The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Jul 28, 2020 15:54 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
In reply to: The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track by nix
Parent article: The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Your objections seem a bit contrived. Adding another party to the auction system would drive prices up, not down. It's pretty obvious that most people don't want ads, and we already have plenty of evidence that they are often willing to pay to avoid them ("pay to remove ads" is a popular option in various mobile apps), but they are sometimes willing to put up with them in order to fund sites or apps that they care about when no other convenient method is available. The auction operator has no reason to care whether any ads are actually shown; they get paid the same either way.

As for jacking up the prices with fake bids, they're welcome to try. The user's agent wouldn't be configured to always place the highest bid at any cost. The user would set a threshold based on how many ads they're willing to see. If an advertiser's bid is excessively high then it would just let them win. At that point they can either pay up or take a penalty for cancelling after winning the bid (in which case no ad is shown and the user still effectively gets what they wanted).

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Sep 14, 2020 15:20 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

It's pretty obvious that most people don't want ads

Don't ignore the power of self-delusion when your paycheque depends on it. I know several people who work in adtech and a couple who work in old adland, and all of them are insistent that I am a freakish exception and that everyone really, really loves ads and everyone loves pervasive tracking and it's not creepy at all. (One of them actually watches ads in his spare time because he thinks they're an art form in their own right.)

I've pointed out that this is sort of disproved by the soaring popularity of adblockers, but nooo the problem there is that the messaging is wrong: people who use adblockers have all been lied to by evil people who point at the occasional rare bad apple like malware being delivered in ad networks, and if they can only find the right 'message' (i.e., countervailing lie) everyone will love ads again: sure they slow down your web browser, but in return you are gifted all these wonderful ads! Everyone loved ads in the high days of TV, you could tell by the way there were ads on TV: since the market is always right, that is proof enough!

(The existence of the ad-free BBC apparently does not constitute any sort of disproof, since it's government-funded. You'd think this would mean that it had a closer tie to the people the market is sampling the true opinions of, but apparently letting the people actually have input rather than leaving it up to the mythical superpowers of the all-wise market is axiomatically bad. Odd that.)

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Sep 14, 2020 21:10 UTC (Mon) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Bill Hicks Was Right.