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📂 **Category**:
📌 **What You’ll Learn**:
When Meta, Google and Apple agree on a “privacy”
feature, watch out.
The three companies (along with Mozilla, which is on one of their “ad
features in the browser” kicks again) are drawing up a built-in
advertising measurement system, called Attribution Level 1, as a
standard feature of web browsers. The system is intended to measure the
effectiveness of advertising by enabling advertisers to correlate
“impressions,” the occasions on which someone saw an ad, with
“conversions,” when people bought something.
Don’t look for a section on permissions or consent in that document,
by the way. There isn’t one. And nothing about nerd lawyer stuff like
“opt out of sale” or “objections to processing” in there, either. The
Big Tech companies want a two-track system, where other
companies’ ad features are required to do all the privacy regulation
hassles, but the browser’s own built-in tracking feature is
something that people have to find
the right setting for and turn off.
Unfortunately, this is not just a chapter in Big Tech’s ongoing
antitrust saga. The attribution cartel is on track to perpetrate real
harms to users, including:
-
Built-in advantage for search, social, and app store
advertising: More money for Big Tech, less for legit sites and
other ad-supported resources. -
Added incentives for riskier tracking:
Obfuscating the source of a sale makes it easier to get a payoff from
tracking practices that would be seen as problematic on their
own.
Those consequences are unavoidable because of the proposal’s narrow,
mathematical privacy goals, which are a mismatch for the kinds of
privacy harms that people experience in the real world. In the “Privacy
Considerations” section, the proposal says,
The main privacy goal of this API is to ensure that providing sites
with the ability to perform attribution does not improve their ability
to perform cross-site recognition.
The system is supposed to produce aggregated measurements while
making it prohibitively difficult for an advertiser to discover whether
any one person who bought something is the same person who saw an ad.
Technically, the way it works is that a script running on a site with
ads asks the browser to record an ad impression. Then the browser keeps
a record of ads seen from all the sites you visit. Later, when you buy
something, the retail site can ask the browser to generate a “conversion
report” that can be passed to a centralized aggregation service. The
aggregation service can then give the site some aggregated results, in a
way that does not reveal whether any individual who bought something
ever saw a particular ad or visited a particular site.
So why are the same companies that are notorious for tracking people
so fired up about it? The problem is that the attribution tracking won’t
be functioning in isolation. It has to interact with other technologies
and business models. Even if the browser developers can pull off their
ambitious goal of preventing “cross-site recognition,” the proposal
would make life worse on the real Internet.
Problem one: Over-rating search, social, and app store ads
Marketing data expert Rick Bruner explained
this best.
Lower-funnel media naturally appear more effective because they
intercept demand after it has already been created elsewhere. Search is
the classic example. Brand advertising may create the demand, but the
search click gets the attribution credit because it occurs closest to
the sale.
And the shift isn’t just a matter of a Big
Tech squeeze on smaller companies, or an oligopoly tax on everything
you buy. The attribution cartel threatens us as citizens, too. Many
advertising-supported media have positive externalities—they benefit
even people who don’t use them. Corruption
thrives where newspapers shut down. Meanwhile, the negative
externalities of Big Tech are too numerous or too content-warning-worthy
to list here. The average person in the USA has about $1200/year spent
on advertising intended to reach them. Where do you want “your” $1200
spent?
So can’t I just turn it off?
Privacy is a collective problem, not an individual one. Attribution
cartel reports will end up filtered through friendly academics and
presented at every privacy law hearing at every state legislature in the
land—look how small businesses depend on Big Tech to make sales, you
shouldn’t regulate us. Even though professional marketers already
know the attribution cartel is offering “little
better than voodoo” and “just a surface for the media sellers to commit
fraud”, professional marketers won’t always be in the loop. Lobbying
dirty tricks are a thing, and every browser running this system will
act as a little lobbyist for Big Tech.
This post is already getting too long, so I won’t cover all the extra
problems besides the big two.
-
There’s no estimate of the environmental impact of all the extra
processing. For people trying to use the web responsibly, and for
marketing departments tracking their carbon footprint, that’s a big
omission. -
Centralizing on a few big companies in the USA is going the
opposite direction from the
toward digital sovereignty. (It is the World Wide
Web.)
What to do about it?
It’s time to stop. Give the authors some recognition for their
mathematical achievement—some of the ideas might be useful elsewhere,
maybe forecasting energy demand without revealing who’s home—and then
archive this thing. None of this stuff is inevitable. Even Google was
able to shut down the similar “Privacy
Sandbox” project when it got too much regulator attention. By now
W3C should have learned the lesson that all those boring “competition
policy” slides and meeting announcements at groups like the Linux
Foundation, Interactive
Advertising Bureau, and Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers are there for a reason. If
you try to YOLO the antitrust bureaucracy, big companies doing forum
shopping will take advantage. Say what you want about the lysine
price-fixing conspiracy, at least they booked their own meeting
rooms and didn’t use an existing organization.
Back when commercial open source was first booming, and corporate
sponsorship of community events was a big thing, there were quite a few
open bars at all-ages events. Events managers quietly started coming
into compliance with the alcohol laws before any consequences made the
news, and W3C still has the opportunity to do the same. Cutting off
surveillance oligarchs from colluding might be a little harder than
cutting off some overserved teen hackers from the adult beverages, but
the principle is the same.
Worst case, if the attribution cartel does get its way, at least add
the functionality to allow attribution tracking to be managed by
extensions the way that all the other ad stuff is. A majority of people
in the USA use an ad blocker now, and the number one reason is now
privacy, not annoyance. Users who have been told that they can protect
themselves by installing Privacy
Badger, or uBlock
Origin with the right filter lists, should not have that advice
rendered invalid on a technicality.
Most of the articles about this kind of stuff are structured as a Feedback
sandwich: an introduction about how great it is that some big
company is doing something for privacy, the actual content of the
article, and then a positive conclusion about how we can all work
together on future privacy projects. But I’m not getting paid for this,
this is my personal blog, and scam culture is
everywhere, so that’s all for now.
🔥 **What’s your take?**
Share your thoughts in the comments below!
#️⃣ **#advertising #cartel #coming #web #browser**
🕒 **Posted on**: 1780429944
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