A Conversation On Online Privacy

You may have a privacy feature on your browser or have installed a privacy extension that stops advertisers tracking you. And if so, you’re probably also used to seeing this pop-up on some websites:

That despite the fact that you’re not using an ad-blocker – which is another whole kettle of fish. Or so you’d think… Actually, this is not the fault of privacy apps and extensions. I’ll let Privacy Badger take this one.

So you can see that this is – sort of – not the website’s fault that’s asking you to turn off your “ad blocker.” It is in fact directly the fault of the advertisers. And the only way to stop them from greedily slurping up all your data is to somehow get them to stop doing that.

Bit Of History

The whole privacy-invading thing started way back. Companies wanted to advertise on the then-new(ish) Internet, and paid for ads to be placed on specific websites that they did a deal with. That was hard to keep up with so ad brokers got involved, and they took payment off advertisers and sold the ads to those and other websites.

They often embedded a tracking bit in the ad along the way, to count the number of times each ad was seen on a website, and paid those websites per “impression,” that is, by how many times that tracking bit was activated when someone’s web browser loaded the page with that ad in it.

But (and here’s the first place websites themselves were a cause of the privacy invasion) unscrupulous website owners could set up a PC to just load and re-load a particular ad, stacking up their number of impressions (and thus their income) astronomically. So the brokers had to add some tracking cookies to the ads as they sent them to different websites.

Those cookies collected A) which website the ad had passed through and B) which computer web browser opened it. That was how they could be sure that website W had shown that ad to XXZ number of individual viewers. That was information they could use to document to advertisers how many of that particular ad were shown to XXXXXXZ users across websites W, F, G, and R, and that was still sort of okay.

The cookie that the ad broker set was often impermanent, but then the inevitable greed and enshitification happened, and the ad brokers realised that they could set the cookie to tell then what web browser you were using, and find you again when you clicked another ad out of their current bank of ads they were selling on another website.

They could track you as you opened pages, see which websites you preferred, and by the times you actually clicked an ad, they could start to see what sorts of websites a person – that liked to check out whatever was in particular ads – also enjoyed visiting. No point advertising electronic components to a person whose main inline surfing consisted of bushwalking and camping sites.

Then The Real Enshitification Starts.

You may also remember the infamous “Facebook dot,” which was in effect a single-pixel-sized invisible advert that Facebook embedded in all of its pages. This dot recorded everything that you did on Facebook, but the real problem was when FB offered it across its commercial corporate partner websites so that each site could recognise you, link to your FB account, and build up and even bigger database of information about YOU.

Advertisers realised that before they even sent an ad to the ad brokers, they too could put that dot style code into their avderts. And at some stage, the whole thing crossed the line from ensuring that an advertiser who bought 50,000 impressions of an ad from an ad broker actually got what they paid for, to an all-out race to the bottom of the scummy data-slurpers pile.

There Are Also Acceptable Uses

For instance, many websites use visitor counts and track how you interact with their site – do you go to the homepage first and then jump to pages from there? Do you go straight to the “New Stuff” page? Did you come here from a web search engine or from another website that had a link? Or did you just appear, meaning you probably have their site bookmarked?

These sorts of things are, to me, acceptable uses of trackers. They’re between you and the website you’re visiting, and sometimes a third party that just collects those statistics for the website owner. If they started collecting Dot-style information, I’d deny them too in a heartbeat. But I like to let a website operator know that they’re attracting traffic so that they don’t just look at their statistics and decide it’s no longer worth keeping the site open…

The problem is that websites depend on advertiser dollars, advertiser dollars depend on their ads being seen, and ad viewers not wanting their entire online lives slurped up for the purposes of some cooking gear manufacturer knowing that the average person that sees their ads can usually afford to spend $50 on a saucepan but can be upsold to a $100 one if you use certain keywords and get an article about your $100 pots into this and this website.

So – What Can We Do?

Don’t install an ad blocker to block honest advertisers. There aren’t many of them currently, but they deserve to be encouraged. Install a privacy screening app or plugin on your web browsers and be prepared to spend a little time setting it up so it’s right for you.

I use Privacy Badger – I can manage it on a page-by-page basis, allow or deny several levels of tracking, and so forth. It’s free – although I suggest you make a donation to the EFF as they’re the group that’s campaigning endlessly against invasive unnecessary data collection if you get it.

But I can recommend the Badger to you as a thing I’ve used for years and which has never caused me any issues. (Other than self-precious websites that decide they’d rather let unscrupulous advertisers advertise there than basic here’s-an-ad-hope-you-like-it style adverts. Just like they did it back in the days of newspapers and magazines.)

Install your privacy screening package of choice.

And then use it at all times.

When you get to a site that has accepted advertisers that are known to breach your privacy, stick to your guns. Use the “continue without disabling ad blocker” option and remember that the words should be “continue without disabling ‘privacy-invading, tracker-laden ad’ blocker” and that way when the website owner sees 10,000 views of their page with that ad on it but only 1,403 ad impressions of advertisers A, B, C, D, and E’s ads but 8,965 impressions of advertiser X’s ads, they’ll get the idea that we’re prepared to have ads support the site but not bend us over and give us a cavity search.

If enough people do this, that message will become abundantly clear to website owners, to the ad brokers, and the advertisers. And then we can hope that they just moderate their behaviour.

There IS an alternative.

You could also install the AdNauseam app to your browser. AdNauseam works in a different way – it intercepts the ads on a page and then clicks every one of them. At random intervals. This making the ad metrics useless to the advertiser. You won’t get the “looks like you’re using an ad blocker…” messages, website owners still get paid, advertisers get screwed. If enough people install AdNauseam, it may even make a difference…

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