this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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This entire thing is just idealism vs pragmatism for the trillionth time. The idealists are mad because they think all ads are bad and we shouldn't try to work with advertisers in any capacity. They do not believe reducing the harmfulness of ads is a valid approach, because that would be an acknowledgement of ads. Common talking points there are about how this is technically working with advertisers and how the internet shouldn't have ads in the first place.
The pragmatics also think ads are bad, but believe that an Internet without ads is very unlikely to happen, so they believe attempting to reduce the harmfulness of ads is a valid approach. Common talking points there are about how this isn't giving advertisers anything they don't already have and about how this doesn't matter if you're using an adblocker.
Like all other debates of this type, this probably isn't ever going to be resolved to anyone's satisfaction and we've really just been seeing the same talking points over and over again since the beginning. So I hope y'all have fun duking it out, I don't think I'm gonna bother looking at these pointless PPA threads anymore.
As a privacy enthusiast and pragmatist, I see Firefox as providing no additional benefit to users or advertisers. Considering the laughably small market share of Firefox, I'm not sure how it is expected to woo advertisers over either.
Which of these options look more robust: Google Topics, Mozilla PPA, or advertisers doing AB testing on their own by simply using different links for different audiences?
If you trust the advertiser, they can do it on their own. If you don't trust the advertiser, then the additional third party does nothing.
This is a nonsense comparison as these features serve completely different purposes, while only having in common that advertisers currently use user tracking to achieve the same.
Topics data-mines your browsing history for information about your interests and reveals this information to advertisers in order to improve ad selection. It's meant to replace ad networks tracking each individual user's visits to connected websites and building that profile themselves. Since this is, in a way, much more powerful than tracking cookies, Chrome has a scary dialog asking for it to be enabled, and I don't think we'll be seeing it in Firefox. "Using different links" cannot replace user profiling at all.
PPA doesn't provide any new capabilities to advertisers. It's a privacy-preserving way of measuring ad campaign success that is currently done by ad networks tracking individual users from ad impressions to conversions. "Using different links" is also defective, as advertisers need to connect ad impressions to conversions even if they are not immediately connected through a click on the ad.
If these features become generally available, this reduces the leverage advertisers have on legislators to prevent tracking from being outlawed. Mozilla will be hoping Chrome picks up PPA.
You want to legislate telling companies which servers they are allowed to gather data from, making it into a de jure oligopoly rather than a de facto one?!