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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • If there is money to be made those companies would make deals for data/ad-space, it’s just that they will do it in competition with other ad services and search services for example. That’s how a healthy market works, no? (Aside from the problematic data brokerage which is another issue)

    And if they can’t survive that, then the business should probably not exist.

    In that sense you could argue the market is “hurt” but I think consumers will benefit in the long run when competition can thrive, and monopolies do not exist.




  • Yeah, you argument about pragmatism resonates with me. If all tracking was turned off over night that will break a lot of streams of revenue that many businesses/sites online rely on. Those businesses has grown because it has been possible and profitable to track you every step online. That does not mean that system needs to be preserved, or replaced with something similar. Markets adapt, we don’t have to help this business find new ways to make money.

    And also, cross-site tracking is not necessary to do advertising, it just make is more cost efficient. I don’t accept the argument that they need my behavior data to have a working business.

    Ads in newspapers have worked historically without the tracking. (Newspapers a hard time now though competing with the more profitable online ad business)

    Also cookies have other functions aside from tracking your behavior, while this new feature only benefits ad/product analysis, with no direct benefit to the user of the browser. It’s essentially giving away information about my behavior, albeit without telling them who I am. (Indirectly users might benefit from having more ad-supported services online)

    But sure, Mozilla is free to do what they want. I still like and use Firefox.


  • But Mozilla is not in the ad business so why are they appeasing advertisers?

    I could see Mozilla thinking advertisers will back off when they give them a more integrity-respecting tool, but my expectation is that advertisers will keep doing what they already do. Because why not?

    Either way, distributing reports about my (anonymized) behavior, to advertisers, is still a slight breech of trust.

    And even if it’s aggregated and mixed with others to a point of pure anonymity, it’s still a tool to manipulate your behavior on a large scale. I can see others not having a problem with it but I do.