The founder of AdBlock Plus weighs in on PPA:
Privacy on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population. Advertising on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population.
Yet any attempt to improve this situation is met with fierce resistance by the lucky 10% who know how to navigate their way around the falltraps. Because the internet shouldn’t have tracking! The internet shouldn’t have ads! And any step towards a compromise is a capital offense. I mean, if it slightly benefits the advertisers as well, then it must be evil.
It seems that no solution short of eliminating tracking and advertising on the web altogether is going to be accepted. That we live with an ad-supported web and that fact of life cannot be wished away or change overnight – who cares?
And every attempt to improve the status quo even marginally inevitably fails. So the horribly broken state we have today prevails.
This is so frustrating. I’m just happy I no longer have anything to do with that…
On one hand, hosting content online isnt free, so there should be some form of subsidization to offset that. But I feel like selling my privacy to massive firms so that they can analyze my habits to serve me ads about things I would be statistically more likely to buy is a bad solution to this problem.
I dont have a good fix, as the only 2 alternatives that seem to show up are paid subscriptions and decentralization. Which are both useful options, but not one that fits all cases.
Except there are tons of alternatives that actually work. I watch plenty of YT videos with paid sponsors and if it’s done well, I don’t skip the sections because they are interesting.
What people dislike is obnoxious advertising, not advertising per se. Unfortunately, most advertising is obnoxious.
In other words, reality has already shown us what is possible. But it would probably reduce certain types of ad revenue, and big ad companies (i.e., Google) don’t like that.
That’s why they’re looking for an alternative solution, no? As I understand it, this only tells advertisers which ads get clicked on how often, without sharing any data about you specifically.
There are players in this space that from the start saw the opportunities to track people.
We discussed this stuff at work in the mid-90’s. If us little IT geeks saw it then, surely the major players were already working on plans for more than we could imagine.
You’re criticizing advertising in general and looking for a “fix” which does not involve advertising of any kind.
What Mozilla is doing here tries to address your critique of advertising. It tries to fix the system that’s in place. Obviously, we’ll have to see, if it works out, but I don’t feel like it’s that different from your vision.