Mozilla slams post-cookie ad tech proposals SWAN and UID2 - needs much more work Mozilla on Wednesday published an assessment of two proposed ad tracking mechanisms intended to fill the void left by third-party cookies and found that both make web privacy worse. Third-party cookies – files deposited by code on websites to track people online and serve them targeted ads – are on their way out, eventually. …
Replacements for cookie-based tracking still pose privacy problems
Using the words privacy and tracking in the same sentence is, well, a contradiction. How the hell do you track a person with that person's privacy intact? Privacy means that you do not know about the person, hence you cannot track.
All these discussions about "intact" privacy while being tracked is a distraction. It is an impossibility; a contradiction. It is a sham of a discussion as long as the discussion cannot be honest about the meaning of both privacy and tracking. It is either/or; you cannot have both. In other words, you cannot have and eat the cake at the same time.
Yeah, though it's not binary. What they want is to be able to eat MOST of the cake(and for free), instead of none of the cake or all of the cake.
As usual it's a misdirection, just like the useless "do not track flag" that Mozilla already sold it's users out for. Don't implement real tracking protection for a decade and we'll agree to a voluntary flag that is off by default and there are zero penalties for ignoring. That worked out well.
The real terms should be, if you want my browsing history, stop stealing it, bloody pay ME for it, at the rate I set, or get buggered. Mozilla could broker that and actually have a revenue stream, as well as submitting alternate payments to websites for an add free browsing experience, but it seems they'd rather keep playing Pocket pool with themselves instead.
Good to see Mozilla stopped buying magic beans though. It's too late sadly, their share of the browser market is a rounding error at this point, but at least they can bark at Google right?
SCUM, the Sneaky Cache for User Manipulators. It pretends not to track you, while actually just tracking you. There is a premium version which reverses that, and pretends to track you, and feeds fake info to advertisers. Next year will see the release of the Platinum tier which will reverse the reversal.
The first 100 platinum subscribers will also get a free trace buster buster plus, a hand exerciser, and a signed poster of Avery Brooks.
They start with the premise that they need a way to serve targeted advertising. I say this is a false premise. This is their want, and not my problem. I don't want to stop targeted advertisements, I want to stop _all_ advertisements, and opt into any agreement where I provide my data in lieu of payment. Then they can track me to their heart's content but not share my data with anyone.
The advertisement companies have somehow moved the goalposts of the conversation such that the assertion that ads must happen is viewed as a given, and merely the terms of _how_ it happens are up for negotiation.
I reject that soundly.
Your tracking is effing useless anyway.
Two weeks ago I bought a LED flashlight on Amazon. Guess what ads Amazon is flinging my way ? Of course, a different model of flashlight.
I see absolutely zero reason to give up my privacy for that kind of targeting.
Ad companies : go screw yourselves. Just serve up normal ads without any code attached and the public might begin to tolerate you again.
> Just serve up normal ads without any code attached
Problem is, ad pushers won't be able to ask as much money for those simple, old-fashioned ads. Even if they might be more efficient, they aren't "shiny" enough, and don't sound like proprietary know-how only a given ad pusher might have. The ad pushers' clients, marketing departments worldwide, want bells and whistles, they want to be scammed, to be told their ad campaigns will be surgical strikes only reaching people almost about to buy, every ad dollar generates a flurry of guaranteed sales. Because "targeted", you know, infallible.
That been said, I agree entirely with what you said. A pity common sense is so uncommon.
I second the question.
Vulture Central seems to be a group of shady hacks, but at least they do the ethical things, as far as we know. (Read that last as tongue-in-cheek teasing of El Reg.)
Seriously though. Even though our beloved Vultures seem to be upstanding journalists (don't let them hear you say that) others may not be, and James Rosewell may not be familiar with the publication or the journalist enough to trust them.
Thus, it's actually not clear to me why that request is unreasonable - i.e. quote me unedited. It seems to require a trust-fall that is unwarranted by the overall industry's reputation for 'spin.'
I'm genuinely curious why El Reg has a policy against it.
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