Privacy Badger is a free browser extension made by EFF to stop spying
privacybadger.org836 points by doener 4 days ago
836 points by doener 4 days ago
Privacy Badger doesn’t block ads unless they happen to be tracking you; in fact, one of our goals is to incentivize advertisers to adopt better privacy practices.
There is an easy solution to this --- it is called "context sensitive" advertising. And the idea is simple --- ads are prioritized based on what you're currently viewing, not your viewing history (aka "personalized ads").
What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant. Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already --- so why am I seeing auto ads when I search for pet supplies?. But if I'm currently looking at an auto dealers web site, the odds are pretty good that I'm still interested in buying one.
What's wrong with advertisers? Without any real proof, they have bought into this vision of advertising that is illogical, ineffective and simply not true in many cases --- the idea that personal browsing history is a good indicator of the future.
In the process, they have surrendered their ad budgets to a "black box" process that they have no insight into or control over and can be easily manipulated against them.
So why do I care? Because we *all* pay a price for this.
I don't think people understand the price we pay for these ads. Companies _generally_ are going to operate so they don't lose money. In an industry I am familiar with, I booked someone to clean my home. The total cost was somewhere around $350, about 125 of that went to the actual person cleaning the house. The rest went to a combination of google for the ad and the company I booked through. This industry generally has a 35% marketing expense (sometimes way more) so somewhere around $75 of what I paid to get my house cleaned went to Google. How much better of a job could have been done if the cleaner got a 60% raise? How much better would the local economy be if all of that money stayed local?
you can solve this by direct action. when your cleaner arrives, explain you'd like to make a direct arrangement next time, and ask for their phone number.
no app can patch this 'analog hole' of the gig industry.
That might work for cleaners, but not for rideshare, food delivery and vacation rentals, which probably account for the vast majority of the "gig economy".
For vacation rentals, I have had the owner give me their card afterwards.
For food delivery (at least takeout) and ride share, the app actually provides a real value; it handles matching drivers and customers who want to make a deal now, for a service that is not really super differentiated. It makes sense to stay in their ecosystem and it seems fair that they would be continuing to make a profit.
> For food delivery (at least takeout) and ride share, the app actually provides a real value
The problem with a food delivery network is that it should be a dumb network, not a big profit center. It should be like an ISP, with the food being the high value packets being delivered to you.
If you look at pre-UberEats times, each restaurant employed a couple of delivery drivers on scooters. Some might have shared those if the restaurants were on the same street, but that's about it.
During low times these drivers would laze around doing nothing, effectively wasting productivity, whereas during peak times, the restaurant didn't have enough drivers.
Having one delivery driver network for an entire city should have made things more efficient and cheaper. But because for example in Europe, JustEat-TakeAway and UberEats have inserted themselves as the middleman and crushed out all competition. Delivery has gotten more expensive and inconvenient because of it.
These days delivery costs €3-5 and there is a €15 delivery minimum. Before, no delivery charge and there was no official minimum. One time one of my friends order a 6-pack of cola, although I doubt they would have delivered that to the edge of the city.
Worst of it is, restaurants are not allowed to charge lower prices themselves than they offer on the app. On top of that, JustEat-TakeAway will make a branded store site on restaurantname.localdeliverycompany.com, of which they get a cut versus if you used the restaurant's own site.
If delivery is more expensive, more inconvenient and often slower now than before 2015, what 'real value' was added?
In the US, delivery was pretty spotty in the pre-app days (pizza places tended to have it almost always, other restaurants were case-by-case). The idea of more community organized joint delivery services is really interesting, it just didn’t exist anywhere I lived in the pre-app-days (maybe it was a thing in major cities, that wouldn’t surprise me).
I wonder why the apps out-competed it. Delivery apps are often not even supported officially by the restaurants, right? It’s just sort of like—if somebody comes in for the pickup and gives the right name, they don’t typically care and will just give the delivery guy your order. So it isn’t like some vendor lock-in thing, seems just like network effect from the users or something…
Because it decouples the restaurant from controlling the means of purchase and delivery and thereby creating a market on top of the restaurant.
You order on Uber Eats, Toast, Seamless, and they set the prices pushing them up.
It’s a completely parasitic market and if a restaurant does not participate it’s squeezed out due to not being able to compete with online ordering.
You notice how you can’t just order from xyzpizza.com and choose 1-7 vendors to deliver the pizza? They should class actioned into the depth of hell.
Imagine going to Nike.com, but Nike has to sell on the usp website at the ups price because they deliver the last mile package…
>Imagine going to Nike.com, but Nike has to sell on the usp website at the ups price because they deliver the last mile package…
That's basically how retailing worked before direct-to-consumer? Even with Nike you can get their goods through a variety of distribution channels.
Sure because you had to distribute sales and place product. You shifted marketing off to the retail location and distributor and you still controlled the price / mark up.
Pizza is already sold, the last mile delivery should have zero impact on its retail. Right now the last mile delivery has a near monopoly on retail of a restaurant. Pretending that toast/grubhub/seamless somehow benefit the customer is pure rubbish.
> If you look at pre-UberEats times, each restaurant employed a couple of delivery drivers on scooters.
This was not my experience. Hardly any restaurants had delivery other than pizza.
> If delivery is more expensive, more inconvenient and often slower now than before 2015, what 'real value' was added?
More expensive maybe, but I strongly disagree that it's more inconvenient or slower.
>> If you look at pre-UberEats times, each restaurant employed a couple of delivery drivers on scooters.
> This was not my experience. Hardly any restaurants had delivery other than pizza.
Your parent commenter appears to be European. Europe enjoys better city living in many ways than the United States does because the US is relatively underpopulated. (On the other hand, urban Americans have much larger homes.)
I live in Netherland, and here UberEats was a latecomer to what Thuisbezorgd had been doing for ages, but other than that it rings true. Before Thuisbezorgd, it was mostly just pizza that got delivered. Maybe also other Italian food, and maybe a little bit of Asian. Since Thuisbezorgd we can get any cuisine you can imagine delivered to your door.
But the standard Dutch takeaway food has always been Chinese (Dutch Chinese-Indonesian, actually), and I think even now that might still be more takeaway than delivery.
> The problem with a food delivery network is that it should be a dumb network, not a big profit center.
Which food delivery network has big profit margins?
> The problem with a food delivery network is that it should be a dumb network, not a big profit center.
Exactly.
Networks (markets) operators must be prohibited from competing on their own networks.
Apple's App Store must be spun off as a separate entity.
Amazon cannot offer their own competing products on their Marketplace.
Google must divest their digital advertising from their search engine (or vice versa).
Doctorow & Giblin's Chokepoint Capitalism is a terrific take on our current rentier economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chokepoint_Capitalism
Nintendo ruined it for everyone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Games_Corp._v._Nintendo_....
Nintendo was the first widespread closed platform.
Anecdotal but I have found that at least some times, rideshare drivers are willing to take cash for rides under some circumstances. Not at all common though, most of the time I have asked I’ve been unceremoniously shot down. The one time I distinctly remember it working out was during a packed event in Vegas (EDC LV, music festival). I just asked if they were going to be driving for the concert the second day, since it was so ridiculously packed and hectic to get a ride the first day, and they said yes and I just offered $100 for the ride tomorrow (I was already paying that much with uber, but with poor service from the app and many cancelled drivers). They agreed, they got a double-rate fare for one unsanctioned ride, I got better service since they were better incentivized to get my ride done, and overall everyone was happy. Except Uber I guess. YMMV
For vacation rentals you can often save 20% by Googling.
I usually find the place I'd like to stay on AirBnB and then google the title & description and the property management website usually pops up.
Since they don't need to pay AirBnB, its usually 20% cheaper via their website or calling.
AirBnB takes an obscene amount for doing almost nothing.
I'd like to say I feel a lot better about having AirBnB help handle any problems or disputes that makes it worth paying some overhead... but it's really the other way around.
>I usually find the place I'd like to stay on AirBnB and then google the title & description and the property management website usually pops up.
Maybe it's selection bias but 80%+ of the airbnbs I stay at are mom and pop establishments with 0-2 other properties listed on their profile. I doubt they have enough scale to bother set up a separate booking website for their properties. That said I have noticed hotels advertising on airbnb, but they represent a small fraction (ie. <10%) of listings that I see.
> For vacation rentals, I have had the owner give me their card afterwards.
This simply doesn't work.
I'm half a century old, go on vacation several times each year, and it happened only once in my lifetime that I wanted to go to the same rental as before. I pulled the card from the owner, called him, and found out that it's not free at the time I can go there.
I also don't know anyone who was in the same rental more than once.
So yes, Booking, Check24 and similar always take their cut in my case.
FWIW I actually didn’t use the card ever, haha.
I do have some relatives that like to rent the same place year-after-year for family events, for whatever reason. They are a little picky so I think they just like to go back to a place if it worked out. I’m actually not sure if they go through apps at this point, or what…
My family and friends (sometimes up to 5 families together) have gone to the same summer beach rental for more than 25 years. I know dozens of families who do the same thing. I have several large groups of friends from college who have rented the same mountain places since we graduated (we are almost 2 decades older than you).
Once again, "I don't do that" is not the same as "no one does that".
The app is also providing real value for maids; the point of consulting a trusted maid registry is to hire a maid who won't steal everything in your house.
That value doesn't persist over time because you already know the maid. So there's an expectation that you make a direct arrangement with her.
Even for cleaners it might not work.
I know several people who tried this and the cleaner said no. I think (not sure) the cleaner signed some kind of contract/agreement with the website not to do that and worries that if they are discovered they will be banned from the site and thus lose the other 90% of their income. Dunno how rational that fear is.
It's very real, according some folks in the business I know. They are very aggressive in trying to prevent this, because otherwise why wouldn't someone paid what a cleaner is paid try and cut the middleman out.
You used to be able to ring up certain restaurants and order a delivery. And it was often free.
It will not work for discovery, but if you develop an ongoing relationship it can work for that.
Apps seem to be very good at bringing people together initially, it is up to us to develop relationships after that, and apps are not as good for that.
Well. Communication apps are! Signal et el.
It does work pretty well for rideshare in my experience. I've settled cash with an uber driver before. Neighbor has a specific driver they use for the airport they pay a flat rate for.
It 100% works for vacation rentals. I found an AirBnB I liked in Spain, went there 3 more times over the past few years. One time it was already booked and the owner put me in an even better, larger (4BR) place at a discount.
Caveat: your SO must not be allergic to going to the same place more than once in a lifetime. My ex was.
Good point. I think lack of competition inflates the 'share of revenue' online marketing services can extract. And competitive alternatives are nerfed due to the app store hegemony and the anti-competitive behavior and dark patterns of giants like Google & FB. They needed to nerf the open web to maximize their profits, so they did.
Because rideshare drivers and food deliveries are not done by a single individual only, they are in contract and they are doing it as an employee of a company.
When you call up your local plumber, you are doing everything under the counter.
You can do the same as the cleaner example. For example get the rideshare numer, food delivery etc
I'm not convinced. What makes an app like Uber efficient is that it connects you to the closest driver when you need it. If you have the number of a driver, they may not be working at that time, or they may be far away.
Same for food delivery.
Very different for a cleaner: you never need a cleaner "right now", you can schedule it.
Well, sometimes.
Sometimes you want a ride right here right now, other times you want "a ride to the airport at 6am tomorrow".
Uber let's you "schedule rides" but that doesn't actually do anything to guarantee a ride. You could wind up without a driver if you're unlucky.
Directly contacting the person driving you, 12 hours in advance, is a much better way to guarantee a ride.
> Directly contacting the person driving you, 12 hours in advance, is a much better way to guarantee a ride.
...if they haven't had any car trouble, and haven't quit providing car service, and are intending to work then, and haven't scheduled another ride for the same time, and are willing to schedule something when they don't know where their unscheduled fares are going to leave them just before.
The apps that match workers with customers are actually doing something useful. The main problem is that people keep trying to get them to be considered employers, which increases their costs, and then those costs get passed on so that more of what you pay goes to overhead and less of what you pay actually goes to the worker.
Sure, yes, you do actually have to have a conversation with the person you are personally contacting for a ride and get them to say "yes".
Which is a cost, because then you have to call around trying to find someone who is willing to do it then, which is exactly the thing the app does for you.
In practice you have one or maybe two people you call, and then fall back to using the app anyway if that fails. So the person comes out ahead, in that they have a decent shot at a guaranteed ride, better service, and lower cost. The absolute worst case scenario is the standard app experience.
I've received cards from taxi drivers so I can contact them directly next time. Food delivery I prefer to do through the restaurant's own website.
Owning and renting a vacation accommodation is gig economy? Those poor renting seeking plebs.
Ever heard of airbnb?
I think mainly it helps property owners skirt the whole “I’m a landlord” thing and all the legal obligations it entails.
Yeah, I just don't really consider sitting on you fat butt and collecting rent a "gig". That's called rent seeking, or a scam.
I used to tutor using a company called Wyzant. I got banned from their platform because I directly contacted my client via phone.
I don't know if all such platforms have a similar policy, but it only makes sense. If everyone did direct, these companies can't make money.
Then you are losing out on the insurance the company is supposed to provide, usually through bonding, in case the cleaner pockets your favorite jewelry, for example. Or they knock over the Faberge egg while dusting.
Every service I know of explicitly bans this practice, so unless you can employ the cleaner full time then if they accept your arrangement they risk getting fired.
I don’t know the service company in question, but if it’s a gig-style matchup, how would the company know what their contractors are doing? Also, wouldn’t this incentivize the contractors to develop as many personal relationships as possible, as a hedge against getting arbitrarily kicked by the contracting company?
Semi-related:
If I'm not mistaken, services like Upwork and Fiverr will look at certain metrics for outliers, like repeat business in a particular industry. And for eBay, I think they’d look into cancelled bids on high-value items and check messaging history.
Disclaimer, based on old memories
Data analysis. If someone has a low repeat customer stat, but high ratings, smells fishy.
100% spot on. I do this with subcontractors quite frequently for house related stuff and most of them are quite happy to work with me directly.
Wanna really make their day? Pay with cash.
That's really more of a "Want to pay more than your fair share of taxes? Help them commit tax fraud".
Cutting Google out of the mix can be seen as a net positive for the community. The same can't really be said for taxes that go to your local services.
Paying in cash in no way helps anyone commit tax fraud.
It is very plainly morally and ethically unambiguous to pay in cash.
Paying in cash absolutely helps commit tax fraud. It doesn't mean your contractor will commit fraud, but if they wanted to, it's a lot easier if you pay with cash compare to check or credit card.
That's 100% on them. I'm under no obligation to give some credit card company my personal information just so more fingers are in the pie when accusing the contractor of fraud.
Cash is good and I accept 0% of the blame of what other people do in response to me paying them with cash instead of something else.
Of course, that's fine. I was just responding to "Paying in cash in no way helps anyone commit tax fraud", which is clearly wrong
...
> very plainly morally and ethically unambiguous
unambiguous[ly] _what_? Bad? Good?
> That's really more of a "Want to pay more than your fair share of taxes? Help them commit tax fraud".
This seems like a trope put forth by the middle men other than the government who want to keep getting their cut of every transaction in the world. "Don't cut out Visa and PayPal, that's practically stealing from your neighbor!"
You can obviously accept payment in cash and report it as taxable income, and not doing this is a good way to get caught, because if you're spending thousands of dollars a year more than you're declaring in income and the government asks you where it came from, you're going to have a bad time.
Meanwhile people who want to risk going to jail can do it just as well by deducting personal expenses as business expenses, or just making up business expenses and hoping nobody comes to check. All while letting payment processors siphon off something like 5% of your gross revenue, which for these kinds of things is often in excess of half your net income because your net margins were less than 10% to begin with.
It's your moral duty to avoid paying tax, if you're an American.
Given that America is a democracy, it would appear that a majority of Americans do not share your morals, so on the contrary it is your moral duty to pay your taxes.
Fun fact: precisely nobody who voted to elect the congresspeople who voted for the income tax amendment are alive today.
It’s a big stretch to assume that the current tax regime is related in any way to the will of the group of people who are currently subjected to it.
It's debatable that we're a democracy.
I would bet that in aggregate, more than half the taxes you pay go to your state, or some local polity smaller than state. Local political entities (county, city, town) are absolutely democracies and also have the maximum amount of actual impact on your life. The federal government is mostly irrelevant.
By avoiding paying taxes, you first and foremost damage the community you live in.
I don't know if I would agree with that take taken by itself without qualifiers. "if you're American" is doing some lifting but could mean anything. But otherwise I kind of agree, the average American is getting fleeced while the ultra wealthy are avoiding massive tax costs while benefiting the most from state infrastructure and economic policy.
No taxation without representation, so if your Congresscritter declares they don't represent you (because you identify as the opposite party and therefore are the enemy) then you have no responsibility to pay tax, a uniquely American sensibility
Of course the legal and ethical way to perform a tax protest is to simply have so little income that you don't owe them a thing
> Of course the legal and ethical way to perform a tax protest is to simply have so little income that you don't owe them a thing
That's the way it works. If you're really wealthy your team of accountants can find all sorts of ways to hide income and reduce it to zero or less. The more money you have coming in the less income you have to report, until the government you bought fair and square ends up owing you. Taxation is wonderful extra teat at which to suckle.
Bulk of income taxes go to the feds. Plumber will still pay plenty of sales tax. I'd say the value of having a plumber that likes you outweighs what benefits one receives from government programs, making it rational to stiff the man.
You cannot directly hire a housecleaner in the US without that person becoming your "household employee". You will need to withhold Federal Social Security tax and Medicare tax. In some states you will need to withhold state income tax and pay unemployment insurance.
> How much better of a job could have been done if the cleaner got a 60% raise? How much better would the local economy be if all of that money stayed local?
Let's be honest here, if you got rid of their advertising expense it's not going to cause the company to offer the contractor more when they're willing to do the job for less. In a competitive market what happens is that the price goes down, so that you pay $227.50 instead of $350, the cleaner still gets $125, and now there is $102.5 in overhead instead of $225.
But that's still good. Overhead is inefficient and you could use the extra money to hire other people which increases labor demand which is the thing that does cause people to get paid more. Or maybe some of the gig workers are doing jobs for people who are themselves not rich and paying less helps them out.
The real question is, how do you replace the function of the advertising expense? Suppose you even want to set up a non-profit gig marketplace that doesn't take anything, it just hooks people up with customers and people accept payment with cash or Venmo or whatever. That's pretty much just a website. But then how do you get people to find out about it and use it?
I belong to a local Muslim Chamber of Commerce that is basically this. Every business that wants to be a part of the network pays a membership fee (like $300 a year) and gets put into a directory. We have Muslim plumbers, contractors, real estate agents, etc.
I think such things can only work at small scales. Once there are too many competing interests it's not as effective.
I feel like you're just describing a different form of advertising (pay $300 to be listed in the directory) rather than an alternative to it.
In general it seems like the problem is that a marketplace has a network effect. The sellers go where the buyers are and the buyers go where the sellers are. And then the marketplace gets captured by the likes of Google or Facebook who, instead of showing results based on reviews or customer ratings or some other kind of useful curation that allows high quality providers to rise to the top even if they're small, just sell the top slot to whoever bids the most.
I think one of the big differences is charging enough to maintain the network and charging to extract as much money as possible.
That's a good point. At some point the fee to play becomes exorbitant (or some might say, extortion).
Perhaps, but the difference between what the comment I was replying to and the Chamber is just the membership fee. Maybe that's just what distinguishes advertising from organic networks.
Yelp used to be pretty good until it started putting ads pretty much everywhere. I'd see reviews for a totally different restaurant when looking at one restaurant.
I ask friends and neighbours for recommendations for this kind of thing. Given you know the industry, what made you search online in this case?
The person you are asking doesn’t say that they looked and found the service through ads. They say that the cleaning companies spent 35% on marketing. And therefore everyone that uses these services pays 35% more as a result. Not only customers that find the service through ads.
It really does read like they booked through a booking intermediary although the advert part is less clear. In either case, I prefer a personal recommendation if I can get one and we both gain by avoiding the intermediary fee.
Given I'm in the digital marketing industry my case was a little unique. Partly it was for UX research.
Sorry, this triggers me a little.
Whenever we hire someone, a restaurant to cook our meal, a lawyer to help settle our house purchase, a plumber to fix the leaky pipe, we almost never know what we are buying into.
So e ask people that have previously had someone do those jobs for them.
And here's the rub, they have no idea whatsoever on the quality of the person being hired, only that they've not NOTICED any poor results.
I've highlighted noticed, because, unless the person you ask is qualified to assess the work, they have no idea on is quality.
And this affects us all, because we use references to guide us on people to hire for jobs, and we have no idea on the quality of the person providing the reference.
Do we ask for a reference on the person giving the reference? Even if we do, do e get a reference on the person giving the reference for the person giving the reference?
I noticed this with booking.com. When we asked people for recommendations we got way worse sleeping arrangements than when using booking.com. I believe that the first reason, as you outlined, is that we followed many persons' recommendations instead on a single person's, but there is also fear of bad online review that keeps the service providers on their toes. It's a pity though that the 3rd party is needed for this.
The eBay type feedback (A++++++ would gladly trade again) or the yelp problem, where malicious feedback was being placed to attack another business.
Heck, businesses will sue you if you put bad feedback on glassdoor.
I've even been offered 2 months salary by a business to NOT disparage their (toxic) culture on social media.
If we could just get normal people to use the darkweb, the latter two issues would disappear.
> they've not NOTICED any poor results
This is a good enough bar for me to take a chance on someone. If I'm satisfied with the result... I proceed. My "car guy" has a track record of saving me from over-spending on things that don't matter. I don't have a good enough reason to try someone else.
There's a infinite regression in your logic that can only be broken by either:
1. trust in the person, or somewhere along the chain of referrals or;
2. simply possessing the skill and knowledge to assess the work yourself (but lacking the time, energy, or other resources to do it yourself)
> There's a infinite regression in your logic that can only be broken by either:
> 2. simply possessing the skill and knowledge to assess the work yourself (but lacking the time, energy, or other resources to do it yourself)
Yes, that was the point.
This is pretty hyperbolic. Not noticing poor results does give some idea of the quality of the work done. Of course it's not a perfect system, of course more references would be better, of course the work being judged by a known expert would be better.
If I know someone who I think is sensible, and they hired someone to do some work on something that they know nothing about, and the thing was fixed and has kept working for a good amount of time, that is useful information.
What is your proposed solution to deal with this perceived problem? Hire another expert to judge the work (how do you know to trust that expert)? Be an expert in everything yourself?
Reminds me of the potential low value of say a 5-star review for a restaurant from an out-of-towner. Was that phở soup really that good or just the one they happened to have, and it’s trounced by any other Vietnamese spot?
Lead to ideas of (certain-to-fail) locals-only review websites (that might even enlist folks to do potentially-compensated exit interviews with diners leaving restaurants).
And here's the rub, they have no idea whatsoever on the quality of the person being hired, only that they've not NOTICED any poor results.
I trust people I know more than I trust machines that can be manipulated by people I don't know.
If someone gives you a bad recommendation, you make a mental note not to take recommendations from that person in the future.
It's how things have been done for the last 5,000 years.
> It's how things have been done for the last 5,000 years.
Never move from your home community.
Honestly, a huge amount of things would be much better with the world unironically if we were less rootless and didn't feel the need to move around as much as many do today.
I dunno, there's positives and negatives there.
Some cultures have been very destructive when they've moved into new places, others have learnt to live in harmony with the natural environment.
And, it's new environments that provide us with new problems to try to sollve, and that's probably the most interesting thing in the universe.
Without moving to places where I have no pre-existing social support structures I would never know that the problem exists, nor how brittle the current solution (asking people for their experiences) is.
OTOH, if I had never moved away from the place I grew up I would be a much worse person today than the one I became. Many people's roots are in places that are highly immoral, wrapped in a flag or a bible or whatever symbolism suits, but they don't know any better unless they are exposed to outside ideas.
I’m not sure what the other person meant by “less rootless,” and there’s definitely a lot of value to moving around and seeing new places. But, is it possible that you just put down roots somewhere better?
Like, in the US at least, most licensed professionals are not catastrophically bad at their jobs and you can probably get by with slightly worse contractors and lawyers for most day-to-day issues, for a couple years, while you get integrated into the local community. Especially in areas that you actually want to move to, which tend to have large populations of problem who’ve moved there recently and so are well organized to integrate them.
It goes both ways. I asked my neighbors for an HVAC reference. They gave me a name, but also a recommendation to NOT use a particular company that advertises heavily in the area. Although they do not have HVAC certifications, their recommendation to avoid a particular company was very helpful.
You need a functioning community for this, with people knowing and interacting with their neighbours. Sadly, we live in an era of a somewhat atomised society. You can live in a city of ten million people to not know a soul, with workmates that are friendly but not friends, with those workmates commuting in from the opposite side of the city to yourself.
For a functioning community you need to have reason to know your neighbours. Maybe you need to borrow things or lend things, go into town together to share a vehicle, or spend time together in the local pub. The list is endless, however, nowadays, when everyone is car dependent, there is no need to ask a neighbour if you can borrow something, you can just hop in your car and get your own. Or you can just get Amazon to drop it off for you.
In a functioning neighbourhood, you might ask your direct next door neighbour about something such as needing a cleaner, and they might know that the other neighbours, a few doors down have one. You might merely be acquainted with that neighbour, but you would know them well enough to ask them to make the required introductions.
It actually requires a little bit of work to have relationships with neighbours, you also need a functioning street with chance encounters made on a regular basis. Being a pedestrian helps.
Another surprising factor is home ownership. If people are merely renting then they are not invested in the community in the same way.
In the olden days there were opportunities for teenagers to do work such as newspaper rounds, household cleaning, car washing, babysitting, gardening, dog walking and other jobs. But then we stopped having 'free range kids' due to 'stranger danger'. I am from the former times when I did the whole gamut of pocket money jobs for whomever in my village and my mother would know exactly where I was and if anything ever happened to me. If I was late delivering newspapers then someone would call and my 'last known sighting' could easily be ascertained. I could also always hitchhike into town because one of my newspaper customers would stop for me and give me a lift. My neighbours looked after me, and I did my best for them. I also did not do everything, for babysitting I could 'outsource' to my sister and her friends, for gardening gigs I could 'outsource' to some other kid in the village.
What I find interesting is how many of these teenage jobs have become professionalised. For example, washing cars. Nowadays that is 'detailing' and a very different deal with all kinds of potions. Saturday jobs also became professionalised, so you no longer see teenagers serving customers in shops. As for babysitting, you probably need full background checks nowadays.
All of my neighbours that I did things for gave me a little bit of mentoring, and Christmas was amazing due to the amount of tips and gifts that I received.
Oh, how I miss those days. Apologies for the reminiscing!
This is one of those 100% insane things. We all pay a massive Google tax on every purchase. Marketing has always been a part of business, but since Google has engaged in illegal anticompetitive behavior, the price has also skyrocketed, and we all pay for it.
Many people would not have found this cleaner without Googling, reading reviews, etc. While that may not be an ad directly, it's part of the marketing budget. So what needs to change?
We've had markets for all sorts of domestic help for centuries before we had computers. Perhaps more relatable, think about how your parents might have found such help.
Craigslist briefly filled this role.
Before that, there were classified ads in papers. Those were lightly vetted by the local newspaper. Also, with a warrant, the police could generally track down the person that placed the ad, which broke a lot of bullshit scams. (Like house sitters that don’t exist, but are instead getting lists of people that will be out of town.)
That tells me that modern advertising isn’t making things more expensive, otherwise companies that spend money on it would be crushed by companies that stick with the old ways and can undercut them.
Why does that matter? You can still do that. Nothing is stopping you from finding a local cleaner and negotiating the price, like our parents did.
People just don't want to do that
No, I can't do it that way anymore: my local paper doesn't have classified ads anymore. There are only different online versions, which are a lot cheaper and globally accessible, thus have a lot more fraud.
You get it. A couple phrases I live by (taught to me by the haggling parents generation); "you never know unless you ask" and "the worst they can say is, NO" These don't need to just apply to goods and services either. They have lead to very interesting and life altering experiences that wouldn't have happened if I didn't ask a one sentence question.
Yep. And sometimes a nearby independant contractor who advertises once or twice a week on Facebook or in the local newspaper is going to provide a better service experience than the one blasting TV commercials on the local channels.
The nearby contractor who gets all their work through referrals is by definition better than the one who needs to blast TV ads. The best people are basically never on the market.
Not really by definition necessarily. But yes, it does seem very likely that referrals are the stronger signal.
In some sparser places there might also only be a couple contractors working anyway. Might be able to get suggestions just by asking around wherever you get permits.
The problem is that Google operates both the buy side and the sell side of the monopoly-scale ad platform. They're the only party in the transaction who sees what both parties are willing to pay (imagine on eBay knowing what everyone's max bid was), and sets the algorithm to maximize their take from all parties.
They've already lost the case with this, and are currently trying to prevent what needs to change: Google must be forced to divest large portions of its ad business to reintroduce competition in the marketing space.
>They're the only party in the transaction who sees what both parties are willing to pay (imagine on eBay knowing what everyone's max bid was), and sets the algorithm to maximize their take from all parties.
Is there any evidence of them abusing that knowledge? Or was the lawsuit over them having a monopoly and/or anticompetitive practices?
I mean, the fact they abused that was illegal and anticompetive, yes. This is not a "they are big" problem, it's a "they're big and doing illegal price fixing with it".
Also, note that Google was caught intentionally deleting evidence they were ordered by the court to retain.
>I mean, the fact they abused that was illegal and anticompetive, yes. This is not a "they are big" problem, it's a "they're big and doing illegal price fixing with it".
Which case is this?
This is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_... in particular.
(Note the separate case which determined Google is running an illegally anticompetitive operation in Search was a separate case which can be referred to as "United States v. Google LLC (2020)" and there is a third case they lost recently, Epic Games Inc. v. Google LLC, which determined Google operates an illegal monopoly with Android as well.)
I live in an urban area. Most people I know have a cleaner. Most of those people, including myself, found their cleaner via word of mouth. No services, no googling, no ads.
I mean, the person is looking for a cleaner in their area. If all of the cleaning businesses in the area slash their marketing budget to 0, the author is not going to fail to find a cleaner. All the marketing budget is doing is funneling people who want cleaning to one cleaning company over another.
> All the marketing budget is doing is funneling people who want cleaning to one cleaning company over another.
Yes, and anecdotally I've heard of better experiences using services that do not appear on the top search results. The reason being that the top results have already captured the local market and so are less incentivized to respond quickly, accept the job or task, or offer a better rate. They already have their business and may not need yours.
>If all of the cleaning businesses in the area slash their marketing budget to 0, the author is not going to fail to find a cleaner.
You're right, they'll find whatever incumbent cleaner instead. A marketing ban is something that all incumbents would love, because they don't need to attract more customers whereas marketing is basically the only way that upstarts can get a foothold.
When Google has the monopoly on marketing of cleaning companies in your area, from a consumer standpoint it’s effectively the same as if one cleaning company has the local monopoly. The way to win is to pay Google a bigger cut than your competitors, so Google just takes the incumbency premium as its marketing fee instead of the cleaning company.
You’d be surprised how hard it is to find reliable help in our area.
Reputation based platforms are pretty much the only way to go around here. (Yelp barely counts at this point.)
If a buyer has access to the stored knowledge of trusted peers--peers who have knowledge of trustworthy sellers--supply can meet demand without involving an arms race between predatory middlemen.
The modern web was designed by predatory middlemen who want a cut of transactions they otherwise have no business being involved in. It's a textbook case of rentier capitalism.
So what needs to change is that we need to identify the design decisions made by those middlemen, rip them out root and branch, and fix the gaps with something that takes as an input the trust graph of the users so that the only way the middlemen can stay relevant is to personally gain the trust of each user whose transaction they've gotten in the middle of, and we need to publish the result as a protocol, not a platform, so it can be used without us (the authors of the protocol) being at risk of becoming the problem we're trying to solve.
>It's a textbook case of rentier capitalism.
I don't get it, is google blocking people from making or requesting word of mouth referrals? Or are people switching to google ads because it's more convenient? It just sounds like you're using "rentier capitalism" to describe companies you don't like.
Well yes, that is my main reason for disliking companies. And yes, google weighs in on browser standards in myriad ways which gives themseves and companies like them the ability to elevate the preferences of their customers above the preferences of their users.
It would be nice to block them from doing so, but the real fix is to give those users something better to use. Not much has gone into using technology to amplify the innate peer-to-peer trust/distrust mechanisms that we've spent millenia evolving such that they scale to the demands of our times, and quite a lot (thanks to google and friends) has gone into suppressing them.
>Well yes, that is my main reason for disliking companies. And yes, google weighs in on browser standards in myriad ways which gives themseves and companies like them the ability to elevate the preferences of their customers above the preferences of their users.
What does google's control over web standards have to do with the death of word of mouth referrals? You might not like FLoC or webusb but those aren't the reasons why everyone doesn't bother with word of mouth referrals to hire cleaners.
I'm watching a video sent to me by somebody I trust, and it stops to show me a video about the same topic made by somebody I don't trust, an interference which was targeted by--and an interference that I'm discouraged from preventing by--those standards. The connection is quite direct.
Now I don't know if there are any home cleaners that attempt to reach a wider audience on YouTube. Maybe there's a different medium that might suit their business better. But whatever it is, if it tries to be faster than meatspace gossip, there's some advertising platform selling the ability to interfere with it.
Google ads is a local optima for companies but not for consumers. The trouble is, for Google, the customers are the companies buying ads, not the people browsing the web. It's a classic example of not paying for your externalities
That Google isn't blocking a better model doesn't mean they aren't at fault. Ads are like pollution for our minds, we need a better web
>Google ads is a local optima for companies but not for consumers.
Are you sure you don't have it reversed? Companies would be quite happy if they could enter into some sort of no advertising pact so they don't have to spend any money on ads at all.
>The trouble is, for Google, the customers are the companies buying ads, not the people browsing the web. It's a classic example of not paying for your externalities
No, it's fully internalized, because consumers are getting free content (ie. sites where the ads are placed) and services (eg. gmail) in exchange. I'd be far more sympathetic to your claims of "externalities" if google stuffed its ads into your computer like junk mail makes its way into your mailbox.
> Are you sure you don't have it reversed? Companies would be quite happy if they could enter into some sort of no advertising pact so they don't have to spend any money on ads at all.
That's why it's a local optimum. Any company that try to unilaterally leave advertising will be punished. The global optimum would be no advertising at all, of course.
Anyway the people are already fighting back. I block ads everywhere, at least.
That's not how advertising works.
You only do ads because you think the net impact on profit is positive.
So in your example of Google getting $75, the alternative isn't skipping Google and keeping the $75, the alternative is the cleaner makes zero because you're not a customer.
I see how Google has a vested interest in hollowing out communities to the point you have nobody to text to refer you to a cleaner.
I frequently see such requests in a local Facebook group aptly named "Exit 10 and 11" (of a highway)
> How much better of a job could have been done if the cleaner got a 60% raise
Would you have hired or even found the cleaner without the company’s referral?
It appears that the cost of referral is much higher than it used to be. Fifty years ago, you might have looked in a phone book for companies that offer the service you are looking for, or gotten a recommendation from a friend. Everything was local, basically. I am not stating that this was necessarily better or game-theoretically optimal, but when the alternative is paying a large share to a big corporation for suggesting an option not based on merit, but the highest bid in a micro-auction, something tells me things have been going in the wrong direction in this case.
True, also considering the hosting costs of that app (probably also on GCP or AWS), and the payment processing fee.
The capitalist lords demand their tithe. Those superyachts aren't cheap, you know.
We are pioneering the new feaudalism.
> What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant. Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already --- so why am I seeing auto ads when I search for pet supplies?. But if I'm currently looking at an auto dealers web site, the odds are pretty good that I'm still interested in buying one.
So... this intuition is wrong.
Across... well, basically every category of product... the product which you are most likely to purchase next is the same (or a substitute for or a complement to) the last product you purchased. Anyone who has ever worked in retail analytics will tell you this.
Advertisers want to minimize their ad spend, so they always try to sell you first on the product which you have the highest propensity to buy. That's why they want personalized ads. The ROI is astronomically higher than for contextual ads.
(That's why the DMA's prohibition on Facebook's pay-or-consent model, and HN's general cheerleading of it, is such a joke... and that's before you even get into the adverse selection problem of people willing to pay to avoid ads)
There are plenty of greedy people in business. Rest assured: If cost of personalized grew to the point that ROI dropped below contextual ads, advertisers would switch to contextual ads in a heartbeat. They're A/B testing all the time, and it wouldn't take long at all for them to figure that out.
So... what's the flaw in the data gathering that leads analytics people to believe this? I got a ludicrous amount of real estate advertising over the first year after I bought my house which was when my "whew, glad I never have to do that again" feelings were strongest. Is it just that they extrapolate from consumables?
(About the only time I'm in the market for "another one of those" is if the first one was so low quality that I returned instead of putting up with it - or if I sampled a few things to see which one was good and then need enough more to finish the project.)
Not claiming that the ads don't have some influence, but they pretty much can't result in another sale...
I think the advertising industry has a very long tradition of relying on and trusting bad data if it's the only data they have. As long as everyone plays along and believes that Nielsen ratings or circulation numbers or click counts are accurate, you can have a more or less functional market for advertising spots. And there's obviously demand for more detailed data, as long as advertisers can believe that it is accurate and can make their ads more effective.
When the analytics produce an obviously wrong conclusion (such as saying you should be shown more car ads immediately after completing the purchase of a car), everyone involved has a vested interest in believing that the analytics must be right in some fashion. Doing otherwise would mean taking on a big risk, straying from the herd with a different advertising strategy that's guaranteed to take the blame for any drop in sales in the near future.
> When the analytics produce an obviously wrong conclusion (such as saying you should be shown more car ads immediately after completing the purchase of a car)
Sorry to say: Probably another wrong intuition.
My husband was in an accident that totaled his car not too long ago. So we bought a new one. Then after having it for a few weeks, I realized that I liked many of the new features it had so I started looking for one, too. True story.
The first purchase of a car in our family caused (and, more importantly for this discussion, was predictive of) the purchase of a second car. I’m sure this does not only happen after accidents.
Sorry to say: Probably another wrong intuition.
I have bought multiple cars in my lifetime. But I have *never* bought one right after another. This is not intuition, it's a fact.
No one is suggesting this can't happen --- but is it likely? Is it the norm?
"Personalized" ads assume it is --- and erroneously so in my case.
Start looking at cars online and you'll be bombarded with car ads for months after you've made a purchase. That ad money was just wasted on me --- and I'm sure on many others as well.
"Context sensitive" ads make no such erroneous assumption --- and they still have you covered in any case. You are shown ads only as long as you continue to express an interest in the subject.
There is no flaw. If you go to any retailer where sales can be tied to accounts, and you run a few SQL queries on their sales history database, you can generate a table of counts of transaction_n and transaction_n+1.
You will find that the most probable (the mode of the distribution) thing to buy in transaction n+1 is either a substitute for, a complement of, or identical to transaction n.
isn't there a difference between buying a gallon of milk every week because that's part of your standard household equipment versus an item you buy once every couple of years?
i think no one would disagree that there are things they buy very frequently, almost on a schedule. (then again, with these items people are probably very accustomed to buying the same brand of milk every week, so ads don't seem reasonable here as well).
The incentive to show post-purchase ads is: 1. people didn't like nth purchase so they're looking for a substitute. 2. reinforce purchase behaviors / reduce buyer's remorse.
Ads work at human psychology; they're not fully logical. Though I'm sure there's inefficiency in marketing but if post-purchase ads weren't ROI positive, I doubt the market would be paying for them.
Like I said before, this phenomenon is broadly applicable across almost everything. I’m hedging with “almost” because I haven’t personally seen data for every category of product, but I believe that it applies universally.
In a sibling comment I replied to someone with an objection that it doesn’t apply to cars… with a personal anecdote that it does, at least sometimes, apply to even cars.
Even governments do it: Having previous purchased a nuclear submarine is highly predictive of future nuclear submarine purchases. Likewise, you probably have not purchased a nuclear submarine, which makes me think you probably won’t buy one this year. ;-)
Does that apply across all product categories?
I can totally believe it for something like bananas or shirts. If I just bought some there’s a good chance I’ll soon buy more.
But vacuum cleaners? Cars? Who’s out there buying those more than once every couple of years at most?
You're claiming that everyone in the industry knows personalized ads are better, and not that they're just using the most available or most popular solution, or the solution their superiors are most comfortable with.
How do they know this? Are there papers or something?
Across... well, basically every category of product... the product which you are most likely to purchase next is the same (or a substitute for or a complement to) the last product you purchased.
Thanks for summarizing the logical fallacy of "personalized ads".
Maybe what you say applies within the narrow context of a single brick and mortar retail establishment --- clothing for example.
If I buy a shirt at a *clothing* store, when I visit this same *clothing* store again (in a few weeks or months) I may be inclined to buy another one. The mere fact that I took the time to visit again suggests it is likely.
But just after buying a shirt, how likely am I to buy another one when I visit a pet supply store across town?
The brick and mortar world is naturally divided and separated by context. When you walk into a pet supply store, you *never* get hit with ads for clothing.
This is not true with on-line advertising which is totally divorced from any rational context and as a result, the ads are much less effective than they could be.
And the ad networks don't really care if the ads are effective or not. In fact, they probably prefer it not be to encourage advertisers to spend more on advertising in a "black box" system that they fully control.
They're A/B testing all the time, and it wouldn't take long at all for them to figure that out.
How? There is no way to A/B test if B doesn't exist.
I'm talking about "B" being a practical ad network alternative to Google's effective monopoly. An offering that provides everything Google does --- except the "personalization". Instead of keying on the person's history , key on the context --- what they are currently searching for or what they are currently looking at.
As far as I know, this really doesn't exist in a generalized, competitive form.
But it would be relatively easy and cost effective to implement. Just bring back the <META name="keywords"> tag and key on it instead of the person. Think about all the time and money Google spends to invade people's privacy --- and simply eliminate it.
The ad networks want advertisers to *believe* that the "black box" they are offering is market based and cost effective but they have no real, practical way to confirm this.
They're called search-based targeted ads. That's where Google's AdWords started from, and you can still do that if you wish. But personalized ads work a magnitude better.
What advertising really needs is not more from the same monopoly but rather an alternative to it.
The fact that Google choose to steer advertisers away from Adwords by overcharging for them doesn't mean that they can't be made just as effective.
Last attribution doesn't work. Retargeting is a joke and the most valuable spenders have ad blockers so you can't even reach them through display ads. The data is manipulated everywhere as long as you can hand wave towards ROAS.
Personalized ads are more effective than non-personalized ads, to try to argue that personalized ads are ineffective is incorrect and the "without any proof" claim is absurd seeing the amount of specific data they collect on effectiveness measures. I used to work for ad tech companies and while that led me to hate them more than most people I'm not gonna say the data isn't their supporting their effectiveness.
Edit: I'm not familiar with data on context based ads but I'm very skeptical they are significantly better in the general case. They are already used in things where it makes sense like when you're searching for something.
I don’t have compelling evidence either way. But, I’d be a little skeptical of the data collected by the ad company. They are specifically and organization who’s entire skill-set includes convincing people to pay more, and that they might need some new service. I mean it isn’t some dirty secret, it is exactly what their value proposition is.
The internal data you were viewing and the metrics they track are, in part, to show people and convince them to buy the ad service. That’s like pure uncut ad-guy ad-material.
There is no grand conspiracy, the ad industry is massive, and advertising works. Companies would find out pretty quickly that advertising is a waste of money, yet here we are decades later and they still ad spend like crazy.
It definitely works, and the more tailored the ads, the better they work.
The key is remembering we are talking about average people, not nerdy techno anarchists with router level ad blocking and a pavolonian vomit reflex to seeing the word "sponsored".
It doesn’t require a grand conspiracy, just nobody deciding to rock the boat. It seems that when academics try to measure how effective the ads are, the effect sizes are much smaller than expected or it turns out the companies haven’t run any actual experiments.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
> The key is remembering we are talking about average people, not nerdy techno anarchists with router level ad blocking and a pavolonian vomit reflex to seeing the word "sponsored".
Sure, dump everyone who is skeptical of ads into this niche weird person case, and it makes it easier to ignore them. Have you actually talked to these “average people,” though? My experience has been that most people just find ads annoying.
I know lots of people annoyed by ads, but I also have family that buy things advertised on Instagram all the time.
Having worked for these companies some of the data is murky (e.g. did these ads they saw earlier lead to them buying the product later, perfect attribution is obviously impossible) but a lot of it is unambiguous where they tracked people straight from clicking on the ad directly to a purchase. People have their conspiracies but I've seen it in black and white, it's very very clear. The only way I could see the data not being clear is in the case of outright fraud, which I'm fairly certain wasn't happening within our own metrics (as it would not only lead to legal liability but even more importantly fuck up the machine learning models).
Edit: to be clear I would believe the effect of ads is overstated, it's just the idea they are ineffective is wrong and people claiming that you can get more effective ads without tracking people at all doesn't seem plausible based on what I know of the industry. I could see contextual ads working in niche use cases (which again we already see when searching for products. YouTubers have relevant sponsors all the time. We even have affiliate marketing, where it's not only contextual but part of the content).
Tracking somebody from clicking on the ad, through to the purchase doesn’t prove that the ad added any value, though. The ad only added value if the person wouldn’t have otherwise found the product.
Look, none of these criticisms are novel or unknown in the industry and it's well known that measuring the exact impact of ads is impractical but we're not talking exact numbers here, just whether personalized ads are generally effective or not. This criticism effects how effective it is but not the fact that it's generally effective, unless you think all ads are doing is shifting sales forward in time (which doesn't really make sense to me).
I think this is more of an effect for things like search or ads on an e-commerce platform (somewhat ironically the contextual ads people here are advocating for are much more susceptible to this) but less so for a lot of the more random ads, especially for niche products.
Edit: For me they are obviously effective. I think the more interesting question is exactly what the return on ad spend generally is but that would take very specific data that I don't have access to.
Yeah I feel you on this. Anecdotal, but I’ve had plenty of Google searches that ended in what technically counts as ad conversions, but the exact same link is only three items below. The only difference for them is that I clicked on the ad version because it is near the top typically.
Keyword advertising for your company’s own name is a well known mistake: there’s no reason to serve ads to people who are already searching for you. If anything the high conversion rate on that sort of keyword is an argument against… using conversion rates as a metric, haha.
Used to be a mistake. Now it's pretty clear you have to pay-to-play to get top billing on SERPs.
But keyword advertising on your competitor's name looks very dishonest. I search for company A but get B as top result.
That can be measured! Turn off your ad budget for a day and see what happens.
The "without any proof" part can be debunked even without the deep data, just looking at sales figures and conversion rates of personalized ads vs traditional "scatter-shot" approaches.
traditional "scatter-shot" approaches.
Who are these folks doing this "scatter-shot" approach? How do we get some insight into their practices?
The major company doing context sensitive advertising nowadays is Amazon. When you search on Amazon, they display relevant "sponsored" products that are clearly labeled as such.
So how is Amazon's "context sensitive" advertising business doing? By most accounts, pretty good actually.
https://www.campaignlive.com/article/amazons-ad-business-soa...
The real problem in my opinion is the lack of competition to the "personalized" approach. Everyone (except Amazon) just accepts "personalized" as the default --- mainly because there is no credible, large scale, organized, generally available alternative to compare it to.
I don't think I want to argue againsr these ads on the basis that there's some alternative form of advertising that's more effective.
The problem is with data mining and tracking and nudging behavior. I want the things driving my behavior to be originating from my own intentions or from my preferred sources of inspiration (e.g. friends, family, media I'm most interested in consuming.)
You'll never be able to fully control the range of things that influence you, but you can still be intentional to a meaningful degree. For me that means supporting free and open source culture, and using subscription-based model rather than an ad-supported model for content. I'm not perfectly consistent but I am somewhat, and I think I'm operating from a coherent vision of what I believe my interests are, which is no small thing.
Amazon is not a good example of contextual ads, though. It doesn't generalize:
1. You can easily argue that these "context sensitive" ads are actually personalized ads: They're personalized based on the search query you just made! Amazon context ads are the same as Google/Apple App Store "context ads". Suppliers are paying for higher ranking.
2. It's a shopping website! Of course those context ads are going to have high ROI because they're showing an ad relevant to the thing you're shopping for!
When people talk about context ads, they mean "Why doesn't Facebook or the local newspaper use context ads?" They don't mean "Why doesn't Target put up a coupon for beans in the beans aisle?"
Not an apples to apples comparison really. Amazon owns the entire user journey on its platform, which the "ads" are an integral part of. They are not analogous to Google showing you ads in banners and searches for target pages it doesn't own, on platforms it doesn't own. If you want to compare Google to those who actually advertise with the scatter-shot approach, you compare them with traditional advertising providers - ad spaces on TV & radio channels, billboard companies etc. That'd be a fair comparison because Google is also essentially a seller of ad spaces it "rents" from other websites - just in this case those ad spaces can simultaneously show different advertisements for different clients to each user, based on that user's best-match profile. It's a no-brainer that Google's approach will yield more leads.
There are smaller examples too. The Register was one such example the last time I checked. They sell space on articles and also run Sponsored Content features.
>Personalized ads are more effective than non-personalized ads, to try to argue that personalized ads are ineffective is incorrect
I basically agree with this. I think because people don't like personalized ads, there's a temptation to argue they don't work.
But I think it's motivated reasoning in this case. And I actually think the argument against them is stronger when you acknowledge that they are more effective. The privacy issue goes hand in hand with the effect that ads collectively have to socialize people into consumer behaviors.
The entire podcast and youtube channel industry relies on contextual ads right?
Havent almost everyone including MKBHD said youtube ads doesnt give them enough to be used as the only revenue.
Contextual ads are more effective. You type shoes, you get shoes ads. It doesnt first need the shoe data and then later show shoe ads after you started searching for socks. And with no middlemen,more profitable. Duckduckgo employs this IIRC.
Behavioural ads are easy cos you are setting up an api. Contextual ads would mean you need a worthy product and having to handle your ad folks yourself. You cannot buy a domain and immediately start showing ads.
Behavioural ads breakeven because they sell your data. Not ads.
The whole reason why new media outlets moved to subscription model is bizarre to me. They could've just started doing it old school and it would have made news open and more privacy friendly.
In-video sponsors are a form of contextual ad but ads inserted by YouTube are personalized (that doesn't mean context is not also a factor).
Channels like MKBHD (and LTT) need more revenue than what they get from YouTube ads because their expenses have greatly increased, particularly staff.
You can't automate contextual ads in news media, otherwise you get airline ads next to stories about airplane crashes. Or travel ads for places experiencing natural disasters or political upheaval. People pairing ads with stories increases the labor costs and there's already not enough money being paid for actual journalism to increase the cost of having ads.
This is an interesting point you make. But didn't we solve all of these context issues already? I don't remember getting any ads like his in Duckduckgo since I've started using it. Nor do for the ads we used to get when everybody used contextual ads.
The only issue is going to be that you will have to handle this when you implement ads for your website/app. And each of them will have to do it.
Of course e.g. MKBHD wants more ad revenue. To do so his only option is to put additional contextual ads as part of the video itself, so he does. MKBHD has no way to make a section of the video target individual viewers based on their history. YouTube does, so they do - because they know it makes them more money to do it that way.
Yes. It makes more money for the middle-man. Neither the advertisers nor user gets enough value.
There are so many articles on why your FB or Google ads are not doing well. They show ads the way THEY can make money. Not value for you. This is theh same going when you use adwords.
When 30-40% of your audience uses ad-blockers, it's hard to make it on just that.
They won't say this, the children in their audience will throw a fit, but tech audiences are stacked with content freeloaders.
Behavioral ads transfer revenue away from publishers and to spam sites and the ad platform (google).
Targeted ads are definitely better for the publisher, but hard to automate (the matchmaking between publishers and advertisers is less automated), but the percentage of ad spend that goes to the publisher is much higher, and the quality of each ad impression is higher.
There’s some win for targeting on the margins, where there’s no good place to buy ads.
Also, there’s an infinite inventory of targeted ad slots (like invisible windows displayed by malware or redirect spam), which could be better than display ads, where you might not be able to spend your marketing budget, at least in theory.
Was the issue trying to monetize your blog, or the way you did it? I assume the former.
Not much is "wrong" with targeted ads from an advertiser perspective - the ROI is more than 2× times higher, compared to non-targeted ads: https://thenai.org/press/study-finds-behaviorally-targeted-a...
And this number is produced even with the edge case you brought up! Targeting is just that good.
Advertising is also not just product advertising, as in, "we would like to purchase this exact product". Advertising spaces are also contested, so, if one brand doesn't buy it, maybe a competitor will. Advertising also increases mindshare - you might not buy another new car of course, but people are still influenced by what they see. Brands are also bolstering their image with ads, regardless if you particularly buy or not. They are associating situations, lifestyles, emotions with their brand.
What I'm trying to get at is incentive. The incentive is huge, and measurable, from the advertiser standpoint. And so, we will never get rid of targeted ads, unless we legislate, and enforce.
Do you have data to back up this claim?
The marketing side of the business is very data driven with lots of very intelligent statisticians and scientific testing for ad placement and ad content, etc. I cant accept that the same people that are manipulating my thoughts and desires with algorithmically optimized content never once thought to run hypothesis test on performance of targeted ads based on browsing history.
I feel like you are making a bold claim, am I misunderstanding?
Here are some stories from academics that had trouble getting companies to actually run rigorous experiments about ad effectiveness:
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
I don’t think ad companies are really trying to disprove the idea that their business model works. The intelligent statisticians work for the ad companies or in the ad departments of the product-selling companies.
It's very easy to forget to challenge your assumptions, and one of those assumptions is "more data = always good"
I don't think they are necessarily saying that. The data driven aspect is to connect users actually wanting or interested in something. The measure of this is the conversion rate, which is where the user actually clicks on the ad. You can also connect these with purchases from the ad buyer. The data driven piece is all the variables involved in developing functions that maximize this. At that point it is basically data science.
The advertising industry relies on ads being ineffective. That way you have spend more on them.
There’s an argument that firms will compete to get better performance per dollar spent.
Having said that, look at all the evidence of platform fraud, auction fraud and click fraud that came out during the Google trial.
They control most of the signals that come back to the groups paying for ads, and every level of the system that generates that signal (inside and outside of Google) is designed to defraud the advertiser (and advertising firms).
Hey, which trial are you talking about? Do you have a link to it?
Can you elaborate what you mean about the "system that generates that signal (inside and outside of Google) is designed to defraud the advertiser (and advertising firms)"?
Thanks
> The marketing side of the business is very data driven with lots of very intelligent statisticians and scientific testing for ad placement and ad content, etc [...]
We'll see that and raise you: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” (Upton Sinclair)
Ok, I'll call and raise you the same quote!
If I can cut my company's ad spend by an order of magnitude and still get the same sales... you really expect me to believe I won't get a fat bonus next year? Really?
Companies and investors do no behave rationally. If they did, there would be no ai industry, no buying gsuite and ms365 at the same time, no buying teams and zoom at the same time, and no return to office, among many other things that are part and parcel with the "modern" business structure.
Really a lot of these plays are about satisfying preconceived notions of what a company ought to look like based on what other companies are doing in order to make broad comparisons for investment. It is why merely hype is such a strong signal for businesses rather than having a product that can stand on its own two feet.
> Privacy Badger doesn’t block ads unless they happen to be tracking you
In practice, that's most of them. Privacy Badger by itself is an OK ad blocker.
Also, you can easily tell Privacy Badger to block sites.
Privacy Badger warns you that blocking certain domains, such as Google Tag Manager (otherwise known as Google Backdoor Hostile Javascript Injector) will break some sites. In practice, this seems not to be a problem. I've had Google Tag Manager blocked for years.
> What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant.
This is incorrect. It is often relevant, and it is reflected in financial performance of personalized ads. Companies aren’t doing it for fun. They’re doing it because it is wildly profitable and that’s because people respond more to ads that are aware of that “past”. You may not have access to the “proof” but they absolutely do.
Yea bit of a selection bias. When I buy a vacuum cleaner and see a bunch of vacuum cleaner ads after the fact, you think, how can they be this dumb
But you don't notice all the ad spend that goes into making you want more stuff in general, or all the ads that make you feel a little uglier on a subconscious level
I read something before about how if you've bought a vacuum cleaner, maybe there is an issue and you return it, so you are still more likely than a random person in purchasing one again soon. Not sure if there's ant truth in that. Maybe all that matters is that you might click the ad out of curiosity as you were recently looking into them...
> maybe there is an issue and you return it, so you are still more likely than a random person in purchasing one again soon
I find it hard to believe that return rates are high enough for this to be worth the trouble. It's much easier to believe that the advertisers are simply reacting to any signal for personalization, even if they received that signal too late.
> Maybe all that matters is that you might click the ad out of curiosity as you were recently looking into them
That serves the interests of Google or any other ad network; they don't really care about whether you eventually complete the purchase, as long as they get paid for your click. But the company actually selling vacuum cleaners should care.
Indeed. It might also be the case that the advertisements are tailored to the weaknesses of the product you bought, such that in case of a defect you might consciously or subconsciously remember the advertised vacuum cleaners with different properties.
Paging YouTube devs. ^^^ This is how YouTube ads should work.
I do not want to see an unskippable 60 second ad for a skincare product I do not care about whatsoever in the middle of a video about replacing the cambelt on a 90s French hot hatch. I especially don’t want that ad to bisect a word or sentence.
At least try to show me something that might have some passing relevance to what I’m watching, will you, please?
The big problem with contextual ads is that there's not always a useful context. What kinds of context-driven ads would you insert into a video by a guy who fixes old TVs in his garage? Or one who is building an automatic squirrel feeder run by a Commodore 64?
It's not an either/or problem. If context = sufficient then show contextual ads, else fallback to generic garbage.
And fixing old TVs / C64? Could literally show ads for any retro game company, or digikey, or pcbway, etc etc.
Electronic components, tools, marker spaces, 3d printers and supplies, etc. And that's just thinking of the top of my head. With data you could build an effective portfolio of ads. More effective than personalized? Probably not given that with personalization you can target which price band of gear would maximize your return.
How do you know that people watching videos about a hobby are actually engaged in it themselves? They often aren’t. If they’re watching videos about a guy who does TV repairs for entertainment but their real passion is sewing, it makes more sense to show them sewing machines than electronic components.
(satirical commment but this comes from real frustation of auto dubbing videos Automatically :sob: which pissed me off so much) (I have become a Hackernews shitposter and I like shitposting nowadays)
Youtube Devs: Boss our customers are asking for better ads / less focus on AI related stuffs
Youtube Execs: What do you mean? Do you mean we need to make videos auto dub and have it on every video available by default which can't be closed or being very hard to do so
Youtube Devs: :-/
Youtube Execs: Oh yeah , btw Our share price just rose 15% after mentioning AI.
We don't care about sustainability. I want to have a yacht larger than my neighbour and this AI crap is doing that shit.
What do you mean we should listen to the consumers, how would that increase the stock prices.
Meanwhile the stock market being the most evil hungry pretentious group of people a semi quote said by robert downey jr): As long as you can make a short term profit, I don't care. I want profits, sure it maybe a bubble but its profitable and Its not my money anyways, I am selling trading courses to young people who are feeling desperate for jobs in an economy which has abandoned them.
And guess where the people are going when feeling abandoned/frustated... that's right youtube... and guess what sort of ads they are getting.
Is this exploitatatitive, Yes, but is it legal, well maybe, we got bribery to make it legal.
Oh yeah, also make the person believe in small issues to be really big issues and don't really give them an option on the one thing fucking them in their asses which is economy and the extreme gap between billionaires.
This post is pure copium from my side but I want to let you know dear viewer, that when I was a child, I used to wonder how we used to have monarchy when I was studying first about democracy.
Like, surely, we all know that this is superior form, we could reason about it and so on so why did we just adopt democracy so recently in terms of human history/civilization.. Like there are millions of people and some people in between, they could've changed the system... I felt as if I was questioning the people of that time, and I feel a lot of people feel that way in woman empowerment and what not too..
Are we not gonna be questioned by our future generations? Think about it, Grandpa where were you when this whole shit happened. I hope the answer is better than idk man just surviving, since that's what I am doing right now. People have become involuntary celibates the way the dating scene is so fucked and the dating standards so they might not even have grandkids.
We can act tho. We can somewhat share this message or the spirit and be emboldened by it. By having less regrets while existence, fighting a bit. People have things hard but we need to get shit together if we want things better I suppose.
lets just make noise tho and be happy. "The pigs are fools because they know too much"
Dear reader, I want to end it in a positive note. I want to say that it isn't the system that is fucked. It is all of us which are fucked.
Either for staying silent if someone does something wrong.
Or silently doing the wrong thing for ulterior motives.
Yes we are human but dear reader, I feel like corruption only goes to top if it reeks from bottom too as well. Its messed up but maybe we can all try to acknowledge it and try to just know that we are all gonna die anyway and well, giving a other unique human smile and happiness might be the most precious thing.
Not even sure if I am on the right platform with this one given how I see so much AI AI AI bonanza here & well this is a YC funded orange website and what I did was another form of just some self pleasure of sorts, just a way to distress myself from the thing which frightens me while knowing I am doing my part.
My point being that, I thought that we have this carefully crafted society yet its just a mask of elegance and the machine is barely working behind the cogs. Yet, we try to hide from this uncomfortable truth when in reality so much of it dictates all of us down to the ads which are pushed down our throats when we want to watch a video about replacing the cambelt on a 90's french hot hatch.
Try to help somebody today please. Donate please. Volunteer please. Stop infighting between all of us, we have more common than differences, stop bullying, be there for someone. Just say thank you to your loved ones, I am going to do it just now. Idk man, we take shit for granted. even this mask of elegance of society is breaking which we were taking for granted.
Subscribe to Premium! All the Google ads go away in an instant. Very cheap for the mental peace you get. Combine with SponsorBlock for a greater effect.
I'll consider it once they stop their torrent of censorship and many other problems
Why expect the other party to be perfect, or even good? It's a clear business proposal, I give $5, they let go of the ads. I can be critical whether or not I'm a subscriber, in fact, maybe even more so.
Yt premium has a built-in sponsor block now. They just recently added it.
It kinda does, but it's not as neat as SponsorBlock is. SB fully automatically skips the sponsor segment, as soon as other SB users define where the it is, of course. With YTP's solution, you need to seek, and then click the white Skip button.
I do appreciate it, but I listen to YT a lot while doing something else, and it's often inconvenient or impossible to touch the screen, because my hands are dirty for example.
Ah I see. I guess the upside is at least the yt premium solution works on all platforms. I mostly watch on my TV nowadays.
Yes, and that's a definite upside. Supposedly the ReVanced app on the phone has SponsorBlock integrated (or the functionality, at least), but I don't want to risk my account with a third party app. So, I take what I can get in the official one.
Do I recall correctly that this is how early google ads worked? I had a blog back then that I decided to monetize (a mistake in hindsight, but I needed to learn somehow). I was never on the buying side, but my understanding of the process is that there were bids for ads to appear on my blog posts based on their content.
For the Google AdSense slots I run I have attempted* to turn off ALL ad personalisation for ethical reasons, hoping that G reverts to purely contextual clues like in the GoodOldDays(TM) when my revenue from Google ads was >1000x higher also!
*I am not convinced that AdSense is really doing this everywhere, in spite of the need to do so for (UK/EU) GDPR reasons etc once I have told it to.
It has always annoyed me that a huge online mega-mart (that starts with the letter A) will advertise things in the same category as ones that have been recently bought, even though they are definitely not frequent purchases.
It feels like the algorithm is saying "oh, they bought a mattress... they must really love mattresses and want more!", when much better ads could be suggested with the wealth of data they have on shopping habits.
They could at least fall back to "context sensitive" ads like you suggest.
Also, don't try to make me feel guilty for having an "ad blocker". I don't specifically block ads, instead I have a "tracking me without my consent blocker".
I guess all you said is correct but there is one important point. Data has being systematically being gathered and analysed to have an individual profile of your behaviour and needs without people understanding. It is not about knowing how much people needs to buy dog biscuits from people searching for dogs, but knowing that John Doe is 33 years, has 2 dogs, votes to democratic party, has chronic gastritis and commented on the internet that he does not agree with current presidential policies.
The level of identification and tracking possible today is scary even across devices.
It's really (not) cool when I get personalized ads that imply my sexuality or medical conditions when I am sharing a twitch stream with colleagues or friends.
> What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant. Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already
It's something you do only once every 3-8 years. Targeting you, who just bought, wrongly, is better spend than targeting me, who isn't interested at all...
A good marketing team has a pretty sophisticated reporting pipeline. A bad one is doing a lot of misattribution.
> the idea that personal browsing history is a good indicator of the future
Its a good way to build a profile of a customer, and even mundane things can be connected together into interesting data conclusions... This was almost 15 years ago: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
The reality is this, your consumer behaviors can be VERY predictable. No one wants to know that their ghost in the machine baahhh's like a sheep following the herd.
All advertisers wouldn't be together converging on the tracking-based ad model if that were the case. It's being used because it's driving more CTR than the traditional way.
Your browsing history gives a more reliable base to segment you based on buyer profiles (incl age groups, location, interests), figure out your "intent" and target ads based on it. If you were to, say, read a random "Top 10 cars with highest resale value" article, on its own without historical data it won't be of any use for targeting because they don't know if you're actually a potential buyer in the market or just some teenager passing their time. Showing you those ads will waste their $$ if it were the latter.
This isn't in any way an endorsement of their intrusive advertising practices, by the way - I personally have been using ad blockers and aggressively taking every step possible to avoid all online advertisements for more than a decade. It's just to provide a perspective on why it's not so simple.
> Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already --- so why am I seeing auto ads when I search for pet supplies?
This generates a lot of false positives too - if I have bought something and I see an ad about it, I may still click at it out of curiosity but without any intention to purchase it. (And rarely has an online ad or copy induced me to purchase something again that I just bought). So Ad networks do have an incentive to keep showing me ads that I have clicked, whether it would convert into sales or not, because they make money from these clicks. I think that's why "personalisation" matter to the online ad industry - not because it increases conversion and makes more money for the advertisers, but because it does increase revenue for the advertisement platform.
I'm always surprised people even click ads.
I am the kind who does a lot of research before purchasing anything - so if I am buying something (or have bought it recently) it will be on my mind for some time and an ad related to it will arouse my curiosity, though (I like to believe) I am rarely swayed by them.
If contextual ads are more effective than personalized ads, then there is an enormous market waiting to have its lunch eaten by a contextual ad provider, which should be able to operate at a far lower cost than a personalized ad provider.
That we don't see that happening at all is pretty strong evidence that personalized ads are more effective than contextual ads. I find it highly unsurprising that ads which are based on the history of a person are more effective than ones based only on their present. If someone was looking for a car last week, odds are that they are still looking for a car.
The best example of context sensitive ads I've seen, is on the Penny Arcade webcomic. It's a comic about computer games, so most/all ads there are of interest to gamers. Not only that, but the ads are made by the comic creators in the style of the comic, and they're about games/products they love. It's not just an ad, but an endorsement.
I would think that kind of ad is a lot more effective than an authentically selected ad based on your browsing history.
They still do both (e.g. I got a Mint Mobile AdSense ad above the comic) so it may be worthwhile enough to add on top but not effective enough to justify more effective targeted advertisements.
I don't know how you think the ad market works.
Advertisers have an idea who they want to sell to but they don't know their browsing habits.
The ad industry collects data about you to see whether you are like the person particular advertisers want to sell to and what sites you visit. With this information it can display ads relevant to you on the sites you visit.
You propose that ads shown should be conditioned just on the content of a website, but you are missing out on the fact that the content on any one website alone is a poor proxy for the type of customer that the advertiser is targeting.
There seems like there would be a pretty simple fix for this: first, collect statistics relating demographics to websites. This can be done in an anonymized way. Next, publish this research and use Bayes' theorem to invert the relationship for serving ads.
Boss, it seems our audience is made up of 51% female 38.7-year-olds who live in Daviess County, Indiana. Let’s get our best team on this. We need to figure out what they’ll be interested in buying!
> In the process, they have surrendered their ad budgets to a "black box" process that they have no insight into or control over and can be easily manipulated against them.
No we were slowly forced by Google to surrender to their algorithm that use tons of data on users.
I wish it was still easy to just put an ad for car when people search « cheap car », but the reality is that they keep removing features, making things convoluted and on the other hand push hard for their automated algorithm.
I personally don't want to see ads at all, be it on websites, Youtube, or anywhere else. I only use uBlock with a very restrictive policy (block ALL third party content), and also block a very large number of malware domains (Hagezi's Ultimate blacklist) at the DNS level. I don't see think I have seen a single ad in years, unless it's a sponsored segment in a YT video or similar.
You are actually more likely to buy a car just after you have bought a car than the 10 years you did not need to buy a car. Maybe not cars, but I’ve heard this argument for kitchen appliances. If you for some reason return the item you just bought, you may buy what you get ads for. Maybe you regret you did not get the premium one, especially when they shove it in your face afterwards…
Appliances, sure, because having bought a new blender I might be tempted to look at replacing that old toaster as well. I'm clearly in an appliance-buying mood, and if I'm not, maybe I can be persuaded in that direction.
Cars? People who just bought a car are generally upside-down, and will not be looking to trade or buy another anytime soon.
I feel like I'm far too eager to accept whatever I bought, and reluctant to return it. Maybe I should play their game and return more stuff when it's not quite perfect.
I think accepting what you get and not obsessing over maximizing your satisfaction is a more internally peaceful way to live.
Maybe get rid of the stuff you still stew over a year later, though.
Old but possibly relevant: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dangerous-does-internet-adver...
at any rate - not only context aware ads would be better privacy-wise but also probably would be way more lightweight…
I understand your argument, but why should we believe you, rather than advertisers spending millions of dollars, that this other form of ads is more effective than what they do currently? Your solution seems easier so it's hard to believe they're not doing it for some good reason.
it's not about belief.
It's about rights - my personal right to privacy trumps any business reason they think they have to track me.
but to not be an ass - the issue is in accountability - how much of traffic to website is genuine? and no side wants to take on that risk so we end up with elaborate inefficient panopticon for advertisers profit.
Retargeting ads also add value, it helps in reinforcement in a targeted way.
It can be thought of a good way of branding on a cohort of customers who would be interested in your product.
Just the definition of interest is something which is skewed.
It's literally how ads were done before the era of social media. Then someone came up with idea that people are annoyed with ads because they are not personalised enough
> Then someone came up with idea that people are annoyed with ads because they are not personalised enough
No, that was just the public justification so the public wouldn't think they're so creepy. The actual reason is that they work better.
There's an old saying in the ad biz: "I know I'm wasting half my advertising budget. I just don't know which half."
The point of personalized ads is to cut the wasted half.
If I was an auto dealer web site operator, I definitely wouldn't want another auto dealer advertising on my site, taking my potential business.
> Without any real proof, they have bought into this vision of advertising that is illogical, ineffective and simply not true in many cases --- the idea that personal browsing history is a good indicator of the future
You're claiming they don't have any real proof, but you yourself are not providing proof of that. On the contrary, I assume there's tons of proof (data), whole oceans of the stuff, because personalized advertising goes far beyond just checking if you searched for a car, then showing you car ads.
Instead its: if you searched for marriage related stuff, a year later they'll start showing you baby stuff. If you searched for "why is my husband so..." they'll start showing you ads for divorce lawyers. If you search for "why are there no jobs", they'll start showing you extremist political ads about immigrants stealing all the jobs, and on and on.
This stuff, personalized, designed to manipulate you and hit you at the times when you're emotionally vulnerable, does work. Of course it works. Humans are easy to manipulate if you know their private wants, needs, and emotional state.
Traditionally, these are called display ads.
They require more effort on the part of the site that produced the content, but are much more lucrative for that site.
Since most of the internet has been low-effort algorithmic slop for the last twenty years, tracking ads are more popular. They let low quality sites “steal” audience impressions from higher quality sites by displaying ads to people that happened to visit both sites.
I think personalized ads / algorithmic targeting (and even collecting the datasets that enable it) should be banned.
There's no reason that contextual ads couldn't be automated at scale.
It might even be easier than automating targeted ads, given the incredible level of research and compute that gets wasted on targeting.
>Privacy Badger doesn’t block ads unless they happen to be tracking you;
That's what Unlock Origin is for. I don't know if they intended it this way, but seems like they complement each other quite well.
Actually, the "he looked for a couch a week ago, let's show him all the couch ads we have" is still the best strategy in terms of CPI/CPC. And also a pretty cheap one. This is why they are doing it, not because they are dumb. It may enrage some, but what would they do, quit browsing the Internet?
It's honestly so embarrassing and damning for HN that drivel like this is getting upvoted. To argue that personalized ads are bad for some kind of privacy argument is all well and good, but to say they're less effective than contextual ads is ridiculous. Some of the commentariate here honestly thinks they've stumbled on something ad tech and marketing companies have never thought of, or worse that there is some grand conspiracy to cover it all up. Meanwhile the people who actually work in ad tech know that there are armies of data scientists poring over every facet they can to get any 1% improvement possible. If contextual ads were actually better Google and Meta et al would instantly switch to it. But they're not.
Ah yes. The classic internet “tens of thousands of experts and hundreds of billion in spend are all wrong and I know better” argument.
Frankly, to me it's the other way around, I don't care too much about all that tracking (even though I routinely block most of it), but I do care about the cost of having ads on the page. The cost of my attention, first of all.
Some ads are masterfully made, but even they distract me, not attract. They jump into the view, they suddenly break the page flow, they strive to be clicked by mistake. Tis is especially insufferable on mobile. They clutter the screen and obscure the real content. They eat bandwidth and battery life by loading tons of content I did not ask for. They play whole videos, some are so impudent as to play sounds. They are consciously created as an impediment to reading (or sometimes watching) the content I came for! Isn't it the definition of being actively harmful?
Then, of course, they are mostly not relevant, like, 99.7% of the time. To quote: «A general trend that the advertising business is not interested in delivering ads to the people that want the product. Their real interest is in creating a stratification of product offerings that are all roughly as valuable to the advertiser as the price paid for them. They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.» (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721611)
And they usually offer no way to say: "Hey, this is not interesting, show something else". Instead, Reader View does away with everything irrelevant in one click.
Interestingly, one of the places where I do not block ads is Facebook (which I use sparingly). It knows everything about my profile (obviously), it shows ads moderately, and in a way that's not infuriating, and it even actively asks my opinion about ads. As a result, I taught it to show me highly relevant ads: about electronic music, vintage computers, etc, stuff that I actually would be interested in clicking. This might look anti-privacy, but the tracking is mostly limited to the Facebook content, because I cut off third-party cookies.
Redundant (with uBlock Origin) on Firefox:
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-don...
I use both to good effect. Similar goal, but not the same in practice.
UBO is a request-level filtering system. It blocks certain requests based on a set of patterns. It's incredibly simple, incredibly fast, and surprisingly effective, since most adds and trackers are served by 3rd party sources that can be recognized. This doesn't catch everything, though, and trackers can be sent alongside the core website content. PB provides content-level filtering that can catch some things that slip by UBO.
PB does things uBO doesn't bother with, but not because uBO only has request level filtering. E.g. uBO also employs content level filtering and methods such as scriptlet injection to neuter/stub specific tracker functionality.
Believe PB rewrites search engine links, which I don’t think UBO does, at least by default:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/new-privacy-badger-pre...
Irony: When I click that EFF link, my firewall goes all
Browser wants to connect to assets-usa.mkt.dynamics.com on TCP port 443Wonder when all analytics and ads will be first party (presumably years away since it’d ostensibly be so tough for the average small site). Enjoying it while it lasts I suppose.
uBlock Origin is an excellent privacy tool. However, uBlock Origin is not a replacement for Privacy Badger (nor is Privacy Badger a replacement for uBlock Origin).
For more see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
That wiki page is a bunch of nonsense. For example:
>Redundant with Total Cookie Protection (dFPI)
https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with...
I’ve been using both uBO and privacybadger together since time immemorial does uBO truly have 100% coverage of all privacybadger filter rules?
Each offer something slightly different in various contexts. uBlock covers most use-cases, but not every site is completely clean.
In general, setting up NoScript per-site filters (like blocking XSS, webgl or LAN resources) is more practical in some ways, and offers deeper control of resources needed for core page functionality.
Often, websites only really require their host, a JavaScript CDN, and some media CDN/cloud URI. Modern sites often insert telemetry or malware/ad services, and will load much faster without that nonsense. =3
In that case, NoScript seems to really be a misnomer. It should be called SomeScript or OnlyScript instead.
Indeed, the per-site rule sets are a relatively recent addition, but offer a better application layer filtering solution.
Anecdotally, we have seen a correlation between minimal resource domain/redirect counts, and site content quality. =3
Shortsighted. Especially given what happened to adblock.
Prefer not to expose myself tbh: https://adtechmadness.wordpress.com/2020/03/27/detecting-pri...
This detection is off by default. For more, see https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/10/privacy-badger-learns-...
Thanks for linking this page. I am using multiple of these addons, but some years passed since I figured this setup, so it was time for reconsider the choices.
PB is different from other extensions and works well with ad blockers. If you like what PB does, feel free to keep using it.
For more, see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
On a side note, does anybody have a good cookie consent blocker, pop-up blocker for Firefox? I uninstalled "I don't care about cookies" since he got taken over by a mysterious third party.
I use Consent-O-Matic. It doesn't catch everything but it does work on some sites. Basically it just automatically goes for the "Reject" option if that's provided in a reasonably standard way. Lots of sites where that doesn't work, obviously. But a few where it does.
Probably a good benchmark if you are developing standard cookie consent dialogs is whether they work with this.
I'm using "EasyList/uBO – Cookie Notices" in my uBlock Origin in the Filter lists. It works well enough for blocking cookie pop-ups.
We're working on this feature now! Privacy Badger will automatically opt you out of common cookie consent banners, when opting out is an option.
Not an exhaustive solution, but these are often loaded with third party requests. The domains often contain "cookie", "privacy", "consent", or similar, and blocking them does the trick. uBlock Origin lets you do that once you tick the "I am an advanced user" box.
How is this better than blocking all third party content with uBlock Origin? Doing so does break a lot of websites, but you can always manually enable necessary CDNs if you care.
I doubt Privacy Badger blocks fonts.googleapis.com for example, which is a dependency A LOT of websites have and that allows Google to track people across the Internet.
Is there a solution that’d 1:1 replace Google Fonts with a local version?
…OK, looks like LocalCDN could do this (e.g. with a Firefox extension), anyone tried it?
LocalCDN - https://localcdn.org
You don't need to replace anything, the browser will automatically fall back to similar local fonts.
Thanks. I’ve seen that—lacks in aesthetics and I miss out on the artistry of some small blogs etc.
For greater privacy of course not a bad tradeoff!
Privacy Badger has three modes for each host (other than the origin) from which content is loaded on a page: Allow, Block Cookies, and Block Entirely. This lets you load things like Google fonts without allowing tracking cookies to be set. Yes, Google still sees your IP and user agent and can do some tracking that way, but they can't add a tracking cookie (at least once Privacy Badger sees them trying to), and you have the option to block Google Fonts (and whatever else) entirely if you want.
PrivacyBadger adjusts what it blocks over time vs seeing it track you. It did start blocking Google Fonts for me, and I had to manually re-enable it because I wanted it.
I forget which level of blocking it was applying; some cookies it just keeps from being cross-site, it isolates them. Others it blocks entirely. You can easily adjust which it is doing for any given cookie.
I think it's true that if you have uBlock Origin you probably don't need this though, that seems likely. I don't run uBlock Origin.
Manual blocking with uBO is hands on. Privacy Badger is (mostly) hands off.
For more, see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger
Mushroom, mushroom.
Privacy Badger has been around for YEARS and doesn't cover a lot of cases. Use uBlock Origin instead.
What doesn't Privacy Badger cover? (Yes, Privacy Badger is not an ad blocker but it works well with ad blockers.)
Privacy Badger and uBlock = a good lightweight combination.
Near as I can tell, PB is redundant / unnecessary if you have uBlock.
Apples and oranges. PB is not ad blocker (doesn't use the same lists), made by a non profit to fight for a better web, comes with unique features.
For more, see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
It's either a page on the github wiki or a tweet by gorhill, but they say that ublock origin shouldn't be used with other blockers as they can interfere with anti-detection scripts.
Chevy is redundant if you have a Ford, but I'd like to see both stay around and be options.
Why a Brave browser user would need this extension? Sincere question
If you like any of PB's features (like click-to-activate widgets) or want to support EFF's mission and fight for a better web.
For more, see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
You are fine just using the built-in ad and tracker blocking in Brave. It's very effective on its own.
If you're using ublock origin in advanced mode (really miss umatrix) with JavaScript blocked by default, where you whitelist things. What does PB offer over and above this?
Click-to-active widget replacement, GPC/DNT enforcement, the ability to turn off uBO entirely for a website when you don't feel like dealing with it and then have PB take care of most problems automatically.
For more, see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
I find it increasingly makes sites I want to visit stop working, more than it used to. I've been running it for a few years.
I don't mind having ads on the page, I do mind being tracked. But I guess there is no value to showing me ads without tracking me.
Sorry about the breakages!
Just FYI, you can always disable Privacy Badger on a particular site by using the "Disable for this site" button in PB's popup.
You can also help make PB better by using the "Report broken site" button in PB's popup.
i do both!
Although sometimes it's confusing why a site isn't working -- I have to remember it might be Privacy Badger, sometimes I forget about Privacy Badger.
Also, being a developer, sometimes I figure out which trakcers need to be moved to yellow or green from red to get it to work.
i wasn't sure "report broken site" was actually useful, like this would really get to a human, and matter? Especially since I understand the trackeres that get blocked yellow/red are adaptive (not sure if that means specific to my client or not). But if you say it's helpful, I'll keep doing it!
Thank you!
>i wasn't sure "report broken site" was actually useful, like this would really get to a human, and matter?
It matters! We generate and respond to daily aggregate reports. We also periodically comb through bunches of raw reports to see what aggregation misses.
I dream of the day shoving advertising onto people’s faces will be illegal.
I currently run Firefox nightly with cross-site cookies disabled and all the trackers/scripts blocked. I also run uBlock Origin. Any idea if privacy badger is redundant with this set up?
Check out the following links:
- https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with...
- https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
According to [this page](https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-don...), yes, it's redundant in that case.
Happy desktop and mobile user since first release.
Do you know what impact it has had? privacytools.io removed it from their list as it is superseded by uBlock Origin: https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/pull/1864
privacyguides.io got turned into a shill website.
The original crew that ran things are now on privacy guides
Caveats:
We are working towards Safari on macOS support. Safari on iOS seems to lack certain extension capabilities required by Privacy Badger to function properly.
Chrome on Android does not support extensions. To use Privacy Badger on Android, install Firefox for Android.
Privacy Badger does not work with Microsoft Edge Legacy. Please switch to the new Microsoft Edge browser.
Google/Others DNS + Turn on all privacy/security settings on Firefox including HTTPS-Only mode and DNS-over-HTTPS + Ublock Origin + Privacy Badger + Decentraleyes = Poor man's VPN.
The way I initially read this headline my brain thought that this privacy extension was going to stop spying on users. Confused for a moment there.
Been using it for years, it’s cool. Breaks a lot of websites but know to suspect it when you can’t make a payment or login somewhere. EFF does some good work but I’m much less of a fan than I used to be once I realized that at least to some degree more than merely net neutrality, they function as a telecom lobby laundered through digital ethics.
Sorry about the breakages!
Just FYI, you can always disable Privacy Badger on a particular site by using the "Disable for this site" button in PB's popup.
You can also help make PB better by using the "Report broken site" button in PB's popup.
Please don’t apologize; it’s the browser stack that’s broken not your tool. I’m 100% serious.
you can't install for Firefox on Android unless you use a Google account for the play store.
Is this particular to Privacy Badger? Or is it just how it works on Android?
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This is about bookingcom but it shows how a big platform operates:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/aug/07/thousands-o...
“Over 10,000 hotels have already joined the pan-European initiative to claim compensation for financial losses caused by Booking.com’s use of illegal ‘best price’ (parity) clauses,” Hotrec said in a statement.
It alleges that the “best price” pledge on Booking.com was extracted from hotels under huge pressure not to offer rooms at lower prices on other platforms, including their own websites.
Any extension you add so you can have more privacy is misleading. Blocking requests/modifying HTML actually makes you more unique. The only real solution for privacy is TOR browser.
When you open a random content website, such as someone's blog or The New York Times, it could theoretically have code to detect the non-loading of several trackers. However, most likely, nobody has gone through the trouble of doing this.
Those trackers, such as Facebook and Google, aren't loaded at all, so they are unaware of the request that was not tracked.
What you are advocating is loading those libraries, etc., anyway and allowing them to have their way with your browser session. This will always be less private than not doing it. Even Tor Browser has all sorts of protections from these types of things in place, which you would need far less of if you just blocked these tracking libraries to begin with.
Yes, theoretically, my blog or The New York Times could start profiling the missing requests and send them over to Facebook through the back-end, which is what is referred to as 'server-side tracking' in the industry, as far as I know. However, the chances of most websites doing this are slim, as it requires at least some effort on the server side. The way these websites usually do this is by passing along the account information they have on you, such as e-mail addresses, phone numbers, etc. Even if you signed in on some site with Tor, they'd still send those things along if they had gone through this trouble.
Ironically, even Tor relies on clearing cookies, disabling JavaScript, and blocking specific requests to protect your identity, not just the origin obfuscation. So, the thing you are claiming makes it easier to track you, and suggesting that Tor is the solution is somewhat at odds.
> , it could theoretically have code to detect the non-loading of several trackers. However, most likely, nobody has gone through the trouble of doing this.
More and more sites are definitely doing that, in my experience.
It's two different kinds of privacy in this case. What the Badger offers is privacy from the domains run by advertisers. What you're talking about is privacy from the first party that you visit.
This isn't true. If you're the only person in a population with the extension, then it could be assumed that the connections without any successful fingerprinting are coming from you. But if even one other person has the extension, there's no way to tell you apart.
There's a difference between privacy and security
They are different concepts, but they are reliant on each other. Framing them as separate qualities is a false dichotomy pushed by webapps that want to market themselves as "secure" as they're set up to attack you.