Protecting Your Privacy While Eroding Your Democracy: Apple's and Mozilla's PPAs (Privacy Preserving Ad Attribution) Considered Harmful
Protecting Your Privacy While Eroding Your Democracy: Apple's and Mozilla's PPAs (Privacy Preserving Ad Attribution) Considered Harmful
The last few weeks have been interesting if you follow Firefox news. Mark Surman (President, Mozilla Foundation) and Laura Chambers (CEO, Mozilla Corporation...
These browser vendors have produced browser-based PPA (Privacy-Preserving [Ad] Attribution) technologies that attempt to establish a world where “advertising online happens in a way that respects all of us, and where commercial and public interests are in balance”.1 Unfortunately, after studying each proposal, I predict they will inadvertently lend themselves to further incentivize the publication and spread of low-quality information (including misinformation), polluting the information landscape and threatening democracies worldwide.
The alternative to that is the hell that is the current internet.
The alternatives for Mozilla are: A) Try to become an advertising company, or B) Don't.
So the argument here is that, without ad targeting, ads are less valuable to advertisers, which means that they will pay websites less, which means that only the lowest-quality websites remain?
It seems remarkably optimistic to think that this stuff will shift the supply supply curve of advertising to the right, lower barriers to entry for spammers, and crowd out quality content.
This would require increasing the number of people willing to accept that their web browsers are made by an ad company, that they'll be subjected to all the ads, and that the software they use is designed in part to measure and analyze the audience of which they're a part so that data can be sold to advertisers. I don't think there's room for that number to increase much further.
More likely, the only substantial result will be Firefox losing ground even more quickly in the battle against a Google monopoly on web browsers and either someone else comes along to take up the fight or we'll have to give up this "world wide web" thing and go back to writing our comments on bathroom walls, if there are some left that aren't covered in ads.
This would require increasing the number of people willing to accept that their web browsers are made by an ad company
There are billions of people using browsers built by an ad company.
More likely, the only substantial result will be Firefox losing ground even more quickly in the battle against a Google monopoly on web browsers
It kinda feels like you didn't read what I wrote, but I didn't really go into competitive analysis; I assumed that PPA was the new game in town.
@kbal@fedia.io @yoasif@fedia.io
>This would require increasing the number of people willing to accept that their web browsers are made by an ad company
There are billions of people using browsers built by an ad company.
>More likely, the only substantial result will be Firefox losing ground even more quickly in the battle against a Google monopoly on web browsers
It kinda feels like you didn't read what I wrote, but I didn't really go into competitive analysis; I assumed that PPA was the new game in town.