this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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Yellow Flag: "Privacy on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population. Advertising on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population…" - Infosec Exchange (infosec.exchange)
submitted 1 year ago by sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al to c/firefox@lemmy.ml
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The founder of AdBlock Plus weighs in on PPA:

Privacy on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population. Advertising on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population.

Yet any attempt to improve this situation is met with fierce resistance by the lucky 10% who know how to navigate their way around the falltraps. Because the internet shouldn’t have tracking! The internet shouldn’t have ads! And any step towards a compromise is a capital offense. I mean, if it slightly benefits the advertisers as well, then it must be evil.

It seems that no solution short of eliminating tracking and advertising on the web altogether is going to be accepted. That we live with an ad-supported web and that fact of life cannot be wished away or change overnight – who cares?

And every attempt to improve the status quo even marginally inevitably fails. So the horribly broken state we have today prevails.

This is so frustrating. I’m just happy I no longer have anything to do with that…

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[–] Vincent 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Right. And the proposed system doesn't allow for that either, as I understand it. Instead, you show ads for baby clothes next to an article about how to burp your baby, and then learn how many people buy baby clothes via that article without knowing anything about the people reading that article.

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

In theory, yes -- it's all aggregated and anonoymized. In practice, it's much more fine-grained than that, and ad companies under scrutiny have shown that their data can be deconvolved back to individual clients

[–] Vincent 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Where did you get that from? That doesn't match at all what I have read. (At least not when it comes to this system - but maybe you're talking about Google's Topics API?)

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Vincent 2 points 1 year ago

That article is about:

Data anonymization is often undertaken in two ways. First, some personal identifiers like our names and social security numbers might be deleted. Second, other categories of personal information might be modified—such as obscuring our bank account numbers.

Neither of those is what PPA does.

Of course, they're right that history has shown that this isn't easy. Hence: