The founder of AdBlock Plus weighs in on PPA:
Privacy on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population. Advertising on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population.
Yet any attempt to improve this situation is met with fierce resistance by the lucky 10% who know how to navigate their way around the falltraps. Because the internet shouldn’t have tracking! The internet shouldn’t have ads! And any step towards a compromise is a capital offense. I mean, if it slightly benefits the advertisers as well, then it must be evil.
It seems that no solution short of eliminating tracking and advertising on the web altogether is going to be accepted. That we live with an ad-supported web and that fact of life cannot be wished away or change overnight – who cares?
And every attempt to improve the status quo even marginally inevitably fails. So the horribly broken state we have today prevails.
This is so frustrating. I’m just happy I no longer have anything to do with that…
We can do better. It isn’t the 10% ruining it it is the 10% who see that we don’t need to live like lab rats
I mean… what’s wrong with stuff like the Fediverse just gradually strangling the commercially-driven internet? I pay a couple bucks a month to a number of different Fediverse providers and if everyone does that, they’ll likely be able to stay self-sufficient and community-oriented. I honestly don’t mind paying websites directly in that fashion as long as my data is portable and not for sale, whereas I know that if I let most commercial websites have my data, they will sell it to whomever and however many times they are capable of, all while enshitifying the user experience on their website as much as possible without making everyone leave completely.
It’s the most frustrating business model possible and why I refuse to give them any more traction than they already have.
I was there, during the first advertising push of the mid/late 90s, where visiting the wrong website - or even the right one on the wrong day - spawned “uncloseable” pop-ups and pop-unders… uncloseable because as soon as you tried to dismiss the window, that action triggered a half-dozen more to spawn.
Eventually, the weight of all the browser windows would cause not only the browser to grind to a halt, but even the computer as a whole (single-thread CPUs & minimal RAM, nat), such that your only possible recovery path was to conduct a hard restart of the entire system, your unsaved work be damned.
I feel for those businesses whose only possible funding strategy is via ads, but that well was lethally poisoned for me decades ago. I jumped onto the world’s first adblocker the moment it became available for Phoenix (now Firefox), and I have never looked back. The only way I will ever stop using adblocking is to stop using the Internet entirely.
While I also hate ads, what I hate even more is the tracking. I would honestly be okay with ads that respected my privacy, like they largely did back in the early days of the web. I remember visiting sites and having ads that had nothing to do with my interests, probably because they were either randomly or staticly (based on page content) assigned.
We have the technology, however, to move beyond ads. We can do microtransactions and just pay a nominal fee per page view. I wouldn’t mind if I paid the fraction of a penny a page would’ve g otten by showing me an ad, provided that payment was anonymous (e.g. through something like GNU Taler or Monero). But for some reason, websites either expect a ton of money and a login, or ads, with no in-between. I hoped Brave would provide that, but that didn’t happen at all.
Please, give us three options:
- privacy-respecting ads - ads should be relevant to the page content and maybe local browsing history (never sent anywhere, just analyzed locally)
- anonymized microtransactions per page view to avoid ads
- subscription to avoid MTX and ads for sites I use regularly
But if the current options are privacy invasive ads or subscriptions, I’m going to install an ad-blocker. If you prevent me from seeing it, I’m going to look at your competitors instead.
“Why don’t you want to compromise with the leopards? They don’t want to kill you, just let them lick your nose a bit. That would be cute, right!?”
The difference to me, between this thing and what Google is building (“Privacy Sandbox”), is that I trust Mozilla to have user interests in mind. They don’t have shareholders, they don’t have a massive foot in the advertising market, so if this thing turns out to be bad for users, then I expect them to fix it or to pull the plug. With Google, I rather expect them to worsen it for users, when they get the chance to do so, without journalists writing about it.
What would it take Mozilla to do, to break your trust?
For example, what if they sold private data? Or, if that is not extreme enough, what if they sold private data to advertising companies? Stuff like geolocation.
Not the person you replied to, but…
What would it take Mozilla to do, to break your trust?
To move out of the least-worst option position.
Right now it’s in that position. It’s always been in that position, and IMO it has never not been in that position.
And for the record, I am not talking about Mozilla specifically, but the browser ecosystem for that rendering engine that includes any forks and derivatives… because things like Chrome’s maliciously flawed and user-hostile Manifest v3 also cascade down into forks and alternatives that are based off of it, and so contaminate many other normally-good alternatives.
What would it take Mozilla to do, to break your trust?
To move out of the least-worst option position.
Does that mean that you trust it, or just that you will continue using it because you need a browser?
Because to me, there’s a big gulf between a company that hasn’t broken your trust and a company that makes the minimum viable product that you need to use daily.
Exactly. If Brave delivered on what I thought they promised (an alternative compensation system for websites), I would’ve switched. I’m totally on-board with paying whatever websites would’ve made through ads to just not see the ads, and I had hoped Brave would’ve made that a thing. If Brave was based on Mozilla tech, I might even be giving them a shot right now.
But they didn’t, so Mozilla remains the least worst.
My priorities are:
- privacy
- rendering engine diversity
- open source
- performance
I used Opera for years mostly because they were on par w/ 1 and satisfied 2 and 4. Now I’m with Mozilla because they do reasonably well on all four. If Mozilla sells my personal data (violation of 1), I’d switch to something else (probably whatever KDE or GNOME ship with).
