At this point honestly I just wish for a general ban on tracking ads of any kind. Just give me good old contextual ads and remove some MBs of js, with the only purpose of tracking me, from most websites of the internet.
The thing is these ads are not exactly effective either. I mean you'll read about the guru's with 90% conversion rate at 0.50c per click or some garbage like that but when you run them yourself, with what is considered a normal company (not a unicorn) you somehow find yourself with a <1% CR on most remarketing/tracking ads.
They are crazy cheap though and essentially act like a TV/Radio ad. It's about getting repeated exposure, even if it's not a direct conversion (because it never is). Everyone wants to get rich quick these days and highly customized ads appear to be the best way to get there.
It’s not like the current tracking adds are super efficient always. I searched for a new washing machine, found one I liked, bought it, and spent the next 3 months looking at washing machine adds.
With a lot more AI the smart people at Google, Amazon and Facebook may find out one day that there are products you buy rarely versus products you buy repeatedly. Like washing machines vs potato chips.
It makes sense to show ads for potato chips but with washing machines you should stop after purchase.
I much preferred the time when kiteboarding sites had static kiteboarding ads instead of the current situation where ads are totally out of context.
Not an AI problem. This happens when small businesses outsource their adsense campaign to one of the many completely incompetent fly by night SEO shops, or to their grandson who's "good at computers".
Half of Google's income is derived from businesses pissing their marketing budget up a wall with incorrectly targeted ads. But it's still more effective than newspapers.
> Half of Google's income is derived from businesses pissing their marketing budget up a wall with incorrectly targeted ads.
Ah yes I was waiting for a response like this. Adsense campaign or do you mean Adwords campaign? There's a pretty big difference between the two.
Also, what's the difference between pissing away money on "poor targeting" and "testing" targeting which helps you to determine what the best options are?
Alot of bro-vado in your comment - what's your avg CTR? Churn rate? Spend? Out of curiosity.
> I much preferred the time when kiteboarding sites had static kiteboarding ads instead of the current situation where ads are totally out of context.
Or out of nowhere. I get ads for real estate in Chicago - except that I live across the Atlantic. Or ladies products every time after my fiancee used my phone.
Not to mention how most ads are just plain bad. I don't mind actually watching good ads - I was hooked onto buying the Asus Zenbook Pro Duo for a while because of its ad (although later I learnt that the product was shit). The Honda Day/Night ad is another one that comes to mind.
You know I think Amazon may have gotten better about that in the last little bit. I don't recall being flooded with recommendations for something I just purchased recently.
Clearly more tracking needs to be done in order to connect your conversion to your purchase.
Not only will they stop showing ads of washing machines after the purchase, knowing the make and model will help them gauge when to start targeting repair ads as well as start targeting replacement machine ads. They will also know whether you will stick to the current manufacturer or which you will switch to, and which model you will buy. You will be able to live with the comfort of knowing that your entire future of washing machine purchases is planned out and concentrate your energy on more important things in life (such as lobbying for better privacy protections).
Well, they could just use common sense: a washing machine is something people look at when the old one broke down or moved house: they need it so they are likely to buy one asap. Show it a week and then stop. Laptops are similar: makes no sense showing it for months, and that is what happens now.
Even if they have the sales data, it is not connected to the ad data (bought a laptop from a big chain here this week: will get ads for that laptop from the same chain for months) so common sense should work fine for now. If the ads appear around the days I am looking for the article, I even might click on them. Now that my brain knows all ads are irrelevant because they are outdated things I already have, I just do not see them anymore.
The cost of keeping it like that is next to none so there's very little motivation to fix it too. I've done many remarketing ads and generally speaking setting it up to avoid recent buyers is pointless in the grand scheme of daily work.
You seem to imply that the alternative would be more effective. What ads did you see in the 3 months prior to buying it? Maybe they were equally bad or worse but you forgot because of the psychological impact of the washing machines.
I’d like to say I saw the “normal selection”, but the truth is I don’t remember. I’m fairly certain there were not many washing machines there, but probably a good deal of “tech”.
In any case, I put up a network wide Pi-hole blocker shortly after it because the washing machine adds didn’t just show up on my single device, but pretty much every device i own, including my wife’s phone.
I’ve since spent a long time since trying to convince my wife that Apple doesn’t listen for keywords and sell it (though I have no doubt Facebook, Google and Amazon would - if allowed), and that the fact she was seeing washing machine adds as well was either that she had searched for one (at the same time) or they were basing it on our public ip.
I also switched my search engine to DDG at the same time, and it’s quite funny watching the profiling algorithms struggle to find something they think I like. There are still washing machines in there, but the rest of the adds are pretty much all over the place.
Could it just be that online advertising is simply oversold?
I don't know about others but I'd click an ad maybe once every 6 months at best. Maybe there is logic behind constant feed although on a number of occasions I actively avoid products for bombarding me (looking at you grammerly).
I do believe online advertising is a bit of a bubble right now. Lots of bullshit unprofitable VC-funded companies burn tons of money on advertising (more than what they'd ever earn from the potential customer) in an attempt to establish monopolies which in turn inflates the value of advertising companies.
Slap the word A.I. or ML in there are you are golden.
New platform, new opportunities. I have thrown money into ad's on various content suggestion platforms, Reddit, Quora, BuySellAds, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and a hell of a lot more.
TikTok is apparently incredible right now with conversions and pricing. It's all over the forums and the guru's are pumping it too. Give me some solid targeting options and viable metrics and you could probably wrangle some money out of me and many other marketers out there. I would say it's easy money if you can spin the ad network in a new way.
From a marketing pro's perspective you assume that because you have data - reach, impressions, est. click-through rates etc - that you can find a 'quick win' aka get rich rich quick.
So inevitably you try it, then you get some 'tips', then you read a marketing guru's success story, then you start getting ads for ebooks all of which have the best strategy and you really feel that you have no choice but to go for it. It's the FOMO/what if complex magnified by professional requirements to grow at all costs.
From now on I consider online advertising like gambling. You think you can win but the house always win's because you spend more money on A/B testing, copy edits and new keywords all of which create very few leads or deals. You always think you can win too, 8 years later I still go back to online ad's because I feel that there's just that juicy copy, design, content combo round the corner.
I see this a lot but I find that it can't be true on the whole for many many.
We buy ads for political clients. On FB I could get a positive immediate roi for donations. Scaling huge is hard (i got one client to over $1 million last cycle for context). Admittedly but you could go a lot bigger if you look at ROI down the line with email donations.
And we're not alone. I don't think the many many direct to consumer brands would spend so much money on FB if they didn't get a positive ROI.
Maybe some PE or other funded brands are trying to grow over profit spending more than they make. But there are a ton that are profit seeking and get good value. FB is definitely an exception though unless you are an app install ad on mobile.
For us we make a donation page. The only links that go there are from FB ads. We also use different refcodes for different ad groups AND the FB pixel passing in purchase value which is really good at optimizing FB's delivery to highest ROAS
FB is very very very good at this
I feel like people who question it or like don't understand basic attribution should do some more research before denigrating
There are other non-direct measurement, FB for instance allows you to upload offline purchases. Definitely not as clean especially if you're hitting across different channels. But a basic A/B holdout test is pretty good in that case too.
The arrogance of people outside the industry saying that a many-billion-dollar market is "not effective" is... kinda ludicrous on here.
If you don't think it's right for them to exist, I'm not challenging that viewpoint at all. But coming in and assuming, with minimal to no research, that thousand of people and billions of dollars are pouring into complicated products which don't actually do anything, is a bit of an anti-vaxxer approach to the world.
Tracking should be considered creepy, just imagine if a single person would collect all this data of you. There should be some limitations of what can be advertised on.
It is crazy to think Facebook is still able to operate as they do. I mean look at the stock price. Ridiculously out of reality. This will come crashing down soon enough.
Their P/E ratio is 27. It’s below P/E ratio for SP500, which sits right now at 40, and includes tons of beyond ridiculous companies like Tesla, with P/E ratio over 1200.
There’s lots of wrong with Facebook, but calling their stock overpriced isn’t one of those things.
That is like saying if we make the punishment for any crime tortorous enough we won't need law enforcement. That only answers "what the punishment will theoretically be" not "How can it be found out when it is being broken? By whom? Will we able to take action against it?".
I think what they mean is, how can you track which companies are not complicit, how do you organize the proof so that you can levy the fine successfully
Already done. It's up to 10% of turnover, not profits. Which the companies would happily go to court over. But how to actually prove in court that company X is tracking users if a leak doesn't occur? Subopenas? They need a court order for that. They need reasonable suspicion to get a court order.
Those issues aren’t unique to this problem. Courts already try to solve them. It’s the same as how you would find banks denying loan based on race. You find banks by complaints or wide search. You do an initial investigation from the outside with no warrant or subpoena. Like send in a white client and black client (or someone with a search history of fishing versus sewing) and see what happens. Then that’s enough to ask for all the secrets. Of course they could delete them, but that should be a big crime.
I’m not saying this is a perfect system. It’s not. But it’s an attempt the problem you describe.
Right now it's very easy to see, the companies are not hiding it at all. They send the data to third-party trackers straight from their website or application.
That’s so stupid, why not just take your OWN cookie and use it in the backend to send to all these resources, proxying through your own server or having a CNAME for theirs under your domain?
CNAME cloacking has gone even further, ad company now ask you to put a A/AAAA record pointing to one of their IPs as CNAME uncloaking was working pretty well.
Turkey successfully made US tech giants comply to Turkish law by banning purchase of ads from non compliant ones and threatening with accumulating fines and progressive bandwidth throttling.
People are all equal and should be afforded the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, there is a massive power difference between a rich corporation and an individual. Inverting the burden of proof is warranted in such cases.
Your accusation would be very troublesome if made against individuals but for corporate lawyers its just another day at the office.
There are only three countries listed there - Pakistan, Canada and the UK. That is a bit of an indication that it is a major fringe excepetions.
The UK's libel laws are so infamous that many nations specifically refuse to enforce them - not a point in favor. Canada has largely scoured out the bits they inherited by thr courts and what is left is dubiously constitutional.
The income accounting in the UK and Pakistan are the closest thing to legitimate and even then self evidently regarded as extreme by their limited adoption.
Never thought I would see the day when people on HN would enthusiastically support making it much more difficult for anyone to publish their stuff on the web. All while, in the same breath, clamoring for the "good old days" of the web when publishing something was as easy as just uploading a folder with your HTML/CSS to your host.
No, thank you, I don't want to go through audits and deal with bureaucracy when I just want to publish my side-project blog on the web. If you want to discourage people from building and publishing their personal projects and making them easily accessible to the public, that's how you do it.
However, I am absolutely ok with EU doing this, given they seem to be hellbent on running their local tech industry into the ground. Truly great founders from EU will either manage to make their companies succeed despite EU or eventually end up creating their companies in the US, and both of those scenarios sound like a win-win to me (from the perspective of the US; from the perspective of the EU, I guess they are doing all of this knowingly, so they get what they wanted, which would count as a win in a way too).
Well, in the good old days people didn't abuse users with unwanted tracking and fingerprinting. Pages used to be just that: files someone uploaded to the internet. People came up with tracking techniques here and there but they weren't so pervasive. Now most pages aren't pages, they're hostile applications purposefully built to extract as much value out of you as they can by any means available whether you want it to or not.
If all you did was publish an HTML+CSS page, your innocence is self-evident. Anyone can look at your page's source and confirm it. If you link to Google's javascripts though, that should put you into a completely different category of suspicion.
>If all you did was publish an HTML+CSS page, your innocence is self-evident. Anyone can look at your page's source and confirm it. If you link to Google's javascripts though, that should put you into a completely different category of suspicion.
Things change. Back in the day, HTML+CSS page was all it took. These days, wanting to know how people discover your page or how many new readers come to your blog is basics. Reliability and performance tracking is something that wasn't really a commonplace thing back then. For all of those things, you kinda do have to use JS.
The question is, do you necessarily need those features? No. Would it be nice to have? Yes. When I publish a side project, I want to make it nice and great, since I am not getting paid to do it, I am doing it out of pure enthusiasm and motivation for creating the best I can. Forcing anyone in this situation to go through audits and deal with bureaucracy just to be able to publish their personal side-project is a certain way of discouraging people from ever doing so. All you end up with is a bunch of people who are willing to jump through all these hoops because they have something monetary to gain from it or those who know how to jump around those hoops really well.
You're reducing the equation to an unreasonable degree.
Parameters are:
- negative effects on society at-large
- destruction of privacy
- creation of turn-key surveillance systems
- negative effects on urban environment aesthetics
- ...
- legitimate business desire to promote goods and services.
It's that sole last item, which is the entire stated purpose of "advertising". We could create a web just for product promotion, and it would be opt in. Looking for widget x? Go to the market and even provide demographics for better service.
Advertising is a pretext for baking in surveillance and social modification systems into society. It is, like certain aspects of financial system, 'sacrosanct', and it is strictly taboo to state the obvious regarding advertising, as a systemic approach to moderating societal norms and behavior.
Ads could be placed into a search engine, and user agents could choose to request relevant ads based on the page they are viewing (the context) and/or the current user's profile (if the user opts-in to their profile being included).
Advertisers would compete within that search engine to have the most relevant and accurate product and service offerings to match demand, and would pay the search engine provider for the hosting.
The search engine provider could attribute and send credit back to the websites from which advertising requests from the user agent originated. This could be attributed based on requests, clicks, purchases, etc.
Under this model, publisher websites would not need to design and manage their pages specifically to incorporate advertising slots, and users would not have to see any advertising at all unless they are genuinely interested in further commercial information related to the page they're on.
As a side-effect this could reduce the usage of advertising in various grey areas (spam, disinformation, and even the rare-but-feasible harassment of individuals by using targeted advertising).
I think all the great minds at google have a better chance than I do. Plus you were the one saying how unfair it would be for them to not invade people’s privacy in order to cash in. My point is that if they can’t operate without violating our human rights then they shouldn’t operate.
Yep. People don’t pay for search anymore. They haven’t since Google took over the world a decade and a half ago. That’s not to say free is the best option, but people don’t want to pay when there’s a free solution that works just as well.
And when effectively no users opt in to advertising, how does the search engine stay in business?
A few years ago my response to this would be that I'd gladly pay Google $10/year for access to Search without adverts, but over the past couple of years that's changed. Google have become so utterly terrible at handling customers that I no longer would. I'll only use Google services if they're free. The idea that Google might just kill my account without notice leaving me with no access to search would be catastrophic.
I would gladly pay a different search engine company for access to a good search service though.
Do you have exact numbers? The estimates I've seen are about $60 per user per annum, so about $5 per month. That's for all services, not just search.
So for less than a Netflix subscription you have Youtube, Gmail, Search, Drive, Translate, Calendar, Maps, Photos, Hangouts and more. Services that many people use regularly.
It wouldn't be hard to argue that any of these products is worth a lot more than $10 a year, but convincing users at large to go down that route will be a challenge, undoubtedly.
It is less than a Netflix subscription but essentially everyone on the planet subscribes and can't cancel.
(Also, many users would agree on the value but balk at redirecting funds from an existing allocation to continue service on something they've already gotten for free.)
The ad industry's biggest accomplishment is making most users believe that they can have access to state of the art search engine, video streaming, messenging etc... for "free". It means that it's incredibly hard to compete with a different business model.
Yes I would. Based on the really, really crappy results that google gaves me out lately (I have actually quit using it), $12 a year seems more than reasonable (you have market of millions of users, charging $10 / month is ripoff). Under condition that it is not some ads company under disguise (like google), that they eliminate all SEO crap (i dont want those results anywhere near the 100th page of results) and ads from my results and serve me relevant content.
Instead of google I am aggregating multiple search engines and joining the results eliminating all that are not on most of them. I am losing anything special (like there is something "special" today) but at least I dont get bunch of stuff on google that just wastes my time.
Nextgrid: yes, exactly that. I want old results, I want old content, I want content that matches with my search words 100% instead of getting what google crappy algorithms think that I want. I dont want hipster crap that propagates next silver bullet (that is just a copy what we already had packed into SaaS).
> Based on the really, really crappy results that google gaves me out lately
People on Hacker News seem to think Google's results have gotten worse over time. Maybe they have for the narrow set of interests and requirements of this crowd, but I'm very confident they've gotten better for the vast majority of other users (users who I bet are less likely to use an ad blocker too).
> That they eliminate all SEO crap (i dont want those results anywhere near the 100th page of results) and ads from my results and serve me relevant content.
This is an extremely difficult engineering problem. Google doesn't make a conscious decision to include low/middling quality SEO'd content. That content is optimized to appear relevant and high quality. Google does a better job than say Bing at telling the difference, but it's still obviously an unsolved problem.
It's a good question. I'd flip it around a bit and say that if you're a search engine that:
- Hosts commercial advertising content (not the entire web; only product and service offerings)
- Charges for hosting
- Has a highly qualified audience that genuinely wants to receive relevant advertising (based on requests being user-initiated, not software-initiated)
- Claims credit for revenue generated as a result of providing relevant advertising
... then you're likely to be able to cover the costs of developing and maintaining the system.
- This is a bit like eBay or Amazon, arguably; except that the user profile and context is optional for the user to provide
- Addictive products could still be a loophole that bad advertisers could exploit to monetize users without providing them overall benefit; fortunately local regulations tend to cover that
Call me cynical but more regulation like this only serves to further entrench the existing (quasi-)monopolies by increasing the barriers for new entrants.
Especially the focus on "illegal" content and political advertising only (as opposed to, say, advertising as such) makes it appear not as an attempt to improve the situation in general, but rather to carve a bigger slice of the extant lucrative pie for certain interest groups.
> EDPS said gatekeepers should provide an easy and accessible way for users to consent or decline the use of their personal data by the companies for their other services, and that there should be tests to ensure personal data is effectively anonymous.
Users will consent to anything, especially if they have no choice, and any tests can and will be gamed. Ultimately if the problem is to be solved it would require a more novel approach than this.
> The proposed European Commission rules will need to be discussed with EU countries and EU lawmakers before they become law, a process which will take 16-24 months.
The implementation deadline seems excessively long to me. A lot can change within this timeframe, rendering the laws obsolete before they even come into force.
> Call me cynical but more regulation like this only serves to further entrench the existing (quasi-)monopolies by increasing the barriers for new entrants.
Have you actually read the proposals?
I don't mean that in a snarky way, but you're never going to be able to figure that out from a couple of lines in a wire report.
For instance: it's not mentioned in this article, but the proposals add extra conditions on Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) which wouldn't apply to smaller entities. The definition of a VLOP would be one that reaches > 10% of the entire EU population (~45 million).
>The implementation deadline seems excessively long to me. A lot can change within this timeframe, rendering the laws obsolete before they even come into force.
It's not like this is now law and the EU will be sitting around for 2 years. The DSM and DMA are just legislative proposals which need to be considered (and almost certainly amended) by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU before they can become law.
Large, impactful legislation shouldn't just be plonked on the statute book by the executive.
In what I imagine is a brilliant twist of irony (I can't read the article), all I see when I open this page is a consent form to be tracked, with a link buried in text to opt out, which brings me to a page that requires me to fill in all of my personal details in order to opt out.
Apparently in order not to track me reading their web page, Reuters requires (among others) my full name, residency, date of birth, street address, and telephone number.
I see the same. Maybe I'm getting confused by the wording and layout.
I interpreted the "Reject All"/"Confirm My Choices" buttons at the bottom to belong only to the "Manage Consent Preferences" section. The "Information Our Partners Collect" part above it is a separate section, with a separate "Accept All" button, and an opt-out link in the text, so I figured the final "Reject All" might only reject the second section. Because why else would they have separate sections with separate buttons?
Either way, none of this inspires confidence that they have my interests in mind.
> Either way, none of this inspires confidence that they have my interests in mind.
Bingo. This is the underlying issue. And indeed this dual opt out is probably intentionally confusing - and I'm never sure either whether 'refuse all' refuses also the partners.
I would wager that "Reject All" does not, in fact, opt you out of "Legitimate Interests" - sites are using the language "Object to Legitimate Interests" for this.
For me (EU) the consent popup has "reject all" at the very bottom (though I only see it with blocking disabled). Pretty lame, but still better than most.
Way less frequent. I'm usually jumping between Germany and India and whenever I'm in Germany it feels like I'm always getting a popup on every site I visit for the first time.
A lot of the same sites don't bother to throw the popup when I'm browsing from India.
is there some extension to mark links like this? popups, paywalls, consent forms. all of these, I don't mind if the link is red or if their domain is entirely blocked. I'm immediately not interested in such websites and it would save me so much time
On related news: Just two days ago the EU ePrivacy regulation took the first hurdle in Brussels. This will most likely bring some changes to the whole consent drama.
I'm not good at reading legalese and there seem to be no commentary for the current version[1] yet. What I understand is that they "encourage" browsers to implement "whitelists" (their choice of word, not mine) as a solution to "end-users [..] overloaded with requests to provide consent". I'm not sure what is in there regarding first-party analytics cookies which some hoped will be exempted.
I would hone in on pages 27 & 28 in that document. In particular, this quote:
> Cookies can also be a legitimate and useful tool, for example, in assessing the effectiveness of a delivered information society service, for example of website
design and advertising or by helping to measure the numbers of end-users visiting a website, certain pages of a website or the number of end-users of an application. This is not the case, however, regarding cookies and similar identifiers used to determine the nature of who is using the site, which always require the consent of the end-user.
It is, of course, legalese. But they seem to be drawing a distinction between analytics and tracking. Counting distinct users seems to be acceptable without consent; profiling users does not.
I pray to the day were privacy is reclaimed. Big Tech has abused us for long enough. You cannot enforce slavery through terms of service, You also should not be able to own all private information of someone through terms of service.
> profiling of users for content moderation purposes should be banned
I'm not sure exactly what this is suggesting, but noticing that a user has previously posted abusive comments and using that to lower the threshold for flagging future comments for review seems completely fine.
People. Just. Delete. Your. Cookies. Regularly.
I am baffled about the crazy amount of debate and technical solutions to a problem that was solved the moment Cookies were invented. In the 1990s I suppose.
Do you think you are clever? Like this ad trackers can't just switch to use local storage, fingerprinting or other methods to go around your clever solution? You can't use tech to solve this, Google, Facebook and the others will tech around your fix.
I am not being clever, but sometimes the clever people need an idiot to see what is in front of them. ;) ok tell me what are anonymous browser windows good for? Local storage is not deleted then? If yes, use that.
Sure, now train all people to use that. And then tell them how to edit their hosts file(or to install a firewall) to also block tracking embedded in apps or in the OS. And when the OS vendor goes around the firewall and the DNS by using other technology then tell the users to buy and setup some fancy router and when they invent some other tech then what ?
Much simpler, make tracking without permission illegal so everyone can benefit not only the tech people and the ones that can afford extra routers, VPNs or other tech solutions. Also not sure if private mode is 100% safe.
Your argument isn't grounded in reason. Let me make another one in kind: let me just take all of the money from everyone's wallets. If anyone notices then they can just get new wallets.
That would mean getting every single cookie banner, insterstitial ad, newsletter begging screen, country selection, TOS confirmation, etc, on every single visit.
That's what I do. I use Firefox, set to delete cookies, cache, and history when I close the browser, and also uBlock Origin. I close the browser frequently, often between sites, certainly before/after visiting my banking site or anything like that.
Automatic logins are easily automatable to steal data from my device, me, and the people around me.
I want to be asked every time a service wants to know who's using it from my device. I want to have the option to immediately decline authorization before any information about me or my device is sent.
I want to have the option to say "no, I don't want this service to know it's me". I also want the option to say "I am <soandso>" even if really I am not <soandso>.
Not giving me that option is a disrespect of me as a user.
Please don't propose technical solutions for things that should be solved by law. Protection should be the default, and not up to your own cleverness vs. the cleverness of trillion dollar industries. If that is the fight you have to fight, you will lose either immediately or eventually (see also the next point).
Please don't propose technical solutions that are mostly ineffective due to the huge amount of brainpower spent on browser fingerprinting, super cookies and other means of persistence. Cookies were invented in the 90s, and the means of being more clever than those deleting cookies were invented soon after.
Please don't speak with such condescension about these topics. People might mistake your confidence to imply you are actually on to something, but if the solution to the problem was so simple it would have been solved already - and the industry behind this would be dead or pivoted away.
It's the other way around. Things with technical solution should never be solved by law. Lawmakers and law enforcement is absurdly expensive and law has unforeseen side effects, we should use that only when absolutely necessary.
We'll probably disagree on this, but I think we're well past the point where this is "absolutely necessary". Some of best engineering talent in the world is spent on engineering the internet to 1) misuse human psychological affinities to lure you in and keep you in and 2) build large profiles of you to make as much money from (1) as possible. Targeted advertising and the incentives it creates should be banned as a benefit to society.
The technical solution wasn't even tried, I will agree with you after that fails. Also for example subsidy for Firefox and other independent browsers (of Google/MS/...) could be tried. Law should be the last resort.
I'm curious what the technical solution is you're proposing. I was considering OP's context of a technical solution that's "clearing your cookies regularly". Surely that's both not sufficient (not by a long shot) and being tried at some scale [1]? So probably you mean something else, but I'm not sure what.
First step would be making private browsing the default. Second step would be making strong, capable adblockers built-in. Third step would be something like Firefox containers, one for each domain. Fourth step could be analyzing network traffic for potentially fingerprinting information and blocking it. I am sure there is much more to think of.
Adtech companies have worked hard to make you associate privacy with annoying popups.
They've lobbied hard to water down tracking bans to be "user choice", and then used dark patterns/malicious compliance to make not agreeing a horrible experience to wear people down, so that people just give up on privacy.
What the EU should really do is fine / tax monopolists like Google and Facebook into submission then invest that money into the EU-based startup ecosystem.
I am all for import tariffs, especially when those taxes prevent wasteful international shipping.
However, to respond to your snarky tone, does Germany have a monopoly on the world auto industry and use that to abuse the rights of citizens while squashing all competition? If so, absolutely, tax the hell out of them! My ‘99 VW Jetta was a piece of junk and I sold it at a major loss after a year.
Targeting taxes directly towards specific companies seems overly aggressive. I hope they will find and implement more generic rules to achieve what it is they want to achieve which, if I'm not completely mistaken, is to protect me from invasive tracking.
If you want to see the outcome of a lack of protectionism, look no further than the devastation of the steel, automobile and other manufacturing industries in the ‘70s and ‘80s which effectively wiped out the middle class.
Steel and automobiles had the same root cause - management complacency. Not from a failure to race to the bottom as often suggested. Instead from their failure to invest in improving tools and processes. Edward Deming offered his statistical improvement techniques domestically first and they passed on them. Japan didn't.
hey I'm no fan of naked neoliberalism either, but I promise you an EU facebook would suck just as much and in the same ways as US facebook. Profit motives still exist for huge corporations in Europe.
every tool has its use, but protectionism is not the way to solve big tech's bad incentives.
Why is protectionism bad? Why is it better to allow trade imbalances which sucks your nation’s financial and intellectual wealth to others with nothing in return?
By definition in a trade imbalance you are getting the imports in return. Putting aside believed Great Depression influences and tit for tat tarrifing it puts your own nation's companies at a disadvantage intentionally by discouraging both efficiency and quality.
Coddling them with a protected domestic market. Protecting one company means harming others who depend upon their type of outputs. This in turn harms their competiveness and can lead to domestic demand declining.
Effectively imposing a tarrif is like sanctioning yourself - If protectionism was helpful shouldn't they be at least a player in the Caribbean and South and Central American markets? Cuba had its own domestic auto market for decades from sanctions and the only people to benefit were mechanics as they had to play automobile reanimator to actively used vehicles that have grown older than the oldest member of their workforce.
They have tried that several times. They don't hold a candle to even the "second tier" of the US (Barnes and Noble, eBay, etc.) Really the harsh truth is that the source of their problems is not found in the "Big Tech" Boogeyman but in the mirror.
Like what solutions? Have you tried these "solutions"? I live in one of the countries which is special by having its own competitive search engine - and it's truly bad compared to Google. If we're going back to that, I am going out of EU.
Didn't we hear the same thing from the UK with Brexit about their disregard for billions of dollars of commerce and it ended in completely predictable and avoidable disaster?
What Google and Facebook should really do is to tax/fine the monopolistic EU into submission and then invest the profits into whatever they feel like it.
I applaud EU for taking at least this initiative. US tech giants is result of lax rules by USA and entire world is suffering. I will even go further and say: EU should not allow any US company to work on EU soil unless there is separate sub-EU division which is tailor made for compatible with EU laws. US should solve their own problems inside US. We have our own problem- no free tutoring and moral lessons !
The web is broken. No amount of regulation by the EU will fix things. I can only hope for something new which is designed from the ground up to protect the users. I'm not smart enough to know what that looks like, perhaps IPFS or similar?
In the mean time I'll block all ads and third party cookies and hope for the best.
It is good to see regulation that diminishes the chance of monopolies or abuses. I don't know if current safeguards help such guarantees.
What could be interesting are economic incentives. For example, social networks profits could be taxed and part of the money acquired could be applied on independent de-centralized services. Imagine the impact if just a small amount of facebook profits were donated to wikipedia.
How is this going to diminish monopolies? Big tech is (a) going to have a voice in these regulations and (b) will easily afford the cost of compliance. Small competitors will have no voice and will struggle to comply. This is almost certainly going to entrench the big players and widen their moats.
They could start by making it easier to report and act on GDPR violations (fb, discord, google, etc all have known violations but nobody seems to care). Then they say that they need more safeguards, no, you need to actually start doing something.
God no. Governments absolutely suck at changing the incentives to deter bad behaviour. Do we really want more cookie banners and GDPR consent forms?
Maybe I'm missing something, but why can't we block all forms of stateful identifiers to third-party content? First-party cookies, localStorage, etc only. Is there some big legitimate use case I'm not seeing?
Having said that, I'm sure if they were blocked, tech companies would just provide an SDK that passes through first-party state so companies could continue the status quo.
Some stateful identifiers are required for technical purposes. IP addresses for example.
Other identifiers are required for the functionality of the service, such as your contact details or information you enter in a social network.
Given you can't work around providing the information, the only solution is to use legislation to prevent that information for being used in malicious ways.
Also, the current situation with the consent prompts in Europe is not because of the GDPR but because of its lack of enforcement. The GDPR learned from the former "cookie law" (which I agree was a shit-show) and explicitly prohibits annoying/misleading consent prompts.
> Some stateful identifiers are required for technical purposes. IP addresses for example.
Yeah that one's pretty unavoidable, but is at least for many people temporary and pseudonymous only. Once their dynamic IP rotates (granted this isn't the case for everybody), the connection is lost. Much better than every website with a "Like" button on the page allowing facebook to track you as you traipse across the internet.
> Other identifiers are required for the functionality of the service, such as your contact details or information you enter in a social network.
That's first-party information. You're not posting on facebook via an iframe on another site. If you choose to provide your information to facebook, they're gonna use it - legislation or not. Legal encodings of intent are always full of loopholes, even if they escape regulatory capture via lobbying. The best way to stop Facebook from getting information about you, is to not give them information.
> Also, the current situation with the consent prompts in Europe is not because of the GDPR but because of its lack of enforcement. The GDPR learned from the former "cookie law" (which I agree was a shit-show) and explicitly prohibits annoying/misleading consent prompts.
I'm sure it won't be long before that argument goes to court and teams of lawyers spend the next decade arguing over the meaning of the word "annoying". Hence my argument that if we want Facebook to not know everything about us, perhaps we should stop them knowing everything about us?
