The advertising cartel coming to your web browser

> Don’t look for a section on permissions or consent in that document, by the way. There isn’t one. And nothing about nerd lawyer stuff like “opt out of sale” or “objections to processing” in there, either. The Big Tech companies want a two-track system, where other companies’ ad features are required to do all the privacy regulation hassles, but the browser’s own built-in tracking feature is something that people have to find the right setting for and turn off.

This language to make consent popups sound good is suspicious. Not being interrupted while you're browsing is good. A browser setting that people can turn off once, for all participating websites, is good.

This seems like this is written by an advertiser who wants their profits, but pretending to care about privacy so they get users' support.

Here is a more honest summary:

"This proposal hurts us, small advertisement networks and professional marketers. Reject it, or we will ramp up the tracking to compensate for the lost opportunities!"

I'm not sure what this blog is complaining about.

>Problem one: Over-rating search, social, and app store ads

Isn't this a problem with today's ad attribution system? The author doesn't try to argue how the new system makes it worse.

>Problem two: Incentives for extra tracking

Same as above. It sounds like he's against attribution in general, which is an okay position to have, but I'd rather he say this upfront and more directly rather than spending 1k+ words on what essentially can be boiled down to "I hate Attribution Level 1 because it's attribution, and attribution is bad in general", and implying the issues he has are issues with Attribution Level 1 specifically.

> When Meta, Google and Apple [and Mozilla] agree on a “privacy” feature, watch out.

?

This feels like a good sign, to me. I get far more worried when I see the likes of Meta, Google, Spotify, Epic etc team up.

Closed immediately due to the invasive "using this site means you agree to our terms of service!!" Popup

You can tell who works in adtech

Time to fire up the chaffing. Or the pitchforks and torches. Either one.

Advertising needs to be over now.

> called Attribution Level 1, as a standard feature of web browsers

We need to eliminate private companies from our browsers in general. Many years ago they called it "acceptable ads".

"The average person in the USA has about $1200/year spent on advertising intended to reach them. Where do you want “your” $1200 spent?"

Interestingly $1,200 is roughly 3.5% of what the average American spends per year (roughly $78k), and $1200 is roughly 15% of the average American's discretionary spending. That doesn't seem too crazy to me as a cost for the main driver of the matching and branding system of the capitalist economy of the United States.

The next time anyone on HN says "GDPR should've been a setting in the browser", I'll just point them to this. This is what browser vendors are making as a default setting.

So they “reinvented” HTTP cookies but with only advertisers?

> Technically, the way it works is that a script running on a site with ads asks the browser to record an ad impression. Then the browser keeps a record of ads seen from all the sites you visit. Later, when you buy something, the retail site can ask the browser to generate a “conversion report” that can be passed to a centralized aggregation service.