> The browser should act on behalf of the user and do its best to preserve privacy while reporting on ad click attribution.
I certainly have never wanted my browser to report ad click attribution.
I certainly have never wanted my browser to report ad click attribution.
The alternative is a browser breaking all the tracking mechanisms and then getting blocked because it’s “blocking ads”.
This provides an API that allows ads to work, while also allowing a browser to block all the tracking techniques currently being used.
That way web sites can have a revenue stream without gratuitously violating their reader’s privacy.
That's fine. That's the browser I want. If a website doesn't want me to visit, that's fine. I won't.
Until browsers get blocked for being anonymous, this is never in the interest of the user.
And if a site doesn’t work unless I turn off adblock / switch browser, then it’s most likely bad on multiple levels.
Of course they wouldn't. It betrays almost the entire foundation of marketing and advertising itself. Building brand recognition, forming brand opinion, encouraging new social and personal practices, etc are big parts of advertising. And now because the Internet is around, we're just supposed to give companies all of that brand building and everything else completely for free, only having them pay for specific sales funneled directly and provably through an advertisement? Can I get an ad played during the Super Bowl and only pay the TV networks when someone can provide proof the ad was the cause of their purchase? Can I get an ad in the newspaper like that? Radio? Roadside billboards? Where? Where else do I get to just rob the person hosting the advertisements of basically all advantages of advertisement and only rarely pay them for providing the venue?
Aparently it was shut down? I wonder what happened.
Edit: it looks like they were focused on independent blogs and since those have far less traffic now they couldn’t afford to stay open. That really sucks, at least it’s a good example of how the web is a much worse place when it becomes centralized.
DRM support in the browser allowed video on demand in a way that video providers were okay with. It ended the content war for video.
So if a browser does want to protect its users it is necessary to provide a fallback to allow site operators to make revenue from ads.
Hence this proposal: provide a system that allows the necessary steps for ads to work, without violating user privacy. Then browsers can start more aggressively blocking trackers.
Will browsers be able to? Are vendors encouraged to do so?
If you don't want to be tracked, then don't click on the ads.
You could potentially stop their code from running on your computer, but you can't stop them from running code on their servers, and if you make yourself hard enough to fingerprint, CAPTCHAs become impossibly difficult.
Plain old cookies and unique url parameters are the bread and butter of ad tracking. It is a much more accurate and practical way of tracking you.
It is just that trackers are relying more on first party cookies than 3rd party ones.