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…
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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:
Fundamentally what the alternative is, is to propose that you remain the sole owner of your privacy at the cost of sharing with advertisers that you have, say, 6 generic topics you’re interested in. Like motorsports. It, with the millions or billions of others looking. The ad tracking currently knows everything about everyone and then works out if motorsports is an effective ad for you individually based on their profile of you.
For me, I’m fine with the current system. For my family though, they’re just using phones and tablets with their default browser, blissfully unaware that there’s no privacy. Then their data gets leaked out.
I know it’s an extreme kind of case, but domestic abuse victims are always my thought when you think of a counter to “well I’ve got nothing to hide”. Those people if they’re unsure about privacy, will err on the side of caution. They stay trapped.
In conclusion, I’d rather move the needle forward for those who are at risk. Those who installing anti-tracking plugins would put at further risk. Where installing odd browsers make them a target. We can find perfection later. Make the Web safer now.
Plenty of people could justifiably take the opposite stance. But even just for my grandparents, they shouldn’t be tracked the way they are. They’re prime candidates for scams, and giving away privacy is one data leak away from a successful scam.
Kind of off topic to what you said I realise. :)
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.
Isn’t AdBlock Plus the one that takes money from advertisers to have their ads whitelisted by the ad-blocker?
Fuck this guy.
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.
The problem is this was snuck in, there was no transparency.
If it’s an improvement for users, wouldn’t you be making a big deal of it?
That tells me all I need to know.
They listed it prominently in the official changelog, they’ve got a support page for it and they have a toggle to disable it. If they wanted to sneak it in, they would not have done any of that.
It’s also still unclear, if this will improve the situation for users. If it sees no adoption, it’s dead on arrival. If it ends up being abused by advertisers without evidence of it improving privacy, they’ll throw it back out.
Like, I agree that a blog post engaging into the discussion would be nice, but I also get that it’s not easy to time this correctly. Since Mozilla does develop out in the open, a feature like that could be discovered by journalists as early as the conception phase. Arguably, it still is in the conception phase. People are now stumbling over it, because they made it transparent.
So how come you know about this before it’s been generally enabled?
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.
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.
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.
The difference to me, between this thing and what Google is building (“Privacy Sandbox”), is that I trust Mozilla to have user interests in mind. They don’t have shareholders, they don’t have a massive foot in the advertising market, so if this thing turns out to be bad for users, then I expect them to fix it or to pull the plug. With Google, I rather expect them to worsen it for users, when they get the chance to do so, without journalists writing about it.
What would it take Mozilla to do, to break your trust?
For example, what if they sold private data? Or, if that is not extreme enough, what if they sold private data to advertising companies? Stuff like geolocation.
Not the person you replied to, but…
What would it take Mozilla to do, to break your trust?
To move out of the least-worst option position.
Right now it’s in that position. It’s always been in that position, and IMO it has never not been in that position.
And for the record, I am not talking about Mozilla specifically, but the browser ecosystem for that rendering engine that includes any forks and derivatives… because things like Chrome’s maliciously flawed and user-hostile Manifest v3 also cascade down into forks and alternatives that are based off of it, and so contaminate many other normally-good alternatives.
What would it take Mozilla to do, to break your trust?
To move out of the least-worst option position.
Does that mean that you trust it, or just that you will continue using it because you need a browser?
Because to me, there’s a big gulf between a company that hasn’t broken your trust and a company that makes the minimum viable product that you need to use daily.
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.
I don’t think anyone is asking you to stop blocking ads. Block away!
I think the only request defenders of PPA are making, is please don’t actively prevent it from making things better for everyone else.
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
“Why don’t you want to compromise with the leopards? They don’t want to kill you, just let them lick your nose a bit. That would be cute, right!?”
Well, using your leopard analogy. It’s why wouldn’t you go to a safari park in a car rather than on foot.
I mean… what’s wrong with stuff like the Fediverse just gradually strangling the commercially-driven internet? I pay a couple bucks a month to a number of different Fediverse providers and if everyone does that, they’ll likely be able to stay self-sufficient and community-oriented. I honestly don’t mind paying websites directly in that fashion as long as my data is portable and not for sale, whereas I know that if I let most commercial websites have my data, they will sell it to whomever and however many times they are capable of, all while enshitifying the user experience on their website as much as possible without making everyone leave completely.
It’s the most frustrating business model possible and why I refuse to give them any more traction than they already have.
The problem with donation driven Internet is that it lives on the whims of a few and weaker willed developers and content creators start trying to pander to whoever is paying them.