zlacker

>>danShu+(OP)
Can Mozilla also respond with their position on their own IPA proposal[1] for tracking users across the Internet?

If you are shown a product ad whilst browsing searchengine.example and then later look up the product at reviews.example, then end up making a purchase at shop.example, your Mozilla browser will send all of these events to one or more aggregation services that allows shop.example to understand (at least in aggregate, assuming you trust the cartels running the aggregation services) that you were exposed to their product at searchengine.example and further exposed to their product at reviews.example.

Where previously an ad tech company was ultimately able to track users based on source IP address (even if cookies had been disabled by a user), IPA now allows these companies to track users across multiple IP addresses, and regardless of the user's cookie settings, via a unique tracking identifier. It is also proposed that the operating system provides the unique tracking identifier which can then be used by all applications or browsers on a device, allowing different devices behind a single IP address to be distinguished.

[1] https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/ipa/

>>dhx+oi
Attribution is necessary for advertising to work at all. If you don't have attribution that is independent of the ad platform you bought ads from, then the ad platform will defraud you[0]. This is separate from ad tracking where you build up interest profiles on users, or ad remarketing where sites can buy ads from people who have visited them in the past[1].

Most of these private attribution systems are specifically designed so that the people running the ad can count how many people clicked their ads, but not who clicked them or what other things they did. Safari had a proposal in which you could only have a certain number of campaigns running per domain, so you couldn't set up a separate """campaign""" for each user and fingerprint them all at once. I don't know how the Mozilla proposal differs.

Whether or not user-agents should care about this sort of thing is an orthogonal question.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/29/google_trueview_skept...

[1] Remarketing in particular is responsible for the "feeling of being seen" from modern ads where you search for one thing and get 10,000 ads for the thing for the next week

>>kmeist+Cm
> Attribution is necessary for advertising to work at all.

Something strange. So, radio advertisement, billboards, video panels, and absolutely any other type of advertisement is a scam that exists for few decades and still going good?

>>deely3+Wm
Those ads existed regardless of observers. The buyer of a billboard can go see that the ad is on the billboard, or that it plays on the radio.

This is quite different than the current design of online ads, where which ad to show is only decided when the ad loads and reloads.

Not that it matters that much - online ads are a total scam anyway. Particularly google's search ads, which 9 times out of 10 is just a copy of the first search result - but now in a version where they get money for the click.

>>arghwh+hz
So it's a conveniently self-imposed "problem", because websites could also just "sell adspace" like a billboard that anyone could confirm was displaying what was paid for. But instead of that, they created a problem of showing ads "dynamically" thereby necessitating the need to track users. Interesting.

>>zo1+PM
How would you, the ad buyer, confirm that the websites are really showing your ads to all, not just to you?

>>warkda+QQ2
By verifying it using public resources?

I agree that it convenient to be able to see each ad information, but that doesn't mean that it should be this way.