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Mozilla acquired Anonym, an ad start-up
(blog.mozilla.org)
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Advertising isn’t going anywhere, so investing in/supporting ways to more ethically serve ads without harvesting private data seems like a good thing?
The alternative was supposed to be idle crypto mining
Becoming an ad company while trying to put privacy first seems like a conflict of interests in the making
As Jamie Zawinski put it, it’s like a non-profit animal shelter setting up a sideline selling kitten meat to satisfy demands for hockey-stick growth. If somebody castigates them for it, they can point out that the demand for kitten deli slices didn’t going to go away, and if they didn’t sell them, someone else would step in and do it less humanely.
There's actually a real world example of this. Some cats that are disected in schools are euthanized cats from shelters, because the alternative is cat farms that breed cats just to be killed and disected
It's not, at all. When you drive by a billboard on the highway, is it invading your privacy? There's no reason there can't be a digital equivalent.
Possibly?
Let me rephrase it a little- When you walk past a digital advertising screen at a Westfield Shopping Centre - is it invading your privacy? (The answer is a definite YES, they have facial tracking and keep metrics on where you go in the mall, how long you loiter in certain locations, what stores you go, whether you came back out with bags, etc)
Once again, that is an issue with implementation, and not an issue inherent in advertising in general.
That's what I always say. Targeted advertising should be illegal. Contextual advertising is acceptable.
If I'm on the star trek wiki, serve me ads for star trek, sci-fi, and whatever. You don't need to know anything about me specifically.
We'd still need to do something about like ads that take up too much space, hurt page performance, or introduce malware, but removing the stalking would be an improvement
Contextual ads can be simple images/html without 20 thousand scripts buried in
Right, and something like Reddit makes targeted advertising SUPER easy, with zero personal information.
Want to know what kind of products I might be interested in? Literally just ask.
Worse than being a pro-privacy company that utterly depends on Google?
Advertising doesn't need to be privacy infringing. That's something from the last 20 years. No conflict of interest necessary if all they do is ads.
It’s definitely making their job harder on the face of it, but it also differentiates them from other ad companies, so I guess they’re betting on that being a draw for potential clients.
Why? Does 95% of digital advertisement even serve a single valuable purpose?
I get that websites need funding and that legitimate business require some way communicate their services exist. We need to solve the problem for the former and create specialized accessible safe spaces for the later.
When is the last time anyone here saw an ad for a local business, when is the last time anyone recall willfully clicking one? Was there actually anything useful there?
From what i recall ads almost always are one of the following:
sex, barely legal drugs and predatory video games. (Lumped together to make a bad pun)
real product/fake price: oh this item isnt in stock plz look at catalog
politics, buy our guide to get rich, actual illegal scam operation.
None of them are honest or respectful to the customer. People aren't prey, stop baiting.
Admittedly, for me this is personal. Autism means i experience the extra noise as painful. Plastering it on useful websites feels like a hostile attack to keep me out and unwelcome. I downright refuse to look at watch nor will i support them through ad free subscriptions to the point of it having become a digital disability.
But come on, can we smart online people really not figure out something else that isn't based on literal brainwashing.
I think a long time ago a vicious cycle began in the advertising space where predatory ads had more incentive to pay for ad space, so sensible people start to perceive ads in general as predatory. Now no sensible advertiser that's trying to promote a legitimate product for legitimate reasons will do so by buying ad space, thus reinforcing the increasingly accurate perception that all ads are predatory.
As well as predatory/not, there's also a trend with attention grabbing/not.
There was a period of time where Google AdWords ruled the online ad space, and most ads were pure text in a box with a border making the border between content and ads visually distinct.
Kind of like having small portions of the newspaper classified section cut out and slapped around the webpage.
I still disliked them, but they were fairly easy to look past, and you didn't have to worry about the ad itself carrying a malware payload (just whatever they linked to).
Companies found that those style ads get less clickthrough than flashier ones, and that there's no quantifiable incentive to not make their ads as obnoxious as possible. So they optimized for the wrong metric: clickthrough vs sales by ad.
More recently, companies have stepped up their tracking game so they can target sales by ad more effectively, but old habits die hard, and predatory ads that just want you to click have no incentive to care and "de-escalate" the obnoxiousness.
When everyone start using adblockers then it will go away and companies will have to come with new business models. I have been using adblockers since the first adblock was released and I don't see ads so it's up to the people. Better invest in/support ways to block ads.
Same, but surely you realize that ads have only gotten worse in the intervening time. I also don't truly believe that we'll ever reach critical mass on adblocker users. You're asking people who don't care, who don't use the internet the same way we do, to suddenly care enough to take manual action outside of their knowledgebase amd comfort zone.
The only way the adblocker user numbers get pumped up to critical mass for a change is if a popular default browser makes adblocking an opt-out default.
If they don't care about ads then they won't care if those ads are private or not.
I will say that we’re definitely getting to a level of adblockers that the sites actively care about blocking content or warning about people using adblockers. It’s starting to affect their bottom lines.