This episode of Security Now covered Google’s plan to deprecate third party cookies and the reaction from advertising organizations and websites.
The articles and the opinions of the show hosts are that it may have negative or unintended consequences as rather than relying on Google’s proposed ad selection scheme being run on the client side (hiding information from the advertiser), instead they are demanding first party information from the sites regarding their user’s identification.
The article predicts that rather than privacy increasing, a majority of websites may demand user registration so they can collect personal details and force user consent to provide that data to advertisers.
What’s your opinion of website advertising, privacy, and data collection?
- Would you refuse to visit websites that force registration even if the account is free?
- What’s all the fuss about, you don’t care?
- Is advertising a necessary evil in fair trade for content?
- Would this limit your visiting of websites to only a narrow few you are willing to trade personal details for?
- Is this a bad thing for the internet experience as whole, or just another progression of technology?
- Is this no different from using any other technology platform that’s free (If it’s free, you’re the product)?
- Should website owners just accept a lower revenue model and adapt their business, rather than seeking higher / unfair revenues from privacy invasive practices of the past?
Would you refuse to visit websites that force registration even if the account is free?
Yes, I already do. I don’t visit Instagram because you need to login to view posts.
What’s all the fuss about, you don’t care?
I definitely care.
Is advertising a necessary evil in fair trade for content?
Ah, now this is an interesting question. I can certainly see an argument that ads are necessary to support “free” content, although personally in many cases I prefer to pay a subscription to support content rather than being subjected to ads.
Really though this is kind of a red herring because it’s predisposing that violating your privacy and collecting personal information is a prerequisite to serving ads. It’s required for individually targeted ads, yes, but they don’t need to traget ads to the individual, they could target the ad by site or the contents of the page hosting the ad.
Would this limit your visiting of websites to only a narrow few you are willing to trade personal details for?
I would not visit any site that sold my details to an advertiser.
Is this a bad thing for the internet experience as whole, or just another progression of technology?
Yes, this is very bad.
Is this no different from using any other technology platform that’s free (If it’s free, you’re the product)?
There’s a reason I don’t use most “social media” sites.
Should website owners just accept a lower revenue model and adapt their business, rather than seeking higher / unfair revenues from a privacy invasive practices of the past?
Yes, or find a different revenue model that doesn’t invade people’s privacy.
Ah, now this is an interesting question. I can certainly see an argument that ads are necessary to support “free” content
I understand the need for ads, but having lived through popups, bonzi buddy, and “punch the monkey”, advertisers blew any chance of me not using an ad-blocker.
Ads don’t bother me as much as their invasiveness. I block ads because…
- if a business is dirty enough to resort to interference with popups to get attention, I’m not spending money there. Period.
- I don’t want to support mass surveillance perpetrated by the industry.
Give me simple tech ads on tech sites, grocery ads on store fronts, travel ads on travel articles, etc.
i would be fine with a 5 second brand mention, like “this youtube video is paid for by SoapTM”, quietly. And I’d probably think “thanks.” But it’s like they’re trying to overtake the content. Like you can’t enjoy your show because they’re worried you’re not thinking about their brand for the largest possible % of time.
Ah, now this is an interesting question. I can certainly see an argument that ads are necessary to support “free” content, although personally in many cases I prefer to pay a subscription to support content rather than being subjected to ads.
On the other hand, not everyone can afford a subscription, so offering a both ad-supported and paid-for options is ideal, imo. Well, at least as ideal as it gets in a “grind your hustle or you’ll starve” economy.
Plus all of those subscription transactions have individual costs. 3% just to the credit card companies alone. We either need to actually make low-cost microtransactions an actual thing - no Bitcoin is not that thing - or we need to publicly subsidize artists for the sake of art.
yall have no cheap/free bank transfers? is that some american problem i’m too european to understand?
Yes, or find a different revenue model that doesn’t invade people’s privacy
Agreed. The business model is unsustainable, and toxic. As much as I hate paywalls, it’s better than the alternative.
Nobody could seriously believe that the viability of journalism should be dependent on the public’s malleability and willingness to buy McDonalds burgers. And yet that’s the status quo, more or less.
I would also like to avoid ads, and pay streaming services rather than cable or anything with ads. Oddly, this hasn’t been the case for any online news sites. The Indy Star is begging and pay walling for subscribers and for some reason, I don’t want to. But I don’t want ads. I admit it’s unreasonable to have neither. They need to pay people like anyone else.
I think it boils down to the difference in how we consume these things. You typically go directly to a streaming service with the intent to browse and consume its content, but few people directly consume news sites. More often you’ll either end up on a particular site from a web search or from a link from an existing content aggregator like facebook, reddit, or lemmy. Since you don’t seek out a particular news platform for regular consumption you feel less inclined to pay an ongoing subscription.
That does raise an interesting idea to me though. What if instead of a normal month to month subscription a news service offered a pre-paid per article account. So, say 25 cents an article say and you can purchase 40 articles for $10, then each article you view deducts from your account. When you get low on remaining articles it can prompt you to top up your account or you can have it auto-renew. Personally I think I’d be far more inclined to something like that because the cost would scale based on how much I actually used the service rather than being an ongoing monthly cost for something I use very sporadically.
This is why I wish those micropayment systems took off. I would be happy to pay 20 bucks a month for ‘ad free’ browsing if most of it actually supported the creators of the content i’m accessing.
10x their cpm is still fractions of a cent for me as a user on a per page view basis, there’s space for winning here if one of the big tech ad companies gets behind it and pushes.
Chromium at least is still looking into it:
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/4Rqw4SbjO88/m/j7x8sTyzAAAJ
based on this spec:
Constantly being brainwashed to consume is one of the great evils of our time. Consumerism is bad for mental health and the environment. But advertising also creates many biases in content creation.
When was the last time you heard anything about bad effects of advertising? Not just superficial “stupid ad” but as a massive corrosive force on society? That is how much freedom of speech we have.
Yeah, large portions of economies are being driven by consumption. I feel like so much stuff is just landfill fodder.
Massive affects of advertising
I was hoping you might have some examples, I’m not sure.
Here’s an example.
I was advertised camel smokes as a kid.
Everytime I relapse it’s on camels. Camels are shitty and cheap.
I relapse and then switch to a brand that’s not garbage. Then figure out again how to beat the addiction.
It’s a substance use disorder directly caused by advertising. And cancer causing (so my physical environment).
Here’s another mental illness that’s very easy to trace back to advertising.
Eating disorders.
I think those are good examples, thanks.
Off topic: I don’t smoke, but do generally hate smoking so much. I dislike the smell, and the affects on people around the user, like you said. I appreciate vaping. Not because of some hopeful idea that it would be safer, but cause I either can’t smell it, or it smells like cotton candy. Who doesn’t love the smell of cotton candy?
Also, props for quitting all the times you have. I’m probably majorly addicted to caffeine. Like smokers tell me they have one first thing in the morning, coffee is the first desire after I’m out of bed. I’ve already limited myself to two-ish cups/day, but I don’t think that helped. Coffee also has negative effects on others…fortunately, my wife has coffee breath too :)
The entire goal is to use money to change your behavior. They’re inherently manipulative by definition. It’s literally weaponized mass manipulation. There’s no way to spin that as a positive effect.
If you think about it in terms of it’s effects, advertising is the closest thing we have to mind control: companies are paying money to change the behavior of millions of people. Even without any concrete examples, you can easily see how dystopic it really is when you just think about the intention alone
Sorry I don’t have any great sources on this. It’s rather speculation because how could you research this scientifically? Even if you could, an experiment like that would actually be unethical! And who would fund this, there is no way to talk in mainstream about advertising without running against massive financial interests. There are some search results but most of those articles look like mental garbage.
My guess is that because we’re constantly being told what to consume our minds work quite differently from what they would without advertising.
Our minds constantly have to resist intrusive advertising and psychological manipulation which means we constantly have to switch between and adversarial mindset and whatever content we were watching / reading. Or we become obedient and just “let the advertising wash through us”. And advertising constantly has to find new ways to activate our emotions.
Just as massive is the effect on content produced, there is a “natural selection” that any content that helps sell advertisement is more successful on the market. It’s not just that you can’t piss off your advertiser but that generally you want the consumer to be in a certain mood - or that content producers who do this naturally are more successful and grow.
Then there are privacy concerns which reduce humans to machines and creates a powerful system that can and is abused for political control (public relations).
How can any of that not have massive societal impacts, since it’s being done on a massive scale and is near ubiquitous? How can anyone assume these effects are not incredibly bad?
You could have a country banning advertising that has a kind of “content tax” that is funded publicly and administered independent from the government through separate elections. And that has strict mandates and distributes the money to news papers, websites, movies and video creators dependent on views - similar to music rights agencies. But none of this is even talked about. We’ve completely lost the ability to even think seriously about how to improve our society. I believe in large part this is due to advertising.
PS: There is a film called “Branded (2012)” about the “horrors of advertising”.
My guess is that because we’re constantly being told what to consume our minds work quite differently from what they would without advertising.
Our minds constantly have to resist intrusive advertising and psychological manipulation.
I stopped quoting because you made many good points. I imagine we could find some supporting material for this basic idea. It seems like a safe idea to say people adapt to the environment they are in, including our thinking patterns based on what we take in and feed our minds (books, media, streaming, conversation, etc).
I wouldn’t be eager for a new tax, but the creative problem solving and imagining new ways to do things is good.
Also, thanks for the movie mention.
The great evil is that we keep going to places where we are shown ads, despite having a choice in theory. It’s demoralizing.
I’m living mostly ad-free due to adblockers everywhere (except android) but most people don’t know, can’t do it or are brainwashed to think it’s amoral to block ads. If more people would catch on adblocking would be made illegal. And either way my personal choice doesn’t change what content is produced and how society is influenced. Personal responsibility doesn’t solve this just as it doesn’t climate change. Because advertising clearly does work.
So, internet users may soon need to create accounts on sites they currently access for free. As Laporte worries, “We thought those cookie permission popups were bad, but things may be getting much worse” regarding being forced to hand over personal information just to browse sites.
Good way to kill your site, this is the one thing everyone hates, from the enthusiast to the casual user, making an useless account for 1 service that you barely use.
Slap Google SSO on that and you’re good. Honestly that’s worse than regular registration.
Yeah, if I see a “register an account on this random website” I roll my eyes or close it/back out. If I see “sign in via Google/fb” I recoil with a “fuck no”.
Yeah, I initially was ok with it, but as I have watched these companies I have become less and less ok. I have been contemplating making dummy accounts full of erroneous data so all of the metrics are wrong as a giant middle finger. Sure, I’m a 72-year-old woman in Des Moines, or am I an 80-year-old man in DC? Maybe a 22-year-old in LA? Who knows.
On mobile it is pretty common to force the user to create an account before being able to use the app, so people may already be trained on it.
If they need permission for third party cookies and those are now no longer possible, the popups can go already.
And if a site doesn’t want to serve people that do not accept data hoarding, an account with terms and conditions is the only logical way to go.
Belgium forced facebook to not track users without an account and they reacted by doing this exact thing (requiring an account to even read pages). It made it a lot easier for me to not having to deal with Facebook at all. If some store or organization only had the info on Facebook, I’ll just tell them I can’t access it 🤷♂️
Would you refuse to visit websites that force registration even if the account is free?
Lots of sites require a free account these days. I don’t visit those sites.
What’s all the fuss about, you don’t care?
I care.
Is advertising a necessary evil in fair trade for content?
I like advertising - how else are you supposed to find out what products/services are available? Regularly visit every website of every company I might be interested in? That doesn’t work.
It’s data collection I dislike, nothing wrong with ads as long as they’re a reasonably short interruption. Make ads relevant to the content, not the visitor.
Unfortunately under the current system I don’t see ads, because the only way to block tracking is to also block most ads. Sorry, but ad networks have burned that bridge. It’s going to take time to rebuild it.
Would this limit your visiting of websites to only a narrow few you are willing to trade personal details for?
A website would need to offer some really valuable service for me to “trade personal details”. Even sites where I have an account (e.g. YouTube) I generally don’t log into that account.
Is this a bad thing for the internet experience as whole, or just another progression of technology?
I think anything that gives users control over wether or not they’re tracked is a good thing - and forcing people to sign up / agree to terms before using a site does that. If websites want my personal details to access them… that’s fine with me. I just won’t use those sites. Other people will make a different decision. It’s how it should be.
I also think I’m not alone, and plenty of major sites will choose to just not do any tracking. I look forward to using those sites.
Is this no different from using any other technology platform that’s free (If it’s free, you’re the product)?
I reject that premise. Lemmy is free. I don’t feel like “the product” when I use lemmy. The product is the content and the discussions. If Lemmy has a few ads on every page, I’d be fine with that. I think it’d be a good idea - as long as it’s done right, without invading privacy.
Should website owners just accept a lower revenue model and adapt their business, rather than seeking higher / unfair revenues from privacy invasive practices of the past?
It’s their business, choose whatever revenue model they want. Just be honest and open about it.
Other people will make a different decision. It’s how it should be
This is an aspect of the predicted changes I can at least appreciate. Choice/consent. There should already have been obtained and informed consent. But instead, they just did it behind people’s backs. I say that because I don’t think most normal/non-tech people really know or care much about cookies and all the ways this stuff actually works.
If Lemmy has a few ads on every page
Ahhh! No please :) …but I understand. Unless these people (hosts) are getting those services paid for by something else, they might need to cover the costs of this like anything else. I really enjoy Lemmy because, at least right now, I feel like it’s in the true spirit of the internet and not a business. It can be for community and discussion like you said. Only reason I’m here. I like asking people why they feel a certain way about things and hopefully walk away with some understanding.
Did I? You signed up for an account where data collection is wide open to everyone.
I vehemently oppose Google having hegemony over web standards, but I’ll still happily enjoy the delicious schadenfreude of propagandists – excuse me, “advertisers” – getting screwed by that hegemony.
Google having hegemony over web standards
You’re not wrong here. I think chrome browser is basically the Defacto browser, and it obviously allows google to do whatever it wants. Not great. The Mozilla / Brave options are barely that. I struggle to even call them competitors at this point.
I definitely appreciate some of the EU’s recent privacy/monogoly focused legislation. Also, thanks EU for forcing a common sense charging cord standard and killing off the stupid lightning plug. IMO, if apple would have not been so greedy, they could have unlicensed it and maybe everyone would have used that. EAD apple :)
The Mozilla / Brave options are barely that.
You mean “The Mozilla option”. Brave is just Yet Another Chrome Reskin.
Brave is just Yet Another Chrome Reskin
Good point. I don’t use it. I thought it stripped/blocked tracking though.
