11mo ago

Mozilla Welcomes Anonym: Privacy Preserving Digital Advertising

blog.mozilla.org

Mozilla Welcomes Anonym: Privacy Preserving Digital Advertising | The Mozilla Blog

80 comments

I said this in the other thread but it bears repeating.
Data-driven marketing and privacy are diametrically opposed.
If I want to advertise to pregnant teenagers looking at bus tickets, even if I have something helpful to say, that is a huge privacy violation to those people. And even if you say, I can't see who's being advertised to, I can see who clicks on the ads, even accidentally. Now I know a whole lot about them
- I can see who clicks on the ads
  Any privacy-focused advertisement program needs to prevent this. Clicking on privacy-oriented ads should be handled locally and anonymous statistics sent to Mozilla for revenue collection. There should be zero way to connect my identity with any interaction with ads.
  If they can manage that, I'll disable my ad-blocking on those sites that opt-in. But I'm not giving up any of my metadata. My metadata stays on my machine, so if they want to advertise to me, they need to abide by that.
  
  That's not how ads work
  
  It's how they should work.
  When I get an ad in the mail, the advertiser doesn't know that I actually looked at it. When I grab a newspaper ad at the store, the advertiser doesn't know that I did that unless I use a coupon or something.
  That's how I'd like online ads to work, but with a bit of targeting based on local-only data.
  If they want me to look at ads, they're going to need to respect my privacy. If not, I'm content leaving my ad-blocker enabled.
  
  The whole point of targeted advertising is that you get to bid on people you want. You want a old fat guy in Oklahoma? Done You want to advertise gambling apps to people who have a history of gambling? Done.
  
  That's certainly true from Google's or Meta's perspective, but it wasn't always that way.
  I get ads in my mailbox that are completely irrelevant to me, like Medicare ads (probably for the previous owner). As a kid, I watched lots of ads on TV that definitely weren't applicable to me (e.g. cutco knives, when I wasn't old enough to use a knife). I see billboards on my way to work for debt relief (not in any debt, aside from mortgage) and addiction recovery (no addictions here). Companies pay quite a bit for those ads even if they won't be relevant for most people because of the sheer reach of those ads.
  I'm proposing a middleground. Ad companies don't get as accurate of targeting for ads, but in exchange they get seen by people who would otherwise block them.
  
  I'm not sure how that's physically possible. Any data-driven marketing strategy that results in clicks, somebody just makes a very narrow campaign and then measures the clicks. Anybody who clicks matches the data targeting.
  If the goal is to drive clicks, and not just like expose you to a logo passively, I don't see how it's physically possible to do anything else
  
  Like this:
  Mozilla runs some algorithm to categorize browsing history
  Advertisers send an ad compaign to Mozilla targeting certain categories
  Firefox downloads those campaigns regularly and notifies websites that the client has opted-in to local ads
  Website doesn't display ads, and Firefox replaces ad areas with locally-driven ads
  Any clicks/views are recorded locally and reported periodically to Mozilla in an anonymized fashion (e.g. distribution of categories among views and clicks, distribution across domains, etc); clicks open in a new tab with no tracking other than the ad image that was clicked (e.g. if it was a product, the server can redirect to that product page)
  Mozilla bills advertisers using click and view stats; advertisers only get summarized, aggregated data
  That's what I thought Brave was promising, and that's what I hope Mozilla is planning. I doubt Mozilla will deliver, but hope springs eternal. If anyone can do it, it's Mozilla, I just doubt they will.