
Ad industry threatens Firefox users with more ads if Mozilla moves on tracking - robin_reala
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9237847/Ad_industry_threatens_Firefox_users_with_more_ads_if_Mozilla_moves_on_tracking_plans
======
judofyr
I almost find this a bit cute:

> Without third-party cookies, they will not be able to participate in the
> existing industry system for privacy protection.

Their privacy is still protected, but they can't _participate_ in the privacy
protection _system_! Oh noes!

> They will see an increase in the irrelevant spam advertising served to them

So you're telling me that when you serve ads for "RightWingNews.com,
LiberalOasis.com, MotherhoodWTF.com, and SuburbanDaddy.com [and] thousands of
small businesses" there's no _possible_ way to find relevant ads without
tracking the user?

~~~
mkmkmmmmm
Using Firefox and AdBlock Plus I actually expect I will continue to see
exactly zero irrelevant spam advertising. Still, it's funny to see the mental
gymnastics going on when someone obviously wants to exploit people but does
not want to admit it.

~~~
relix
By running AdBlock, you're the one doing the exploiting. It's no different
than pirating stuff, you don't have the moral high ground here.

~~~
Silhouette
_By running AdBlock, you're the one doing the exploiting._

That's a fair point, to some extent.

 _It's no different than pirating stuff_

Off the top of my head...

Piracy is illegal, while not watching ads isn't.

In general, when something is sold for a price it's normal to pay so you can
buy it, while when ads are displayed in other media there's no expectation
that people must stop and look at them _and the advertiser knew that up-
front_.

Consuming pirated content is a security risk if you do the "wrong" thing,
while displaying on-line ads is a security risk if you do the "right" thing.

~~~
mkmkmmmmm
Actually, I don't think downloading files is illegal, just morally wrong. The
distribution of them is a different matter.

------
Silhouette
_In their blogs, the two groups lambasted Mozilla, predicting dire
consequences, including the shuttering of small businesses and small websites,
fewer choices for online users, and more ads in Firefox._

Or small businesses will have to bring their revenue in by other means, such
as charging real money for valuable content and services, or simply running
ads themselves, targeted at their own viewers' likely interests, without
relying on third party middlemen. Either of those outcomes sucks for the
middlemen, but not so much for anyone else.

Fortunately for the advertisers and the user-as-product platform services,
micropayments are mostly still wishful thinking, so they're not likely to see
this happen on a wide scale in the immediate future. But if they think small
-- or even large -- businesses on the web can only survive by using their ad
networks, sooner or later they're going to get a rude awakening about the
sustainability of their business model.

I imagine there will be some last gasp effort to legislate that people can't
view sites without viewing the ads, shortly before the ad networks finally
retreat into obscurity, but that's so user-hostile that I don't see it gaining
much traction.

In the meantime, the first team who manage to gain traction with a social
network that is totally user-focused and charges a small annual fee for basic
features and a few more small fees for top-ups is probably going to be very
rich. And for the smaller sites, anyone with enough traffic visiting say a
blog to make real money via the ad networks is probably also in a position to
negotiate a direct ad deal and cut out the middleman for better returns.

~~~
mfjordvald
> Either of those outcomes sucks for the middlemen, but not so much for anyone
> else.

It actually also sucks for the businesses themselves, at least in my case. I'd
much rather spend my time creating valuable content for everyone than creating
valuable content for a few who pay me.

Of course there are alternatives I can try, I can keep content free and
solicit donations, I can create various merchandise or I can directly sell
advertising space hosted on my own site. All these options essentially take
time away from creating content in the first place. My fear is that I'll be
too busy trying to make money to make good content. Ad networks at least have
the benefit of a "fire and forget" and having someone manage that whole aspect
of my business, leaving me to work on content.

I totally get the whole point of no tracking, I'm not even really against it.
I'm just trying to point out that it's not _just_ the big business ad networks
that will be affected here.

~~~
Silhouette
I sympathise, because I also run a couple of low-traffic web sites purely to
share information I've found useful or thoughts that might help others. Then
again, I never expected to make any money from those sites, and I don't run
ads on them either.

Whatever we might ideally like as site creators, I think the reality is that
small-scale, targeted-ad funding for web sites, where we create something like
a personal blog or a site with some articles and then slap something like
Google Ads on them to cover the hosting costs, isn't going to be a sustainable
model.

Instead, I think sites like that are either going to be done for love (as they
always used to be), or done for profit (and run as a business, including
marketing and advertising arrangements or some other revenue stream), or
perhaps hosted on some sort of aggregator site that does have critical mass to
run a cost-effective ad program even if its individual contributors wouldn't
(which might be a business, or might simply be a bunch of like-minded
individuals clubbing together to split their hosting costs).

There might even be some sort of positive cultural shift over time, where
people stop wanting everything for free and start to realise that you get what
you pay for and good sites are worth supporting. I don't expect that many
people are going to actively donate to sites any time soon, but then you only
need a few who do to pay an annual hosting bill for a low traffic personal
site.

So while I do see your point and understand your concern, I don't think we're
talking about the fall of the Internet here. Little guys like you and me will
keep our sites running one way or another and still spend our time on content
we think is worthwhile.

------
h2s

        > They'll see untargeted ads, which will look like spam
    

That's your loss, not mine, asshole.

~~~
skore
A thousand times this. "Oh no! Somebody else will stop doing our job for us,
the horror!".

Go die in a thousand fucking fires, people working in
advertising/marketing[0].

[0] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo>

(edit: Jeez, hyperbole detectors seem to have a calibration problem today.)

~~~
thomholwerda
Wishing people to death really isn't cool. How would you feel if random people
on the web told you they wanted you or your family to die?

Disagrement - okay - but calling for people to be killed - not okay,
especially not over over something as utterly inconsequential as _ads on a
damn website_. Remember that you just committed a very serious criminal
offense with your post. I'm not sure how this reflects on the compony you work
for as per your profile.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Threats like “I'm going to find you and strangle you in your sleep” or “I'm
going to set your house on fire” are criminal offenses. Voicing a wish for
someone to die in a fire isn't (unless there's a discriminatory nature to the
threat). In this case, it wasn't targeted at one person but at a hard to
define group.

Utterly tasteless? Sure. Illegal? Nah.

NB: Since you're Dutch, this site is relevant and shocking:
<http://www.doodsbedreiging.nl/>

------
jcr

      > "The Internet was created on the foundations of advertising," said Jaffe.
    

This Jaffe character is factually wrong in most of his statements, but
claiming the above is wrong to the degree of at least blatantly ignorant, or
more likely to the degree of willfully and maliciously misleading.

~~~
Jgrubb
Well sure, if you're going to take it literally, the foundation of the
internet has more to do with software and Linux and TCP than advertising.

The fact is though, and I'm surprised to find that I must be the only HN
regular who finds himself working in the world of marketing and advertising,
that a hell of a lot of the internet and _people working on making it better_
, not just worse, is paid for by advertising money.

The vitriol that's on display from everybody on this thread is, in a big way,
as myopic and ignorant and full of self-righteousness as the guy they're
calling names (who I agree is all of the above, yes).

~~~
johnsoft
"Some sites nowadays depend on advertising as a revenue stream," is a far cry
from "The Internet was created on the foundations of advertising." Reading
through <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet>, if I had to
guess what motivated the people who worked on those early networks, I would
say it had more to do with the potential to advance humanity with accessible,
near-instant communication than it did the ability to serve ads to people. Ads
were not on anyone's mind when they first saw text appear in real-time from
thousands of miles away. Ads were just a single application for the new
technology, and they came about much later.

------
sneak
The intense pushback from the ad industry is testament to the fact that
they're on the right track for user privacy.

Carry on, Mozilla!

~~~
gargoiler
That's extremely naive. You can track people perfectly well without using
cookies.

~~~
jeltz
He said that they are on the right track. Not that this will be the only
change needed to protect the privacy of the users.

~~~
gargoiler
Yes but it's a game you can't win.

~~~
gordaco
More than a game, it's an arms race. Both us and the privacy invaders have to
make moves, even if the race won't stop. Surely, they'll come up with
something else. Something else that we'll have to counter, and so on.

------
tinco
"The facts are that [Firefox users] will get more ads, not less, and those ads
will not be tailored to their interests," he said. "They'll see untargeted
ads, which will look like spam.""

If this is truly the case then Firefox users will notice and either turn the
third party cookies back on or complain/switch to chrome. If the effect is
that big, and people want to see the targeted ads, what do the ad networks
stand to lose?

Firefox is making a right move, there is now a distinctive conscious choice
you can make: Firefox, privacy by default. Chrome and IE can never counter
that (because of their affiliations with ad networks). Maybe its not the
biggest reason to use a browser, but it's a big one and it enforces Firefox's
position in the market.

~~~
Jgrubb
_what do the ad networks stand to lose?_

It's less about the actual ad networks. It's more that the sites who display
ads that are better targeted and have a higher click through rate can charge
more money for them and run fewer of those specific ads as a consequence.
Businesses that are able to better target ads at people who might actually be
in the market based on recent browsing behavior can spend their advertising
money on reaching a higher quality audience. The alternative is that you get a
spray of all kinds of ads that have no relevance.

------
EwanToo
You can enable this in Firefox today, by going to about:config

and setting the network.cookie.cookieBehavior value to 1 (0 is the default)

You can also try setting network.cookie.thirdparty.sessionOnly to 1 to allow
third party cookies during the session, but then delete them afterwards

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Cookies_Preferences_in...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Cookies_Preferences_in_Mozilla)

~~~
huhtenberg
Also, consider setting

    
    
      network.http.sendRefererHeader 1
    

as per discussion from yesterday on cross-domain referrer headers. See [0] for
details.

[0] <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.sendRefererHeader>

------
lucb1e
Safari is already doing the same for years.

This kind of privacy improvements actually make me want to donate to Mozilla
to continue their efforts.

~~~
lucaspiller
++ Chrome will just do whatever is good for Google (and hence other
advertisers) unless they get pressured to do anything different. I'm glad to
see Mozilla taking the user's side on this.

~~~
efdee
I could be wrong, but hasn't this been an option in Chrome Preferences for
ages?

~~~
joosters
Chrome eventually added the option to block 3rd party cookies, but it
certainly wasn't there to begin with.

I don't think the option is there on their mobile browsers either - it didn't
exist on Android when I last looked, and definitely wasn't there on iOS
either.

~~~
Zirro
Safari on iOS (and the desktop) blocks third-party cookies by default.

------
kislayverma
Bigoted idiots. This rant is surprisingly similar to press release before
every western invasion of a country - freedom, threat to 'small' consumers
etc.

"we will lose the opportunity to monitor and protect our privacy" Really
now!!! So my privacy is best served by sharing all my data? This is so
Orwellian. Noam Chomsky should have something to say on this :)

------
arethuza
I've only recently installed AdBlock as, although I know advertising revenue
is important to some of the small sites I use, I've been a bit perturbed as to
how _creepy_ a lot of online advertising has become. I spend a few minutes
thinking about buying something (e.g. an electric raclette coooker) and for
weeks I am pestered on loads of different websites about them - which I find
_really_ annoying.

------
wkearney99
There's an old saying that goes "Don't piss on me and tell me it's raining."
that seems applicable here. The ad industry is crying foul that a browser
comes with it's own umbrella against their torrent of waste.

------
shawabawa3
> we will lose the opportunity to monitor and protect our privacy

How exactly will blocking 3rd party cookies stop us protecting our privacy?

I could understand if they said something like "it will stop targeted ads",
but that is just clearly bullshit

~~~
thexa4
Because they;ll switch to different methods of tracking. For example, you can
be tracked almost uniquely by the plugins you currently have installed. It's
harder to mask that than to remove a tracking cookie.

~~~
Nursie
So we stop giving away information like that too?

I'm still really not sure why my requesting information from a web server
should leak any information about me beyond an IP address.

------
DanBC
When I listen to advertisers talk I realise that I understand the individual
words, but all strung together they mean something different, and reality
starts to slide away until I'm through the looking glass in a weird world
where "We want to show you our ads" is the same as "Why don't you want to see
our brilliant content? People love those shouting smileys and buzzing
mosquitoes!"

Me saying "Really, I only leave ads on to give a smidgen of money to the
content provider; I'd much rather make micro-payments direct" is interpreted
as me being an obscure hard-line communist.

I genuinely feel lost when listening to advertisers

------
arocks
> This is damaging to consumer interest and will undermine the Internet.

If that is the case, then people will eventually stop using Firefox and sites
will continue to put annoying popups that confusingly say 'We use cookies, do
you agree?"

However I doubt that is what users would prefer. I think they would prefer
less privacy invading advertisements and more contextually relevant ones.

------
brador
Am I the only person who actually likes relevant ads? I like finding new
things I didn't know existed to buy...

~~~
awjr
That's fine until you go to a site looking to buy something for your daughter.
Suddenly the rest of my day's browsing is polluted by pink ponies.

~~~
skore
Or just check out some weird novelty item on Amazon out of curiosity. Then you
also get emails about it for the rest of your life.

------
fear91
"; we will lose the opportunity to monitor and protect our privacy; "

I laughed so hard at this one.

Great move by the Firefox team. It made me donate for their cause.

------
tokenizer
This seems like a typical response. I'm curious if Mozilla will cave or
continue.

While I like the idea of restricting third party cookies, I can understand the
advertising businesses argument. They need to know what you want, so you can
click on the ad, thereby providing a small amount of revenue to both website
and advertiser.

~~~
richardwhiuk
As the article notes, Apple's Safari browser has done this since launch, and
is the most popular browser on mobile. There isn't a convincing argument
that's going to cause Mozilla to cave here. This isn't a bold new move - it's
Mozilla following Apple's lead, given that Microsoft has caused DNT to go into
a death spiral.

I'm not sure why Mozilla would care about any business arrangement between
some websites and advertisers.

------
qompiler
Firefox should enable AdBlock plus by default in the next update.

~~~
scrrr
And that would probably increase their market share..

------
tpetrina
This is a battle they (advertisers) simply can't win. If they increase the
number of ads for Firefox users, Firefox installation might suggest ad-
blocking software to users. If we have a "browser choice screen" as a
punishment for Microsofts abuse of monopoly, who can deny adding the same
"choice" screen for ad-blocking software to a major browser?

After all, public should be educated about ads.

------
p6v53as
We will soon have these ad networks to enforce us with laws that prohibit
adblocks all together by calling the act of blocking ad as "piracy" and
"theft" since we are not "paying" for the content provided. We can't let that
happen, these networks must be put down as fast as possible till while they
can't influence the government. Oh, wait, it's too late...

------
obsession
I wonder if the move to create Google Chrome was a due to a concern that
Firefox would disturb Google's ad-serving business some day.

------
hackernewbie
This should shove the internet into a more sophisticated mode of advertising
(if more clandestine in many ways, shills ahoy). It's unprecendentedly
pathetic to see companies worrying about their outmoded methods and hegemony
on content choice. Imagine when content choice is purely based on relevance
and recommendation (and shills).

------
Kiro
I've said it before but in my opinion retargetting is a win-win-win situation
for advertisers, publishers and visitors. Being retargetted has improved my
online experience a lot since I only get ads I actually care about.

------
Nursie
_"The facts are that [Firefox users] will get more ads, not less, and those
ads will not be tailored to their interests" he said. "They'll see untargeted
ads..."_

OH THE HORROR!

------
ginko
Firefox should include an ad blocker by default, then.

------
moron4hire
Lies. It's just all lies.

------
monsterix
Good riddance ANA/IAB.

Better sense would have prevailed if you'd asked the choice been given to
Firefox users to allow third party cookies if they wanted it.But no, you'd
rather lash out on Mozilla. Good job - the two of you ad presidents! :)

------
af3
Just to make sure, in Chrome this option could be enabled in Preferences?

~~~
sirn
It's a different feature.

The gist of this new behavior is a change from Allow All Cookies to Allow
Cookies Only From Visited Domains. This is unlike Block All Third-Party
Cookies option that existed in both Firefox and Chrome in the way that third
party cookie is still accepted _but_ only if user ever visited that "third-
party" website before.

The behavior may be less strict than Block All Third-Party Cookies option and
probably won't make much difference for Facebook or Google's tracking cookies
(if you use them). But being the new default option means smaller players
going to take a direct hit. Which is good.

