I have DoNotTrack set and my browser blocked several tracking scripts from their site.
As for the problem, it really comes down to making money: Data is sold to inform targeted adverts. An additional requirement is that the ad company needs to know how much to pay the ad host. Also remember that ad blockers came about mostly as a result of reducing web bloat and reducing the fight for the users attention.
Nobody in their right mind would agree to this without some sensible solution in place. Servers cost money to run and content is usually not free to create.
That's the part that needs to go away. I think the original version of Google had the right idea. The content of the page determines the ads.
Billions of dollars that have been spent on brilliant engineers, bandwidth, and CPU cycles to improve ad targeting by a fraction of a percent here and another fraction there. I can't help but feel like the big winners in the web of the past two decades are ad companies and not creators. Even the term content creator points to this. Ads are what is important and the stuff they go around is just content.
We've devalued creative work to the point of absurdity.
It's not fractions of a percent. It's massive increases which is why FB and Google are two of the most valuable companies on the planet.
They have 1st-party access to user profiles which is why they're so good compared to independent parties which use more anonymous profiles. This is why 3rd-party audience data is poor and will get poorer while Google and Facebook will be more entrenched because of GDPR and similar laws. So there will be a move to context for some ads, but not most of the ones you see.
> It's not fractions of a percent. It's massive increases
Do you know a number on the difference between targeted and untargeted search (not display) ads? If I search for "instant pot," I'm probably looking to buy an instant pot. How much does knowing my entire search and browsing history help the advertiser? I'm sure Google has these numbers, and equally sure they aren't sharing.
It looks like there may be big differences for display ads (2-3x?), but for search?
> It looks like there may be big differences for display ads (2-3x?), but for search?
Keep in mind that display ads are wildly ineffective to begin with. Targeted ads may raise your click through rate from 0.2% to 0.6% but that isn't good enough to justify the massive privacy loss and use of bandwidth, server time, engineering talent, etc...
That's the saddest part. A lot of talented people could be working on important problems, but instead they're trying to make people click on ads a tenth of a percent more, so they will buy Crest slightly more often than Colgate.
I guess it's no worse than going into finance: just another way for someone with talent and ambition to make a boatload of money while providing almost no value to society (and sometimes negative value). Still, one could hope that talented people would sacrifice a bit of lucre to do some good. The inventors of Arpanet don't have rocket companies, but I bet they're living comfortably.
No value to society? Every single business uses marketing to grow, including the one that employs you if you have a job. How about the shareholders who benefited? That includes pensions, retirements, insurance and other funds that you have an interest in.
And what about all the other stuff that you get for free, including the majority of the content on the internet? What about all the other services like Gmail and the technical projects that have been opensourced? What about all the people who got rich and went on to invest in or start their own companies?
There's no "right" thing to work on. It's like asking why do we have astronauts in space [1] when there are problems here on earth. The truth is that it takes all kinds of people to make this world work and we're all better off if people get to do what they want to do, and hopefully it happens to be what they like doing too.
I referenced "Crest vs. Colgate" to suggest that quite a bit of marketing is a zero-sum game. If people drink more Pepsi, they'll probably drink less Coke. If they eat at McDonalds more, they'll probably eat at Burger King less. How much money do these companies waste shifting consumers between equivalent products?
I'm not against ad-supported businesses, but I'll bet Google would have made plenty of money off plain old search ads, probably enough to make Gmail free for everyone. If not, they could have charged a few bucks a month, or shown untargeted ads. In any case, they wouldn't have had an enormous database of PII, just waiting to be hacked or mined in more malicious ways when the ad bubble pops (e.g. credit reports, insurance).
> There's no "right" thing to work on.
Really[1]? We're paying hucksters 5-10x what we're paying teachers now. If that's what the market demands, then the market is twisted.
Anecdotally, my mom worked for P&G when I was growing up and she said the main difference between the brands was which one was on sale, sold more than the other. In a way the price was the biggest reason for selling toothpaste, not marketing.
Yes really. There's no rank of value. Go work on what you want to work on. Changing the value of teachers is a good goal and there are plenty of edtech companies being funded so if you care about it then go fix it.
I prefer that we all have the freedom that you can actually choose to do that, or not.
It was an example, but you seem to be suggesting that some people have a more worthy cause than others?
What's the most "right" thing then and why aren't you working on it already? I assume curing cancer is somewhere on that list? Let us all know when you'll be getting to it.
And plenty of people wouldn't find any significance in space exploration, or whatever your career is. Subjective judgements are pointless overall. All that matters is that we have the freedom to choose.
> And what about all the other stuff that you get for free
It's only free if you think that the details of your life aren't worth anything (I specifically object to advertising targeted to individuals, I have no problem with ads similar to ones you find in a magazine or print newspaper).
Without any discussion, ad companies asserted that they have the right to spy on users and track them in almost every area of their lives online and off. I think we are finally starting to push back in the other direction. Europe has GDPR and I think it's only a matter of time before we have something similar in the US. IMHO companies should only be allowed to collect and use information on individuals in ways that each individual decides to allow.
Yes things are different with search ads. What you're describing is called "intent" and there's nothing more clear than what you query, although it can and does get boosted by history. I didn't think this discussion was limited to just search though.
That's kind of what I thought: Google didn't have to turn to the dark side until it bought DoubleClick. Sure, they wouldn't have become one of the biggest companies in the world, but they could still have made plenty of money. If they had taken that course, I'd still be using their products.
I mean, true enough, but DDG has since proven that non-tracking ads can be profitable even in an industry dominated by nosey advertisers. The trick I think is to look at whether or not you're profitable not if you are the most profitable company in your sector.
To be honest I would be happier running a company which made $1,000,000 per year profit than a company which had to race to make more and more profits each year. That's the rub, though, if you have investors you need to keep growing and at some point growth requires you to abandon even the most basic pretense of ethical behavior.
The sensible solution, I think, is requiring digital advertisers to support non-personalized ads as a fallback for tracking ads; that is, a digital advertiser would not be allowed to only offer personalized ads. Then allow content creators right of refusal for those consumers who don't wish to allow any advertising at all, and build software supporting this into major browsers. Supplement with things like Brace's Basic Attention Tokens and premium subscriptions.
Will people just make ad free browsers elsewhere that don't respect this? Yes, of course. But hopefully these will be few or niché, as even now many users do not mind personalized tracking and many don't want to move to a new browser.
And yes, content has to to be paid for. If content creators do not want to work for free, let them find alternate revenue streams or cease creating. (And the second is an option.)
The alternative is tantamount to saying creators or their paymasters have a right to personally track me simply because they created content that I happened upon, and it's the de facto situation right now, albeit with a vigorous arms race of advertisers and ad blockers.
Content doesn’t have to be payed by obtrusive ads and user tracking. Many articles wrote just for the sake of writing or as an additional marketing channel (digital ocean articles how to setup servers, basecamp blog and so on).
I don’t want to read the content created with incentive to sell me to advertisers. The quality of such content is also questionable.
>> Servers cost money to run and content is usually not free to create.
Yes- and you know who makes a lot of money out of servers and content? ISPs. If they want to keep making that money, perhaps they can fork out some of it to cover the costs of running the infrastructure and the content that keeps them in the money.
At first I agreed, but it might actually be a good idea if the payment is enforced.
Imagine a scheme in which any traffic has to be bought/paid by the ISP, which is financed by your monthly subscription.
So if you open an url, you're gonna have to pay a tiny amount for the request.
But it's probably too easy to game. Just write a malware that keeps downloading from your servers. It would make hijacked chrome extensions insanely profitable. And just imagine the money Mirai's Creator could've gotten with this...
It would also make bigger websites more profitable than lean and clean pages.
So I guess you're right. Not a good idea.
It would be cool if it worked though. sometimes I wish capitalism wouldn't pervert any system at the cost of society. Too bad there aren't any alternatives that actually seem to work.
> It would be cool if it worked though. sometimes I wish capitalism wouldn't pervert any system at the cost of society. Too bad there aren't any alternatives that actually seem to work.
Only if you adopt the mainstream, incorrect definition of what capitalism is. To put the correct definition into laymen terms, capitalism is essentially paying someone less than the value that they produce. A privately-held and operated Ponzi scheme with nearly everyone on the bottom. That's what all the talk about "mode of production" is about. The term does not hold exclusive domain on profit or enterprise. There were markets under feudalism.
To address your second point, there are plenty of alternatives that work. There's even one that's currently showing itself as being outright superior. Look into worker owned cooperatives such as Mondragon in Spain. Both Microsoft and GE have sent representatives there to figure out why their quality level is so high and so consistent.
By that same logic, the power company should also pay royalties to website owners. After all, if the internet didn't exist, we wouldn't need that much juice for our electronic devices.
> As for the problem, it really comes down to making money: Data is sold to inform targeted adverts.
If it came down to simply targeting, the original DNT proposal would have succeeded. If someone cares enough about not seeing targeted ads that they're willing to opt-in for this setting, then probably not much value in targeting that way anyway.
The issue came down to things like measurement, ad spam & the rest. Basically things that involve tracking but not targeting. The advertising side wanted to still allow these things if DNT was set, but there were vocal voices saying DNT must be strict & not allow those tracking cases either.
It seems weird that they would ask survey respondents to check their browser settings to determine if they had Do Not Track enabled. DNT status is transmitted over HTTP headers, and is available to JavaScript. Couldn't they have just checked DNT status automatically to get more accurate data?
Propose a legislation that has zero chance of ever coming into effect and then watch as all of your target audience pat you on the back for all the great work.
Problem of course is that this isn't how legislation gets passed in the US. Especially these days when you have Democrats, Republicans and the President all with completely different stances on privacy. And of course a 2020 election with a President who is relying almost exclusively on digital marketing and would be hurt by this legislation.
If this was a SuperPAC with a high profile lobbying firm then you could take all of this a little more seriously.
Indeed, no one talks about the privacy implications of referral links, although when it comes to the agreement with Bing, etc., I think everything is proxied. Not so much with the direct links to Amazon. Amazon knows when you are a DDG user.
Even though affiliate links are a low hanging fruit in regards to making money with search engines, it is not made transparent by DuckDuckGo.
They also use all the data they can get, they just tell us they get rid of the identifying information as fast as possible (IP address). I wouldn't be surprised if, from a privacy-standpoint, using Google and DDG as a non-logged in user is basically the same, especially if you use google with an ad blocker. The process of Google ads is basically to have a profile based on cookie data, which the user can easily control.
yegg (CEO @ DDG):
"We've actually been using Yahoo technology along with our own and others since the very beginning of DuckDuckGo. Over the past year though we've been working on a stronger partnership with Yahoo so we can get access to more features like date filters that everyone has been asking for (that one in particular is our most requested feature by far).
With regards to the ads, nothing is changing in terms of ad privacy/tracking or our privacy policy in general. Ads should just become more relevant."
Have you noticed "improving.duckduckgo.com", the analytics service that logs all requests ?
"To be clear, this means we cannot ever tell what individual people are doing since everyone is anonymous"
But Yahoo search itself has been, for the past four years, a mishmash of Bing, Google and Yahoo results. I wonder which mix of the three Yahoo will pass along when using its API, versus using its search page.
"Canvas defender" style features very often produce false positives (code unrelated to tracking that gets blocked anyway because it's hard to distinguish). You'd have to show the code that produced it for this "fun fact" to have any relevance.
This. Also DDG and Brave are probably the shadiest small tech companies I've seen in many years. They use extensive and aggressive advertising and sneaky marketing techniques with nothing more but attacking big companies using their paid minions (youtubers, bloggers, influencers on reddit an 4chan), ironically the same big companies that their products are built upon. I wonder if a company like Google would ever sue them or that would make these companies a favor because all they need is more exposure as the little fighter who takes on the evil giant and we all know who we should be more sympathetic with when we see a fight between the big evil guy and the little one.
Great way to promote themselves. DDG is growing like crazy, although I had to switch back to Google after half a year with DDG because search quality is nowhere near that good.
On the other hand, the Democratic Party seems eager to stick it to the Silicon Valley, so they may at least use a similar proposal as a way to negotiate with the big tech.
It was a cynical way of critizing that they collect so-called anonymized usage data, for example for people who really need something anonymous they could start offering a gateway to a search that doesn't collect anything at all.
I have split up my browsing and search among multiple browsers, depending on the use case, and I use Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo and Startpage, mostly for having different perspectives as I found out that only using google limited the stuff I found. (Google serves Startpages different results than what they show themselves)
As for the problem, it really comes down to making money: Data is sold to inform targeted adverts. An additional requirement is that the ad company needs to know how much to pay the ad host. Also remember that ad blockers came about mostly as a result of reducing web bloat and reducing the fight for the users attention.
Nobody in their right mind would agree to this without some sensible solution in place. Servers cost money to run and content is usually not free to create.