"Just block ads" isn't a useful answer here - this is about being able to see who is advertising to the people who aren't using ad-blockers (which is most users on the internet), and being able to do research into who is paying for advert and who they are targeting. As long as the advertising industry still has a presence on the internet, this information will be important.
It's not about blocking ads. It's about exposing people who would abuse ads.
It's like saying: "The solution to human trafficking is for everyone to stop having sex. If no one has sex, no one will pay for trafficking."
As an aside: I would not want to live in an advertising-free world, if only because advertising pays for so much of the shit I would otherwise have to pay for myself. Online ads have entered into crazy town, so it's good that we're now exploring ways of reeling that back in. But I genuinely don't know how enjoyable an ad-free world would be once the revenue generated by those ads also disappears.
>As an aside: I would not want to live in an advertising-free world, if only because advertising pays for so much of the shit I would otherwise have to pay for myself.
You still pay. Advertisers pass the cost of advertising on to the customer. Yes, you pay for being emotionally manipulated.
Even in traditional print magazines you find abusive and emotionally manipulative advertisements from internationally known corporations, with their recognizable brands proudly announced on the ad. For instance ads that gaslight the reader, or suggest the reader is unattractive and can only rectify that by purchasing the product. Ads that try to induce then exploit low self esteem to sell products are more common but just as morally reprehensible as ads that try to install keyloggers on your computer.
You cannot solve the problem of bad ads by exposing the people behind it, when those people have no shame. Even when it's totally transparent who's behind ads, ads are still awful.
It might not stop those people from doing whatever it is they want to do. But it helps us to be more informed. And when we're more informed, we can write better laws.
For example, it used to be perfectly legal to lie in advertising. But we became more informed, and we enacted new laws, and now you can't blatantly lie in an ad without risking being sued for it. You used to be able to say things like "Coca-Cola will make you slim." But since there's no actual benefit to drinking Coke other than quenching your thirst, that's the only benefit they'll ever promote anymore aside from taste.
Likewise, greater exposure might lead to laws that, say, require that Facebook only accept ads from companies who have a license to advertise. (I'm not advocating this, I'm just using it as an example.) Or to prove they're American if they want to advertise in America. Or something. Lots of possible ways to approach it.
But it starts with being able to see the problem clearly. And we can't do that when the data is hidden, obfuscated, protected, or simply doesn't exist.
Progress on legislating reform of the advertising industry has stalled. It remains perfectly legal for Coca Cola to suggest to an emotionally vulnerable child that drinking addictive sugar water will improve their social life. That's wrong, and more needs to be done about it. It's a problem that should be attacked from all conceivable angles. We need better laws (municipalities that have laws against billboards have the right idea), better adblocking technology, and more effective campaigns to identify, shame and shun people who work in the advertising industry. They should be social pariahs.
> Advertising isn’t personal, and doesn’t have to be. In fact, knowing it’s not personal is an advantage for advertisers. Consumers don’t wonder what the hell an ad is doing where it is, who put it there, or why.
> Advertising makes brands. Nearly all the brands you know were burned into your brain by advertising. In fact the term branding was borrowed by advertising from the cattle business. (Specifically by Procter and Gamble in the early 1930s.)
> Advertising carries an economic signal. Meaning that it shows a company can afford to advertise. Tracking-based advertising can’t do that. (For more on this, read Don Marti, starting here.)
> Advertising sponsors media, and those paid by media. All the big pro sports salaries are paid by advertising that sponsors game broadcasts. For lack of sponsorship, media—especially publishers—are hurting. @WaltMossberg learned why on a conference stage when an ad agency guy said the agency’s ads wouldn’t sponsor Walt’s new publication, recode. Walt: “I asked him if that meant he’d be placing ads on our fledgling site. He said yes, he’d do that for a little while. And then, after the cookies he placed on Recode helped him to track our desirable audience around the web, his agency would begin removing the ads and placing them on cheaper sites our readers also happened to visit. In other words, our quality journalism was, to him, nothing more than a lead generator for target-rich readers, and would ultimately benefit sites that might care less about quality.” With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Versus the top four things he says about adtech:
> Adtech is built to undermine the brand value of all the media it uses, because it cares about eyeballs more than media, and it causes negative associations with brands. Consider this: perhaps a $trillion or more has been spent on adtech, and not one brand known to the world has been made by it. (Bob Hoffman, aka the Ad Contrarian, is required reading on this.)
> Adtech wants to be personal. That’s why it’s tracking-based. Though its enthusiasts call it “interest-based,” “relevant” and other harmless-sounding euphemisms, it relies on tracking people. In fact it can’t exist without tracking people. (Note: while all adtech is programmatic, not all programmatic advertising is adtech. In other words, programmatic advertising doesn’t have to be based on tracking people. Same goes for interactive. Programmatic and interactive advertising will both survive the adtech crash.) Adtech spies on people and violates their privacy. By design. Never mind that you and your browser or app are anonymized. The ads are still for your eyeballs, and correlations can be made.
> Adtech is full of fraud and a vector for malware. @ACFou is required reading on this.
> Adtech incentivizes publications to prioritize “content generation” over journalism.
I care to disagree deeply on the notion that "Advertising" is somehow much better than "Adtech".
Note I am not saying "Adtech" is good, there are boundaries.
But notice "it shows a company can afford to advertise", "Advertising makes brands. Nearly all the brands you know were burned into your brain by advertising". Which makes winner takes all, and only big players can afford advertising. Which is bad and second half of 20th century was monopolized by giants that could afford buying all advertising space there was.
"Adtech" already is disrupting big companies monopolies allowing smaller players to be seen in the internet because of democratization of costs. But of course I agree it went wrong, though I don't know how to make it better, because if you would let people select their preferences it would be too much hassle and no one would care.
Maybe tracking-based would be OK if I could have all data on my machine and something like my personal assistant would help me with searching.
Or, best method is to block all ads, beacons, 3rd party cookies, and trackers. Keep it simple, just block anything that is not actual content. Everyone knows online ads are now the major vector for malware online along with bad apps.
Pi-hole, uBlock Origin, Privacy badger, Decentraleyes, Tracking Token Stripper, Neat URL, and No Coin. Set browser to block all HTTP/S referers, disable geo, css links history, fingerprinting, and you are well on your way to never having or seeing an issue. uBlock Origin also kills dead the adblock blockers.
Editing to say that it was my children's absolute frustration with waiting for ads in videos that led me to adopt the Pi-hole. Nothing so far has escaped the event horizon of the Pi-hole. It's great for TVs, too. Everything on the network benefits from the Pi-hole. Setting up a VPN will allow you to pass your mobile device through it while away from home.
One of my upcoming projects is to get a DO Droplet, set up the same and have less "infrastructure" in my house. Benefits remain. Google Cloud also allow this in the free tier. Why not? There is nothing to lose except annoyance.
At this point the reverse approach (whitelist) becomes easier. Just pluck out the content, ignore the rest, and write your own simple UI. Most websites can be modeled quite easily as category->article(->comment) with some additional data.
Writing UI for that is quite trivial.
It can be done in browser via extensions/userscripts (without a database), or you can fetch the data into a database and view it via an electron app, or cli tools, or whatever.
More aggressive whitelisting is warranted in my opinion. I recommend using uMatrix to block all javascript by default, including first party. Built your whitelist over time by enabling only that which is necessary to read the content you're after, which more often than not is nothing. Contrary to popular expectation including my own expectation, javascript is totally unnecessary for the majority of sites I visit.
Of course this is only feasible for technically competent users. Regular users are forced to rely on lesser blockers with simplified UX. Such is the unfortunate nature of techno-inequality. Rectifying this would be a worthwhile pursuit.
I recently set up a Pi-hole. I've always been pretty extreme in my blocking extensions (everything you listed and more, plus things like first party isolation) and I was flabbergasted to see Pi-hole blocking 10-15% of my requests. Highly recommended!
I've taken a liking to the term "the New York Times rule" - write and act as if your message, statement, or a detailed account of your actions could be published at any time on the front page of the New York Times: https://businessethicsblog.com/2010/12/08/business-ethics-an... .
The most concerning political advertising thrives in the shadows: it whispers messages to audiences that are false (easier to counter in the light of day) or prejudiced (and thus should have consequences to whatever groups post them). Radical transparency during campaigns may not stop these types of things, but at the very least it enables a response.
That said, it's worth thinking deeply about the arms race that might ensue - when every PAC can see every advertisement every other PAC is investing in, does that make the race into even more of a "whoever has the most money wins" situation even more than the post-Citizens United dystopia we find ourselves in now?
Back in the 70s as the LGBT rights movement was beginning and being gay was still illegal, the Sydney Morning Herald published the names and addresses of those who marched in the first LGBT Mardi Gras, which became a riot after police became violent.
Some lost their jobs and were evicted. Many had problems for years after.
Love Mozillas engagement and spearheading these efforts! To be effective having guidelines be established via outside counsel is the right way to drive independent improvements at scale.
>in what ways could this information be used maliciously?
Depends on who can get access to it and how. If there are organizations that get privileged access to such API it will give them knowledge that is easily translatable into political power. For example, if you know whom your political opponent targets with ads, but they don't know the same about you, it wold give you a tremendous edge in a campaign.
Also, it depends on how good this info is protected against data-mining for undermining someone's privacy.
From the article:
"The number of impressions that an ad received within specific geographic and demographic criteria (e.g. within a political district, in a certain age range), broken down by paid vs. organic reach."
I can see this being used to undermine someone's campaign by showing their ads are reaching "bad" audience. Eventually someone will figure out a way to make bots to "watch" ads and skew these numbers.
There is a famous, in Poland, quote from Stefan Kisielewski about communism: "Socialism bravely fights problems unknown to any other system." And this reads exactly like that.
If Firefox had the 65% market share that Chrome does now no sane website would block them.
>Mozilla can't block ads for non-Firefox users, nor does it aim for establishing a Web browser monopoly, so the original problem still exists.
Firefox should be aiming to be the dominant web browser. If they did that instead of spending their effort dicking around on unrelated projects and poking Google they could actually solve the problems they complain about.
Actually, as a sysadmin/coder (devops, but I hate the term), I have a moral imperative to protect people on my network. I use the firewall at work to block ads via a subscription list. My next project is to run Pi-hole on a VM with proper specs to get almost everything. Does wonders for bandwidth and a clean corporate network.
Firefox is going to enable tracking protection by default, which is already risky and would currently make many websites with anti-adblocking measures block Firefox by default.
Blocking _all_ ads would surely make content providers revolt against Firefox to the point where its viability as a mainstream Web browser would be at risk.
Which is where something like the Pi-hole comes in handy. Defense in depth is the only way to go with this stuff. Like most IT people, I use multiple browsers. I want everything blocked with every browser, not just Firefox (my default).
Let's say the advertisers and websites do start giving grief to end users who are proactively protective. I have an idea that I believe can be done, but I'm at a loss with my current skill level to achieve it.
Quick anecdote: when Flash was a thing, I used to symlink .adobe and .macromedia to /dev/null to let the Flash cookies "think" they were being written to the HDD, while allowing me to view Flash content without worrying about the LSOs tracking me. I wonder if there is a way, if ads/websites figure out how to block adblockers, that would allow the "loading" of ads, but shunt them into /dev/null (or similar bit bucket) making the website think they have been loaded, but not. A man in the middle, as it were. If I could figure out how to begin this, I would undertake it as a project. Hosting this online and allowing others to pass their traffic through it would be ideal. MitM/proxy. Methinks it will eventually come to this if enough people continue to add blocking tools to their tool set.
"AdNauseam" is a Firefox add-on that blocks ads but also virtually clicks each blocked ad in the background, polluting trackers' profile of your browsing habits. I haven't used this add-on but some reviews say that its ad blocking doesn't work as expected.
Thank you. Didn't know this existed. I like the idea behind it. Polluting the ad peddlers' database is actually hilarious. It must get expensive to be serving up ads no one is seeing.
