Firefox

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.

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.

In one sense there was some level of tracking, just not to the extent there is today. Fairly early on they stopped just throwing up billboards and hoping the right people would see them. They generally weren’t putting billboards for luxury cars up in the slums. Advertisers would try to place ads in the neighborhoods of their targeted socioeconomic demographic. Media companies started funding surveys to learn who their readers or viewers or listeners were. If you’re an American you may have heard of the Nielsen ratings for TV or less likely the Arbitron ratings for radio. Those companies would use statistical sampling to send journals to households in a market and over the period of a week or several weeks ask the household to record every TV show they watched or every radio station they listened to. They would also ask what age each person was, gender, how much money did they earn, what level of education had they completed, etc. With enough responses the companies could say, “okay, only 10% of the people in this market were watching this show, but 60% of the men between the age of 35-54 who were watching TV at that time were watching this show.” If an advertiser wanted that demographic, that’s the show they would pick. Newspapers would even change the fliers they would put in the newspaper depending on what part of the city they were going to. Discount stores for the poor neighborhoods, jewelers for the rich.

Of course, unless you were filling out the survey journal or had the reporting box on your TV, they weren’t tracking you directly. But you were being targeted based on your neighbors who had responded and more public demographic data about your age and likely income. This started surprisingly early on, because most business owners couldn’t afford to do a lot of slapping something up and hoping they’d get new business; they wanted to have some reason to be confident they’d see a return on their investment. It wasn’t anywhere near as invasive as what online tracking has become today, but that’s what advertisers have long wanted.

That's true but that doesn't mean that they can't be right.

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.

If brave wasn't completely unhinged, the idea of the brave attention token was kind of a cool idea (assuming you could pay a reasonable rate and not with ads).

But yeah, I fundamentally am not OK with tracking, am fundamentally not OK with companies paying to try to manipulate me, and am fundamentally not OK with the big attack vector ads expose. I would be willing to pay a reasonable rate for quality content, but it's so fragmented there isn't really any way to do that, and because of the way the monetization works, a lot of that content is compromised. So the end result is I don't contribute anything to most sites I visit because I don't have a real way to do so, but will not watch ads.

I feel that this money should be coming from what I pay my ISP. Most of that infrastructure was built with public funds and it does not cost the 180$ I’m paying per month to keep the lights on.

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.

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.

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.

While I also hate ads, what I hate even more is the tracking. I would honestly be okay with ads that respected my privacy, like they largely did back in the early days of the web. I remember visiting sites and having ads that had nothing to do with my interests, probably because they were either randomly or staticly (based on page content) assigned.

We have the technology, however, to move beyond ads. We can do microtransactions and just pay a nominal fee per page view. I wouldn't mind if I paid the fraction of a penny a page would've g otten by showing me an ad, provided that payment was anonymous (e.g. through something like GNU Taler or Monero). But for some reason, websites either expect a ton of money and a login, or ads, with no in-between. I hoped Brave would provide that, but that didn't happen at all.

Please, give us three options:

1. privacy-respecting ads - ads should be relevant to the page content and maybe local browsing history (never sent anywhere, just analyzed locally)
2. anonymized microtransactions per page view to avoid ads
3. subscription to avoid MTX and ads for sites I use regularly

But if the current options are privacy invasive ads or subscriptions, I'm going to install an ad-blocker. If you prevent me from seeing it, I'm going to look at your competitors instead.

Many ads are scams or malware too, which ad brokers don't want to address because they get paid. The "we need ad money to support our service" sounds close to the mobs protect racket given the security risks on some ads.

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.

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?