I've found that most press statement that contain the term "we believe" go on with some utterly ridiculous mental gymnastics to justify shady behaviour. This one is no exception:
> [IAB Tech LAB svp of Membership and Operations said:] “They believe no third party can be trusted. We take a different position: that trust should be established directly between consumers and the brands, and publishers they trust, and with the third parties that those brands and publishers trust.”
Question to that guy: What act specifically would establish that trust? My browser downloading JavaScript from half a dozen companies that I've never heard of?
Or is their position that by opening a link to some web page, I declared my boundless, irrevocable trust in that site, all third-parties that site delegates to, all third-parties those third-parties delegate to, etc etc as infinitum?
Where else in life do you get this understanding of "trust"?
I expect nothing less from someone from a company called "TrustX, a member of DigiTrust". Just like with any other scammer, when someone uses a word "trust" excessively, you know that you shouldn't.
Why is the company called TrustX instead of AdX, if that's what they're dealing with? Maybe so that they appear more innocent when they show up in your browser warnings or cookie alerts? That's the kind of "trust" they're hoping to exploit.
>>Question to that guy: What act specifically would establish that trust?
I'm "that guy", and yeah I feel ya about "most press statements". Anyway, here's what we think would be a good start in establishing trust ... do you agree?
1. Consumer visits a website or app they like.
2. Website/app offers standardized privacy preferences/controls that are easy to understand, and apply globally.
3. Consumer indicates their preferences, realistically based on their inherent trust in the website/app ... could be anything from ghost mode ("no tracking at all") to limited ad targeting ("ok, you can retarget me for 3 days only, that's it") to measurement only ("count me as a distinct user, but no ad tracking, profiling, etc.")
4. those preferences are propagated to any/all downstream parties working on behalf of the website/app or the advertiser, all of whom have to submit system-level log file samples daily (a blood sample, if you will) to a central processing system NOT governed wholly by ad industry
5. ongoing data analysis, with data exhaust, provides for open accountability
6. oh, and consumer empirically sees that their preferences are being respected
We'd also love to see a significant reduction in the amount of JS and third-party requests. But these are all hard problems to solve while also maintaining an open web/ecosystem.
Entity visits a website. The website logs whatever they want, subject to GDPR-style rules. They never send the full logs to a third party, and never send individual information, anonymized or not, without a specific business reason that benefits the entity.
Entity creates an account on the website. Now the website gets to display a privacy policy that conforms to GDPR-style rules, and creates the account only with explicit informed consent from the entity. The website specifically notes the jurisdiction in which they operate and the contact method for complaints, inquiries, deletions, and so forth.
No central processing systems, no unified trackers, no cross-site data analysis.
Seems like you're suggesting that, to establish YOUR trust, either the website does not use any third-party vendors or services (in the delivery of the experience to you), or they use third-party vendors/services but do not send them any data ...? If so, in this age of open web services and distributed systems/infrastructure, are either of these scenarios reasonable to expect?
This comment seems rather disingenuous to me, and puts words in the mouth of the grandparent post. It’s not that my data should not be sent to any third parties ever, it’s that (as the GP said) my should not be sent to any third parties without a specific business reason that benefits me.
I do not consider any form of ad targeting to be of benefit to me. Therefore, my data should not be sent to any third parties for that purpose.
The infosec definition of trust is not really the same as the colloquial meaning of trust.
The infosec "trust" is not something earned or even verified, but an assumption that something is not malicious. Imagine a fortress: inside of the walls is called "trusted", outside of the walls is "untrusted". So a trusted CA merely means a certificate inside your fortress' walls that an attacker can't modify.
It's not even that. It's just a statement of fact. The things that you put in positions where they can fuck you are de facto the things you trust. You might know for a fact that they are untrustworthy garbage, but you're still trusting them.
The trust that browsers place in the TLS chain of trust is basically just the assertion that the holder of the TLS key is the one who owns the domain.
This doesn't imply anything about the contents that can be transferred over the TLS connection. Could be malware. The other side could leak your private data like crazy. That's outside the scope of the TLS chain of trust.
Relatively few companies can sign TLS certificates, and you have the security of the domain name as well. In order for an attacker to steal a TLS session they need to compromise both the certificate system and the dns lookup.
When you use your car, you trust 100 different manufacturers from all corners of the earth. When you go to the hospital, you trust 100 different machines, chemicals, gloves, needles etc. It's no different.
When I go to the hospital I trust the local doctors to make good decisions on products to buy, I don't trust the products themselves let alone the products manufacturers. Moreover it's not so much trust as resignation to the fact that I have no better option but to hope they don't do something stupid.
When I use a car I trust the combination of the manufacturer and the regulator to have used parts in a fashion such that they won't kill me. I don't know or trust the individual part manufacturers, that's the automakers job.
There is no equivalent to the doctor, or the automaker, or the regulator here. It is not at all similar.
When I can file malpractice lawsuits against ad-tech companies for leaking my personal data, maybe then, after a few years of lawsuits causing their insurance rates to skyrocket, can we maybe talk about trusting them.
When you go to the hospital, every machine, chemical, glove, needle has gone through an FDA approval process or has been manufactured to pass FDA standards.
I trust that the hospital complies with medical regulations and standards and that the manufacturers do as well, with the appropriate inspections by a relatively disinterested regulator.
Similar for the car manufacture, plus there are negligence laws in place if either the hospital suppliers or car manufacturers fail.
I applaud Mozilla for taking this stance, but I think that blocking is fundamentally misguided approach. We need to start faking! Let’s fake DigiTrust IDs, convince them that it’s not blocked, and leave them none the wiser! It’s the same approach Apple should have taken with (most) iOS permissions - the app shouldn’t be able to know that it cannot access e.g. user’s GPS location, it should just be faked (i.e. random).
That's orthogonal. I don't want the app/website to know (and make decisions based on) whether or not it's being blocked or not... We can/should do IO/compute blocking in addition to faking input.
From an economic point of view, I understand the OP's point: it's a better deterrent to know know your data is bogus, than to be in the gray area where it may be right to use it or not.
If data is shit, approach dies, because it's not economically viable. If it's just unethical, it will never stop.
I second this, but I doubt anyone would get the go ahead to pursue this fully (spoof canvas readouts, user agents, fonts installed, plugins installed, screen size, etc) in firefox (non addon). Would also be great if noscript functionality was built into servo/dom/netwerk modules (would be way more performant than the addon).
Mostly related to spoofing and caching user agents from those sampled from unencrypted pub wifi connections or popular list available online and randomizing them on every http request, some stuff related to (nuking) css url calls, randomization of read outs from canva2d, removing all the stuff on the new tab pages, randomization of list of available fonts/plugins/langs/etc available. Next thing I want to do is block arbitrary http requests by default and make the list of blocked url calls available to the dom (and a way to unblock them from the UI, or config file loaded in at runtime).
I'll never pass recaptcha, but idc, i installed this on my wife's computer as well and i'm starting to explore a way i can make a ios build using the recent tethered jailbreak for ios devices (besides the most recent releases). One day, It would be fun to try a prank on a day I actually go into the office and exploin a vuln in the old cisco router firmware to try to get installed on other devices on the network and see if how many people actually notice the changes and/or start using the browser because the dont get ads anymore lol
For companies that want to track you and aggregate and sell your data if they know you are not sending them data then nothing much happens to them, they just lose some data. They can probably live with this.
However, if everyone sends them garbage datathen they don't really have anything valuable then. The whole business model falls down.
Having previously been in a position where an ad agency thought we were sending trash data and literally threatened to boot our millions-of-dollars-worth contract, that shit ain't no joke. And having that previous knowledge, I would very much approve of sending fake data instead of blocking. That can 100% tank entire companies that don't have the engineering capacity to deal with this in time. We literally had a week or two to clean up our data or be gone.
How did it get to the point where there was enough "bad" data that the ad agency took notice and was angry enough to take action? I like the idea of jamming ad networks with junk data, but I would imagine that it would have to happen at a massive scale to make any sort of difference.
They accept a certain rough percentage of bad data because having 100% clean data is a little impossible, but basically we constantly had people using our app on virtual machines, phone farms, reverse engineering our API, etc. It was a constant battle to ban them as soon as possible.
At some point, our ad partner contacted us letting us know that some of our data was coming from blacklisted IP addresses--AWS, Linode, known bots, etc. Ranges where a human almost certainly isn't actually viewing ads, and told us to fix it asap or get out.
We ended up licensing an IP blacklist. It updates daily, and it comes with both individual IP addresses and cidr ranges. We didn't have time to write a fraud system to ban users, or do this check via our api. So my solution was to check every IP that came in through our load balancers against the blacklist and blackhole it somehow.
Since we were using nginx, I swapped to open resty because that comes with Lua already fully baked in. Next, I wrote a Lua script that just checks if an IP address is in the blacklist. It even had a caching module! That was awesome.
The real hard part was where to keep the IP blacklist. I came up with the solution to use Redis. If an IP address exists as a key in the Redis DB, it's blacklisted. This "if key exists" check is O(1) in Redis as far as I still know. So I wrote a cron job that runs every day to download the new blacklist, expand the cidr ranges, pipe the individual IPs into a second unused redis db, save the DB and restart production redis so it picks up the backup and refreshes its list of addresses. This list was massive, btw, especially when you expanded the cidr ranges, some of which /8. And the Lua script would just run a GET query on redis. If the key exists, open resty would just return a 40x code. Lua+open resty and redis are all super fast so we didn't lose much by checking every single API request this way.
After that, the ad agency was happy and we didn't get booted. But it was a super close call. Basically if redis didn't exist or wasn't as awesome, I'm fairly certain some engineers would have worked a solid 72hrs to write the php needed for an effective ban system that could go into production. I wrote the lua/redis solution and got it into production in an evening. So simple and really fun to write.
If this were to happen to a company getting bad data from a browser, either they'd have to clean up the data or get kicked out as well. Ad agencies pay for this data, so it's not like they're gonna turn into a charity and accept it. I'm sure it also messes up their datasets as well. I can't even imagine what it would take to clean data coming from a known good source/ip but with bad info. Yikes.
apps shouldn't have the ability to refuse to work without your data
I understand this case, but GP suggests to fake data for all apps. There are apps which are useless without location data. Or worse, you definitely wouldn't want to [accidentally] fake data for some apps, like a "SOS button" app.
Interesting. Can’t wait for my Librem 5 to arrive because it enables experiments like this. I can imagine a 3-way (or more) switch. Give Lyft my GPS for right now so my driver can find me. Always block GPS on some apps, and provide fake random GPS to all others. Would be interesting to try.
Of course not everyone will run a Librem (understatement). But interesting ideas might find their way into more mainstream platforms.
Not at all. In fact, more and more emergency services providers (i.e. the callcenters where 911 gets you) get your location automatically when you call them. I'm not entirely sure though if they only geolocate by cellphone tower, or if the handset also sends location data along with the emergency call. I vaguely remember hearing about this being "supported by all modern phones" or something, so it might be the second. In this case, you absolutely don't want faked location data because it could cost lives.
That's not an app, and it would be trivial to hardcode a device to send its true GPS location when an emergency number is dialled. Your phone already knows the distinction between emergency numbers and normal ones.
> apps shouldn't have the ability to refuse to work without your data
I don’t know. It’s a good signal to me, a user, that it’s an app I probably don’t want to be using anyway. Also, it’s the perfect solution to change the supply and demand structure. If people keep using the apps, they won’t know the difference.
Finally, it’s their app and this their price (personal data). You can chose to pay with it or not. Just like with any other currency, the choice is still yours as a consumer, but you are not entitled to the product by default.
> Finally, it’s their app and this their price (personal data). You can chose to pay with it or not.
There’s a reason selling organs is illegal in most countries, otherwise people end up cornered into a position where they have no other choice.
Regulation doesn’t work (or doesn’t want to work, see the GDPR), the only thing left is guerilla tactics like poisoning the data so the ad-tech scum can’t tell whether they’re being lied to or are getting real data, putting in question the integrity of their entire database and them out of business.
You know you're wrong when you put scare quotes around "tracking", and instead choose to call it "anonymous audience recognition". Anonymous audience recognition ranks amoung the most useless, actively misleading jargon I've heard.
To be clear, this system neither recognizes an audience nor can anything of this sort be fully anonymized. A universal ID such as this would recognize every individual member of an audience, not an audience as a whole. Recognizing an audience would look like telling an amazon seller that their product is popular with people who also bought paper towels. Such recognition would be possible from a list of transactions i.e. (paper towels, sunglasses), (energy bar), (dish soap), (laptop, paper towels). In this system there is no knowledge who made what transaction, no universal ID.
Any Universal ID can't be fully anonymous because your browsing history is you. You might search for something related to your current residence, your hometown, your workplace and the breed of your dog. These searches alone would be enough to uniquely identify you already, but it would be difficult. Luckily you make boatloads of searches a day, and combining all that data would make your identity much easier to discover. This all assumes your search provider bought in to this universal id system (use DuckDuckGo).
> David Kohl, CEO of ad tech company TrustX, a member of DigiTrust, said the entire cookie-based advertising infrastructure needs a rethink that involves prioritizing consumer interests, rather than ad tech’s commercial interests.
Or basically just stop tracking people online ? And find another way to sell your stuff ? #thinkoutsidethebox
Ad Tech is filled with superfluous middlemen/ middleware who take from the transaction, they do not add.
As a long time ad tech executive, I can state that there are maybe 3 companies that actually add value to the chain. And those companies are not even in ad tech... The entire market is a fraud based on obfuscation and lies and every single member of the IAB committees are nothing but shills and charlatans hoping for some career visibility and personal gain.
We could also pay for all the sites we use (google, youtube, gmail, reddit, etc.), but it would be pretty pricey if you visit a lot of sites. Most people would choose tracking instead.
But there's also a middle ground of advertising without excessive tracking - YouTube and Reddit (and most major websites, including social media sites where you're actively following interests) already have enough information on your intent to show relevant ads for the content you're viewing, without tying that to you individually.
A lot of the inventory I buy is now on intent-based sites, and the passive profiles used for cross-site banner display for example, for us, tend to drive the lowest quality conversions.
Advertising can still have a place, but it requires effort to do well (like buying a sponsored post on a subreddit right now). Higher effort though I'd wager will lead to better conversions for all in the long run.
That was the whole point of Google's advertising platform: it would deliver ads based on the content of the page you were on. That's why it is called "AdSense."
It has since morphed into something else entirely.
I wished I could believe that I won't be tracked or I won't see ads if I paid. That is a myth that is easily busted. These guys raced to get big and now really have no clue how to be a tech company. The only innovations I've seen in the past ten years is how to make ads more annoying. Sorry this rant is not directed at you.
This is the exact reason I don’t pay for YouTube Premium despite being able to afford it and wishing to support creators.
The scummy company whose entire business is based on violating people’s privacy asks me to create an account and give out real personal information like name and address? Fuck that.
Same thing with paid newspapers, you’re trading off a pseudonymous ID gathered via cookies/browser fingerprinting against which you can defend with ad-blockers to your actual identity you give them when signing up and then logging in every single time. And Google and Facebook just leech off that since their trackers are also loaded on every page.
it would be pricey if customers still have to pay for exorbitant salaries, payout of investors, exponential growth and moonshot-projects. That way you end up with the 10 USD Jimmy Wales is charging.
If you strip all this and just make an old-fashioned public service business, maybe operated by a lean, tech-led non-profit (looking at you Mozilla...) you are suddenly ending up with a pretty cheap (e.g. cents instead of $) service (at least compared to what classic media costs). Maybe you also have to cut corners on things like free xK-Upload, but I think most people (ie consumers) could live with some surcharge there.
I pay around 10USD for the VPS hosting my personal email and "cloud" services and I'm fairly confident that I could run a mastodon instance there too. Of course I'm cheating here on the management/personel cost, but the operating expenses could easily (and do) host a larger user population (and will go down with scale) and you won't need a lot of personel either.
So I don't know why Jimmy Wales needs to charge 10$ for his network if he's only interested in sustainable operation. If it's the early adopter package for development expenses, I'm all in, but I don't know how he shouldn't eventually get away with 1 Mio. users paying 10$/per year if he doesn't intend to market it as a a startup/make money in successful startup scales.
You'd have 12 people running a few servers, not 100k trying to scour your mind for intent and subconscious clicks... Think POF.com vs Match.com 3 guys and a few servers or 3000 people doing something...
Ultimately it comes down to how much free time you have to pursuit the things that interest you, or to discover new things. You may visit many sites, but how active are you on those sites or how deep are you involved in those topics?
There could be a free casual web, for people who just want to check things out or get a general overview, and offers for those with a deeper interest, who maybe spend a lot of time there and have very different demands. What doesn't work is gating casual information.
With Google being a tracking company, I expect that $10/mo gets rid of the ads but still does all the possible tracking it can – I'm not surprised if anti-tracking people don't buy into it.
Product-first companies seem to be doing fine – Spotify doesn't exactly have a problem with people not wanting to pay for it.
>> Mitchell said. “They believe no third party can be trusted. We take a different position: that trust should be established directly between consumers and the brands, and publishers they trust, and with the third parties that those brands and publishers trust.”
Not good at all. I still trust Mozilla to a large degree but I definitely don't trust their partners. Mozilla needs money to operate, they need partners and they'll will have to give something to them in return for the money - that is all ok and just how things are. What is not ok is that associate so closely with shady operations like Cliqz for example.
I think there's a misunderstanding : the quote above does not come from Mozilla, but from one of the Digitrust people (Mitchell)
Here is the full quote :
“We know certain companies (Firefox) take the position that there is no sufficient consumer value to justify ‘tracking’ — anonymous audience recognition — of any kind, not even for use in communicating privacy choices,” Mitchell said. “They believe no third party can be trusted. We take a different position: that trust should be established directly between consumers and the brands, and publishers they trust, and with the third parties that those brands and publishers trust.”
It argues that you would _trust by proxy_. So: you trust the company (site) you're visiting, that company trusts third parties, and by proxy you trust those third parties.
The problem is that most people wouldn't trust those brands in the first place if they new what shady third parties they enlist.
If web sites are starting to track me via first-party cookies (which I allow for now) those will be banned aggressively as well. Currently I am somewhat lax on deleting them on browser close (I like to stay logged in for some sites). But this will change on a whim when this becomes mainstream.
Check out the Cookie AutoDelete addon – it can be configured to keep cookies from select, whitelisted domains, and delete everything else every time you close a tab. You can have the cake and eat it too :)
I block all third-party cookies, accept all first-party cookies but delete them when Firefox closes except for few sites I'd like to keep being logged in. Those I approve in the "Manage Permissions" section of Firefox. There are plugins for this but this is a Firefox native way of doing it.
I'm always more certain that we're going to see ad based web sites rendering with webassembly in a full page canvas. Some sites will implement ways to let us copy and paste text, others won't.
Heck, companies are already starting to use CNAME records to fool ad/content blockers. I don't think what you're describing is far from becoming reality.
Unfortunately, if the hardware has a lot of issues the well-integrated experience seems to quickly fall apart. I can't really speak about the desktop side of Apple products but the MacBook line of products seem to be troubled with many hardware related issues for years now.
There is light at the end of the tunnel (I have been affected by some of the problems): the new MacBook 16" switches back to a scissor mechanism for the keyboard and brings back the escape key. If they bring those changes to the MacBook Pro, most of my hardware qualms are resolved.
They only differ in marketing really. I use Firefox too but have no illusions about it, Moz://a is sponsored by the same Google ad money. None of the big browser providers are good guys, there is clear conflict of interest that no amount of PR can resolve.
Aha, the Interactive Advertising Bureau not the Internet Architecture Board.
It's always hard to tell whether people think their three letter name is so distinctive nobody could mistake them for anybody else or whether such confusion is instead desirable...
Sadly, it’s an industry that can’t regulate itself and has been overpromising to less and less gullible clients. Unfortunately advertising is still the main revenue source for publishers, good and bad. Google, Amazon and Facebook will find a way around any but the most extreme and impractical blocking, with logins and technology at a scale that isn’t remotely feasible for all the rest of the industry. So in a way this stance is only advancing their strength at the expense of that fainter and fainter competition that’s fed with the breadcrumbs falling from the tables of the big three. Not sure if in the end we’ll consider this battle as worth fighting as many of you presently think.
The only times I click on ads is to see what competing businesses are doing / offering. I am pretty sure they would actually save money by stopping showing me ads.
Mozilla makes a big chunk of money (or did) by making Big G the default search engine. They have employees to pay and servers to maimtain.
Publishers online and offline have almost never made money without ads. The only diff. is tracking readers is easy online. And that is not probably going to change anytime soon. I don't trust publishers. I trust Mozilla.
Firefox and others are good at blocking ads. But what's their replacement? What's the plan here, to starve everyone of the only viable source of income? (If you believe this is not true, try finding a way to accept micropayments to a website). The endgame here will be that sites start blocking firefox. At least Brave is trying something new.
The majority of site ads are affiliate ads. They are being blocked. The lower income folks have been hurt tremendously already. Analytics is suffering from blocks. Math runs business decisions re spending. No math equals bad decisions. Banner ads? Ineffective but why buy when good numbers are not available. The future online belongs to big tech and gorilla business as these good intentioned decisions kill the middle and lower class online. Me? Been running biz online for nearly 3 decades. The blood online is deep and getting bigger.
I run online biz and have since 1993. Today, I am watching the death of small biz online, the under-employed no longer able to increase income from online biz builds, the death of affiliate income, the spike of subscription paywalls, the growth of big tech as a result, the growth of sites as info brochures for retail brick mortar, decrease in content,all melded with large increases in labor costs, labor benefit bookkeeping and tax expenses,taxes due to nearly 2000 US jurisdictions. In time, you will have few sources for content online and it will be concentrated in gorillas, direct mail will and is increasing, retail will be big guys only, and the biggest losers will be the small guys. But blocks won't be needed then as big guys will deploy the Cobra phenomena as they can afford it. Loser: the average guy. Winner: the big guys. Ah well. More poor people. Ah well.
Is there anything bad with focusing on a single project and doing it well instead of spreading attention on tons of different & unrelated ones especially when you’re resource-constrained?
The majority of people know and appreciate Mozilla because of Firefox and Firefox alone. Their other projects are just distractions IMO.
> [IAB Tech LAB svp of Membership and Operations said:] “They believe no third party can be trusted. We take a different position: that trust should be established directly between consumers and the brands, and publishers they trust, and with the third parties that those brands and publishers trust.”
Question to that guy: What act specifically would establish that trust? My browser downloading JavaScript from half a dozen companies that I've never heard of?
Or is their position that by opening a link to some web page, I declared my boundless, irrevocable trust in that site, all third-parties that site delegates to, all third-parties those third-parties delegate to, etc etc as infinitum?
Where else in life do you get this understanding of "trust"?