
Mozilla and independent researchers publish guidelines for an ad archive API - BorisYeltsin
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/03/27/facebook-and-google-this-is-what-an-effective-ad-archive-api-looks-like/
======
borntyping
"Just block ads" isn't a useful answer here - this is about being able to see
who is advertising to the people who aren't using ad-blockers (which is most
users on the internet), and being able to do research into who is paying for
advert and who they are targeting. As long as the advertising industry still
has a presence on the internet, this information will be important.

~~~
nickelcitymario
Preach.

It's not about blocking ads. It's about exposing people who would abuse ads.

It's like saying: "The solution to human trafficking is for everyone to stop
having sex. If no one has sex, no one will pay for trafficking."

As an aside: I would not want to live in an advertising-free world, if only
because advertising pays for so much of the shit I would otherwise have to pay
for myself. Online ads have entered into crazy town, so it's good that we're
now exploring ways of reeling that back in. But I genuinely don't know how
enjoyable an ad-free world would be once the revenue generated by those ads
also disappears.

~~~
msla
It's useful to distinguish between advertisements and adtech:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17972297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17972297)

[http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2018/05/12/gdpr/](http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2018/05/12/gdpr/)

> Advertising isn’t personal, and doesn’t have to be. In fact, knowing it’s
> not personal is an advantage for advertisers. Consumers don’t wonder what
> the hell an ad is doing where it is, who put it there, or why.

> Advertising makes brands. Nearly all the brands you know were burned into
> your brain by advertising. In fact the term branding was borrowed by
> advertising from the cattle business. (Specifically by Procter and Gamble in
> the early 1930s.)

> Advertising carries an economic signal. Meaning that it shows a company can
> afford to advertise. Tracking-based advertising can’t do that. (For more on
> this, read Don Marti, starting here.)

> Advertising sponsors media, and those paid by media. All the big pro sports
> salaries are paid by advertising that sponsors game broadcasts. For lack of
> sponsorship, media—especially publishers—are hurting. @WaltMossberg learned
> why on a conference stage when an ad agency guy said the agency’s ads
> wouldn’t sponsor Walt’s new publication, recode. Walt: “I asked him if that
> meant he’d be placing ads on our fledgling site. He said yes, he’d do that
> for a little while. And then, after the cookies he placed on Recode helped
> him to track our desirable audience around the web, his agency would begin
> removing the ads and placing them on cheaper sites our readers also happened
> to visit. In other words, our quality journalism was, to him, nothing more
> than a lead generator for target-rich readers, and would ultimately benefit
> sites that might care less about quality.” With friends like that, who needs
> enemies?

Versus the top four things he says about adtech:

> Adtech is built to undermine the brand value of all the media it uses,
> because it cares about eyeballs more than media, and it causes negative
> associations with brands. Consider this: perhaps a $trillion or more has
> been spent on adtech, and not one brand known to the world has been made by
> it. (Bob Hoffman, aka the Ad Contrarian, is required reading on this.)

> Adtech wants to be personal. That’s why it’s tracking-based. Though its
> enthusiasts call it “interest-based,” “relevant” and other harmless-sounding
> euphemisms, it relies on tracking people. In fact it can’t exist without
> tracking people. (Note: while all adtech is programmatic, not all
> programmatic advertising is adtech. In other words, programmatic advertising
> doesn’t have to be based on tracking people. Same goes for interactive.
> Programmatic and interactive advertising will both survive the adtech
> crash.) Adtech spies on people and violates their privacy. By design. Never
> mind that you and your browser or app are anonymized. The ads are still for
> your eyeballs, and correlations can be made.

> Adtech is full of fraud and a vector for malware. @ACFou is required reading
> on this.

> Adtech incentivizes publications to prioritize “content generation” over
> journalism.

~~~
ozim
I care to disagree deeply on the notion that "Advertising" is somehow much
better than "Adtech".

Note I am not saying "Adtech" is good, there are boundaries.

But notice "it shows a company can afford to advertise", "Advertising makes
brands. Nearly all the brands you know were burned into your brain by
advertising". Which makes winner takes all, and only big players can afford
advertising. Which is bad and second half of 20th century was monopolized by
giants that could afford buying all advertising space there was.

"Adtech" already is disrupting big companies monopolies allowing smaller
players to be seen in the internet because of democratization of costs. But of
course I agree it went wrong, though I don't know how to make it better,
because if you would let people select their preferences it would be too much
hassle and no one would care.

Maybe tracking-based would be OK if I could have all data on my machine and
something like my personal assistant would help me with searching.

------
stirfrykitty
Or, best method is to block all ads, beacons, 3rd party cookies, and trackers.
Keep it simple, just block anything that is not actual content. Everyone knows
online ads are now the major vector for malware online along with bad apps.

Pi-hole, uBlock Origin, Privacy badger, Decentraleyes, Tracking Token
Stripper, Neat URL, and No Coin. Set browser to block all HTTP/S referers,
disable geo, css links history, fingerprinting, and you are well on your way
to never having or seeing an issue. uBlock Origin also kills dead the adblock
blockers.

Editing to say that it was my children's absolute frustration with waiting for
ads in videos that led me to adopt the Pi-hole. Nothing so far has escaped the
event horizon of the Pi-hole. It's great for TVs, too. Everything on the
network benefits from the Pi-hole. Setting up a VPN will allow you to pass
your mobile device through it while away from home.

One of my upcoming projects is to get a DO Droplet, set up the same and have
less "infrastructure" in my house. Benefits remain. Google Cloud also allow
this in the free tier. Why not? There is nothing to lose except annoyance.

~~~
megous
> just block anything that is not actual content

At this point the reverse approach (whitelist) becomes easier. Just pluck out
the content, ignore the rest, and write your own simple UI. Most websites can
be modeled quite easily as category->article(->comment) with some additional
data.

Writing UI for that is quite trivial.

It can be done in browser via extensions/userscripts (without a database), or
you can fetch the data into a database and view it via an electron app, or cli
tools, or whatever.

~~~
dao-
> At this point the reverse approach (whitelist) becomes easier. Just pluck
> out the content, ignore the rest, and write your own simple UI.

This basically exists already. It's called Reader View in Firefox.

~~~
gcb0
which doesn't even work with github readme.md

------
btown
I've taken a liking to the term "the New York Times rule" \- write and act as
if your message, statement, or a detailed account of your actions could be
published at any time on the front page of the New York Times:
[https://businessethicsblog.com/2010/12/08/business-ethics-
an...](https://businessethicsblog.com/2010/12/08/business-ethics-and-the-new-
york-times-rule/) .

The most concerning political advertising thrives in the shadows: it whispers
messages to audiences that are false (easier to counter in the light of day)
or prejudiced (and thus should have consequences to whatever groups post
them). Radical transparency during campaigns may not stop these types of
things, but at the very least it enables a response.

That said, it's worth thinking deeply about the arms race that might ensue -
when every PAC can see every advertisement every other PAC is investing in,
does that make the race into even more of a "whoever has the most money wins"
situation even more than the post-Citizens United dystopia we find ourselves
in now?

~~~
terryschiavo22
It sounds like you're saying, "Act as if Big Brother is always watching".

~~~
pessimizer
Or more explicitly: always act in a way in which people who could hurt you
would like, even when you don't think anybody is watching.

------
kerng
Love Mozillas engagement and spearheading these efforts! To be effective
having guidelines be established via outside counsel is the right way to drive
independent improvements at scale.

------
kyrra
To view this request through a different lens, in what ways could this
information be used maliciously?

The immediate thought that comes to mind for me is a political party during
opposition research on their competitors.

~~~
gambler
_> in what ways could this information be used maliciously?_

Depends on who can get access to it and how. If there are organizations that
get privileged access to such API it will give them knowledge that is easily
translatable into political power. For example, if you know whom your
political opponent targets with ads, but they don't know the same about you,
it wold give you a tremendous edge in a campaign.

Also, it depends on how good this info is protected against data-mining for
undermining someone's privacy.

From the article:

 _" The number of impressions that an ad received within specific geographic
and demographic criteria (e.g. within a political district, in a certain age
range), broken down by paid vs. organic reach."_

I can see this being used to undermine someone's campaign by showing their ads
are reaching "bad" audience. Eventually someone will figure out a way to make
bots to "watch" ads and skew these numbers.

------
amelius
Such an archive could come in handy when training a DL network to recognize
ads and block them.

------
nickelcitymario
Any other copywriters here think this would make for an amazing swipe file?

------
aussieguy1234
This should be put into law, with real penalties for non compliance

------
blfr
There is a famous, in Poland, quote from Stefan Kisielewski about communism:
"Socialism bravely fights problems unknown to any other system." And this
reads exactly like that.

Just block ads.

~~~
dao-
> Just block ads.

The point of the ad archive is to protect society as a whole from bogus
election ads.

Sure, block ads and tell all your friends to do the same. But unless you get
all members of society to block ads, the above problem still exists.

~~~
treis
But mozilla/firefox is actually in a position to block all ads. They just need
to make a browser better than Chrome.

~~~
dao-
Mozilla could block all ads for Firefox users, except that this would be
somewhat insane, see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19563427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19563427)

Mozilla can't block ads for non-Firefox users, nor does it aim for
establishing a Web browser monopoly, so the original problem still exists.

~~~
treis
>Mozilla could block all ads for Firefox users, except that this would be
somewhat insane, see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19563427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19563427)

If Firefox had the 65% market share that Chrome does now no sane website would
block them.

>Mozilla can't block ads for non-Firefox users, nor does it aim for
establishing a Web browser monopoly, so the original problem still exists.

Firefox should be aiming to be the dominant web browser. If they did that
instead of spending their effort dicking around on unrelated projects and
poking Google they could actually solve the problems they complain about.

