouldn't mind if I paid the fraction of a penny a page would've g otten by showing me an ad, provided that payment was anonymous (e.g. through something like GNU Taler or Monero). But for some reason, websites either expect a ton of money and a login, or ads, with no in-between. I hoped Brave would provide that, but that didn't happen at all.
Please, give us three options:
- privacy-respecting ads - ads should be relevant to the page content and maybe local browsing history (never sent anywhere, just analyzed locally)
- anonymized microtransactions per page view to avoid ads
- subscription to avoid MTX and ads for sites I use regularly
But if the current options are privacy invasive ads or subscriptions, I'm going to install an ad-blocker. If you prevent me from seeing it, I'm going to look at your competitors instead.
We can do better. It isn't the 10% ruining it it is the 10% who see that we don't need to live like lab rats
We didn't used to have tracking, you know? You used to just put up a billboard or put an ad in the newspaper and you just hoped it'd lead to new customers.
It's a bit weird that the advertising people implemented fine gained tracking without asking anyone and now we're just expected to pretend there's no other way for advertising to work.
We didn't used to have tracking, you know? You used to just put up a billboard or put an ad in the newspaper and you just hoped it'd lead to new customers.
Even back then people tried to find ways to measure the effectiveness of the campaigns. For example, you'd get a discount if you passed a coupon or a coupon code, which would tell the seller that your purchase was in response to the ad.
Sure, but you couldn't analyse an individual's purchasing behaviour over time and show just that person ads for baby clothes because you think they got pregnant.
Right. And the proposed system doesn't allow for that either, as I understand it. Instead, you show ads for baby clothes next to an article about how to burp your baby, and then learn how many people buy baby clothes via that article without knowing anything about the people reading that article.
In theory, yes -- it's all aggregated and anonoymized. In practice, it's much more fine-grained than that, and ad companies under scrutiny have shown that their data can be deconvolved back to individual clients
Where did you get that from? That doesn't match at all what I have read. (At least not when it comes to this system - but maybe you're talking about Google's Topics API?)
That article is about:
Data anonymization is often undertaken in two ways. First, some personal identifiers like our names and social security numbers might be deleted. Second, other categories of personal information might be modified—such as obscuring our bank account numbers.
Neither of those is what PPA does.
Of course, they're right that history has shown that this isn't easy. Hence:
There was a hell of a lot less competition back then too. Don't pretend like advertising itself is the only thing that's changed.