
Hey advertisers, track this - dantondwa
https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/hey-advertisers-track-this/
======
zulgan
Not paying for content (small games, blogs, vlogs, journalism, code, etc..) in
the last 20 years, is now one of my biggest regrets. I remember back then I
even had a small addon that was constantly showing me ads and I was getting
money for doing nothing, I thought it was nothing.

Now we have to suffer fake content, incredibly well researched click-baits,
short term conversion optimized (good trailer, bad content) media and of
course tracking to incredible extend. Every single machine learning algorithm
trying to push us to more extreme world views so we stay on the platform to
consume more contend and see more ads.

Every time my young daughter is watching youtube, I can see how what it is
recommending and how easy it is to manipulate her. Few weeks ago it hit me,
that I sold her mind, because I did not pay, and now everything is beyond
repair.

PS: I just finished listening a great reading of 1984
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8))
and am in very dark place. /

~~~
anc84
We suffer that garbage not because people like you and me did not think of
_money_ as reward for other people's projects but because of advertising,
tracking and click counts.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with publishing things for free, doing
things for free and consuming things for free. The best content on the web is
done by people from their own interest in sharing. Personal contacts, exchange
of information, feedback and community are so much more worth than money when
it comes to motivating the production of _good_ things.

~~~
XorNot
Also paying for things has a low success rate in reducing advertising - a
customer who will pay for something is a good target to advertise more too.

~~~
asdff
Paywalls are a great alternative to intrusive ads for a larger publisher. NYT
has been doing very well the last couple of years on their digital
subscription model.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/business/media/new-
york-t...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/business/media/new-york-times-
earnings-subscribers.html)

~~~
runako
Your point _may_ be valid, but the NYT is a poor example of paywalls as an
alternative to intrusive ads.

I'm a paying subscriber to the NYT. When I open their homepage now, the page
is split horizontally with an ad taking up about 40%-50% of the entire screen.
The "The New York Times" header is about halfway down the page, and the first
actual content probably starts at 85% or even below that.

Anecdotally, the NYT runs even more intrusive ads than this to paid
subscribers. Off the top of my head, I would say their modal popup video ad is
the worst.

~~~
inapis
For the past few days I’ve also been unable to read articles on the NYT app
without the page jumping around to load ads as I scroll. And I’m a subscriber
to boot. I’ve a Pihole on the network and it still isn’t a tolerable
experience.

------
neilv
`[https://trackthis.link/`](https://trackthis.link/`) requests
`[https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js`](https://www.google-
analytics.com/analytics.js`) on page load.

Which, besides being a bad idea for privacy on any site, makes much of this
particular site's ostensible purpose even easier to defeat.

~~~
throwaway9d0291
See
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14)

Mozilla has a contract which prohibits Google from using data from Mozilla
websites for the things people usually object to.

~~~
t0astbread
What incentive did Google have to agree to such a contract?

~~~
ubercow13
Maybe they knew it would undermine any anti-Google privacy stance Mozilla
would later take when people noticed GA's inclusion in various Mozilla pages

------
navaati
On a sad note, I couldn't stop myself thinking "this «doomsday» profile may be
a bit dangerous to run, it could get you on some nasty lists" and wouldn't
dare to run it. Shows how bad the chilling effect has become…

~~~
dannyw
So what if you're on a list?

I ran a Tor exit node on my home static IP for years. No dramas.

~~~
kzzzznot
Anecdotal

~~~
Cthulhu_
Yup; the grandparent is likely on a List already for being involved in child
pornograpy and such (inadvertently, but you know that's a big part of what TOR
is used for).

~~~
r3bl
> but you know that's a big part of what TOR is used for

Citation needed please.

That's the juicier stuff that makes its way into the news. "A person living
under an oppressive government evading censorship" will never be as juicy to
write about as "murderers for hire on the dark web". That says absolutely
nothing about the actual usage of Tor, so I'd like to see you back up that
"big part" part.

~~~
Anarch157a
This is the media doing their job. You don't listen on news about how a great
chef used her knife to slice a piece of meat, but you do when someone uses one
to slice another person. We need to be aware of misuses of tools in other to
weed out bad actors, leaving the legitimate uses in place.

~~~
r3bl
I agree, I just disagree with the generalization based off of those news. Tor
is a tool and as such can be used for both good and bad.

It bothers me when people draw badly considered conclusions from them, such as
claiming that "most" or a "big part" of Tor is dedicated to illegal
activities. The percentage is probably greater than on the "normal" web, but I
object to the stronger claims than that.

------
inanutshellus
I suspect the comments here are largely missing the point.

IMHO, Mozilla isn't offering "Track THIS" as a solution to being tracked,
instead it's a demo of how tailored one's ads are, so one will be offended
enough to turn off 3rd party cookies.

~~~
apetresc
I think it may backfire. In my opinion, the dangers of "tracking" and
"customization" are dramatically overblown and I suspect the average user has
a much more sinister idea of what it all means than the reality.

Some people are going to try this demo and realize "Huh, so 'surveillance
capitalism' really just means that I see better ads?"

Most non-technical people have this dystopian illusion when they hear about
all of Facebook/Google/Amazon's fabled super-advanced-magic-tracking that
there's either a human or a near-sentient robot listening in to every facet of
their lives and forming a judgmental, human opinion of them as a person. Once
they realize this shit is so basic that opening up a few browser tabs of stuff
you don't actually like is enough to trick it, I think their apathy will
increase, not decrease.

~~~
danShumway
Anecdotally, I had to explain to a family member recently how they got Twitter
ads for an event they dropped a friend off at, even though they didn't
personally search for or attend the event. They were confused by how this
happened, and they knew I was the weird privacy person in the family to ask.

They proposed the simple, obvious solution: "Twitter is listening to my
microphone."

I countered with, "No, Twitter knows you're friends with this person, and
because they have access to both of your location data, they know you were
visiting this person at the same time that they searched for and went to this
event."

My family member said that my explanation didn't make them feel any better, at
all, and then deleted Twitter off of their phone.

I don't know if that person is typical or not, but I will say that when you
see something yourself it can sometimes make you feel more vulnerable and
disturbed than when you hear about it second hand. Tracking is so ubiquitous
that there's kind of an abstract, "but really it's not so bad" quality to it.
People joke about the super-advanced-magic-tracking, but they don't really
believe it on an emotional level. Or they believe it's super competent and
dehumanized and subtle.

I think projects like this have the _potential_ to maybe make it feel more
tangible. Hyper-advanced systems feel more theoretical and less dangerous
than, "hey, I'm literally just watching you browse the web." In my (again
anecdotal) experience, magical systems are dismissable, but people get worked
up over, "somebody's looking in my window."

~~~
alteria
There's a whole Reply All podcast episode where one of the hosts tried
convincing listeners that Facebook wasn't listening to their microphones.

It goes to show that people aren't too aware of just how much data
Facebook/tech has about them, and occasionally that data can make extremely
accurate predictions.

[https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-
all/z3hlwr/](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/z3hlwr/)

------
amelius
Seems a bit like the AdNauseam project, except more refined because it allows
the user to select a profile.

[https://adnauseam.io/](https://adnauseam.io/)

------
no1youknowz
There are companies such as Forensiq [0] and a few others I can't quite recall
now that work to fight ad fraud.

[0]: [https://impact.com/ad-fraud-detection/](https://impact.com/ad-fraud-
detection/)

Believe me, there are many players in this space that work tirelessly to
compromise mobiles and try to emulate real users to earn profits on PPC
campaigns.

So honestly, this is just a waste of time. Whatever patterns these guys come
up with. It'll be defeated by those to fight the real bad guys.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
Well that's rather defeatist. Its also not correct.

I've done a lot of work in data linking, which I consider basically the same
thing, albeit not with advertising or ad fraud as the necessary subject
matter.

Now while its true that a lot of the things people do to lessen their
fingerprint/signal is often not effective, its simply not true that such
things are always a priori defeatable.

Theoretically, you have to do some combination of plugging the leaks,
increasing the noise, or dropping the signal. And if you do that then signal
becomes harder and harder to extract.

And its not even black and white like total win/lose. You could stop
advertisers from finding out certain things, or change the relative value/cost
of what's possible/profitable, or the degree of accuracy with which they can
state certain things.

Indeed, for instance, if you can get regular people's actions and behaviours
to look more and more like these bots or fraudsters, that likely lessens the
effectiveness of their machine learning techniques...

------
navaati
THIS is the Mozilla I like ! Impertinent, guerilla, middle finger giving !

~~~
qrbLPHiKpiux
Linus Torvalds: “Nvidia, Fuck You!”

Just like this!

------
Uplink
I never understood why advertisers insist on giving me "relevant" ads. I find
it better if the ads are diverse and all over the place, as I discover new
things. The "relevant" ads are usually about stuff I just bought, so useless
to me.

I find this site insightful in terms of discovering new things. It could be
made into some sort of tumbler for ads. :)

~~~
bluGill
Because there are people who buy more than one of something.

Buy a widget - you might be purchasing for a company and will buy a the same
widget next month for the next employee. If you advertise your widget to
everybody 99.999% won't buy it, so that 99.9% that won't buy another widget is
a much larger margin of those who will buy another. (the ad is about either
keeping you a loyal customer or getting to to switch to a different brand).
Most of us are more valuable as a possibly purchaser of more than one than as
a potential customer of something new we didn't even know we needed.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
I read a related claim about this. People that just bought an, e.g.
refrigerator, are much more likely than others to buy a second one soon as
they're more likely to _need_ a new refrigerator and even the small chance
that the one they just bought doesn't work or isn't satisfactory means there's
a much greater chance they'll need or want to buy a second one than that other
people will want to buy one.

I could imagine buying a mattress would be an even better example.

------
myfonj
It would be nice to see what sites it is going to open. And maybe worth
mentioning you can use Container Tab (or maybe even anonymous window) to
test/verify this without compromising your real fondly crafted advertising
profile.

------
neilv
Since before Netscape originally jumpstarted the Web user tracking and
profiling surveillance industry, we already knew that one of the big
categories of risk of such databases is being penalized for inaccurate
information (and being unable to correct it, or even know it's there).

Think twice before you take a poo in your own profiles.

If you want to poison your profile _without it backfiring on you_ , you might
want to wait until pretty much all profiles are poisoned simultaneously.

~~~
raxxorrax
What can they do, display the wrong products? Oh, the horror...

I would certainly like to poison my profile. Preferably with all the kinky
stuff.

~~~
neilv
The pervasive intimate surveillance is a grave matter. These profiles do and
will affect you in many more ways. "Tt's about showing you ads that are
relevant" has been an industry PR lie for a long time.

~~~
raxxorrax
I agree that it is a grave matter which many people take far too lightly. But
I also refuse to be scared by some junkie advertisers. And currently we at
least are still talking about mainly pseudo-anonymous profiles. Filling this
data with wrong info takes away most of the value.

------
petercooper
_" WARNING! THIS WILL OPEN 100+ TABS IN YOUR BROWSER. BE PREPARED!"_

I'm on a full fat iMac Pro and that's still going to be a big fat "nope" from
me :-D

~~~
braythwayt
See, if you had the new monitor stand, it would be engineered to handle the
weight of a hundred tabs on screen. People don’t think about these power user
use cases when they pooh-pooh Apple’s hardware.

/ducks

~~~
petercooper
Ha! It's not even the hardware I'm worried about. It's Chrome ;-)

~~~
yetihehe
That's why they use anodized aluminum!

------
micpalmia
While this looks and feels fun, I also felt so bad - it's such a huge waste of
energy, computing resources and bandwith.

~~~
orcdork
One could say the same for the ads industry.

~~~
kodz4
The ad industry has a higher stake. What they do pays their
mortgages/medical/college bills.

When you fight someone who has more to loose, it usually is a waste of energy.
If you want them to change you have to reduce the stakes for them.

~~~
solarkraft
> If you want them to change you have to reduce the stakes for them.

Why? It just has to become unprofitable for them to look for something else.
They will adjust their stakes accordingly (are you proposing getting them a
different source of income? wouldn't someone greedy just accept both?).

------
seba_dos1
"Track THIS will open A LOT of tabs. 100 tabs is a lot."

Hah, funny. Maybe on Chromium, where it would already go into swapping hell on
my 8GB RAM. However, on Firefox this is rather low - I'm on ~150 right now and
that's just because I have cleaned all open tabs a few days ago (it was above
1000 before).

~~~
lunchables
How do you use 1,000 tabs?

~~~
seba_dos1
With tabs on the side. Some of them are clearly forgotten, waiting for the
next whole-window-cleanup, but there are groups of tabs I revisit.

Some people organize their tabs into trees; there was also "panorama" feature
in the past; however, for me it seems like a scrollbar (with a filtering
search bar) is enough.

Also, the awesomebar itself has excellent support for switching between open
tabs.

~~~
lunchables
I use Tree Style Tab in firefox, I still just can't imagine how 1,000 tabs is
usable. How do you organize it? How do you find anything? Why not just google
search for it again?

~~~
seba_dos1
Do I have to? Most of the time they're invisible behind the scrollbar. When I
need something not visible, it shows up in search.

Sometimes I only have a vague recollection of what I want to revisit - then
just figuring out something that was near it is enough, as after searching and
activating some related tab its whole surroundings are now in view again.

------
TheGrumpyBrit
I wonder how many of those tabs are affiliate links?

~~~
user17843
I looked at the source code and indeed they put referrer IDs to the amazon
links. It's even a dedicated ID for each link, to see the number of purchases
for each link. So mozilla is taking part in the tracking.

~~~
dewey
Do you know it's their IDs and not some of the Amazon Smile charities?

~~~
user17843
the smile links look different, burt I am not entirely sure about the referrer
IDs.

They look like:

\- fsclp_pl_dp_12

\- fsclp_pl_dp_11

with each link having a distinct number, counting down to 1.

It doesn't look like a typical referrer ID, so it is probably something that
Amazon generates, although I don't know under what condition.

------
nerdponx
I don't think this does what you think it does.

This confuses the algorithms temporarily into thinking that your tastes have
changed.

They still know who you are. Your devices and browsers are fingerprinted. Your
home network is in a database. Your mobile carrier is selling your location
data. Your IP address doesn't change that often. Etc.

Plus, you know there are already multiple teams tasked with filtering out
"fake clicks". They probably are already doing it, assuming that multiple
users are sharing a machine or something like that.

------
user17843
I think it would be more constructive it Firefox would include a better
visualization of the extend of web tracking.

Mozilla had already tried something like this with an extension, it's called
"Firefox Lightbeam".

With the next Firefox version, statistics about the number of trackers blocked
will be included in Firefox, and I think a better version of Lightbeam (more
lightweight, visually showing the difference between tracking protection
on/off and excluding subdomains) should be included as well.

------
t0astbread
Couldn't a burst of unusual activity like this be easily detected? Then again,
advertisers probably don't go the extra mile to cover the 1% that's using this
tool...

~~~
c0vfefe
More like 0.00001%.

------
blablabla123
Of course this works but won't solve the root cause and won't be applicable to
the real world in which tracking also becomes more present. For the time being
an ad blocker seems more useful, also I'd be happy to still use certain
features of my browser like the history function. ;)

Also I think there is anyway a trend towards less ads. Those who push out most
ads - probably online magazines - are changing more to paid subscriptions.

------
pavel_lishin
> _This will show you ads for products you might not be interested in at all_

You can just say, "your regular browsing experience won't be impacted."

------
omeid2
Please let us know what links you're going to open.

------
atulvi
I feel by doing this, ad makers will create more aggressive tactics to
fingerprint users

~~~
peteradio
Yes yes, best not to fight back, they say the struggle will only make things
worse.

------
delibes
LOL, ran it in private window. We have a single outward facing office IP
address, and a few tabs were for things like bras and lingerie, so I'm now
waiting to see if it affected others on the office network!

~~~
user17843
IP tracking is fairly uncommon, no?

~~~
gloflo
Nope, widespread. Try looking at the YouTube frontpage when in a foreign
WiFi...

~~~
r1ch
While tracking is uncommon, using it for language / geolocation is not.

------
wedn3sday
The problem with this is that I picked the "Prepper" profile, and then it just
opened a bunch of pages with cool outdoor gear that I kind of wanted. Upside
hopefully now I get ads for REI I guess?

------
hatsunearu
I like the hypebeast guy wearing a "Superior" t-shirt.

~~~
Fnoord
Actually I'd buy a t-shirt with this URL (or a QR code for the URL) in a
heartbeat. Subversive t-shirts are a way to take your part in trying to change
the world for the better.

~~~
ohithereyou
Nothing says 'fuck capitalism' like buying a shirt from a company who uses
sweatshop child labor in a third world country to spew out product so bad that
it will end up in a landfill in six months.

------
m463
I would like to block Canvas Extraction, but it seems to allow it on every
website I visit, and I have to click on the icon in the address bar and turn
it off.. late.

------
miguelmota
Is it broken? I tried it out and it only opened up 2 tabs to random news
articles..

EDIT: nevermind, you have to go back and visit the Track This tab to have it
open up more tabs.

------
dgemm
Is there a simple solution to automatically clear cookies when a tab is
closed, similar to closing a private mode browser?

~~~
fistikcisahap
The closest thing I know is Firefox Focus, but I think it's mobile only.

------
reustle
I'm really afraid to click one of those links on mobile. Does it just spawn
100 new tabs?

~~~
treerock
it says: "It looks like you're visiting Track This on your phone. Please use
Desktop to activate your persona. Trust us, you don't really want to open 100
tabs on from your phone in any case."

~~~
mclehman
Where's the fun in having the number of open tabs visible instead of just
':D'? I honestly can't remember the last time that was the case on my phone.

~~~
floatingatoll
I smiled the first time I saw it.

------
bradezone
Mozilla is on fire lately, this is Trump level trolling & I love it

