> Expecting advertisers to stop advertising on the Internet is like expecting all the billboards on the highway to blow down.
That's not the expectation at all, in fact quite the opposite.
Giving concessions to advertisers doesn't make anything change. Anti-fingerprinting is the way you stop advertisers from fingerprinting. Nothing else short of legislation will work, and even legislation doesn't always work in every scenario.
Expecting advertisers to behave just because you gave them a more private attribution system is like expecting ants to stop going onto your countertops just because you put a cupcake on the floor.
The question is, given that Facebook will always take as much data as they are able to technically extract from the browser, and given that you're correct and advertisers are not going to stop advertising on the Internet regardless of what restrictions are put up -- why is it important to make them happy or to give the company concessions? Building a system that Facebook is happy with won't make its behavior change, so why do we care if they like the things we build?
Funny enough, that cupcake trick works for bees (old Boy Scout trick: if you're having bee trouble, put some juice in a can and set it away from the campsite. Bees will gravitate towards the easier target).
But on the topic: at least in the US, if we're talking a legal solution, there won't be one that doesn't factor in the needs of Fortune 500 companies. And attempts to build solutions not factoring them in in Europe got us, well, the GDPR and infinite consent dialogs.
Better to bring parties to the table than try to hash a solution that pretends they don't have interests here.
GDPR works rather well, if given enough teeth. At the very least, nobody in the EU and the UK is quite so reckless with personal data as they used to be, which is the point. The infinite consent dialogs... I'd argue they were an oversight during the drafting process, and that nobody expected companies to go full-idiot just to keep processing and collecting data, rather than just comply with the law in the simplest possible way - which is to just stop collecting guest visitor data.
> nobody expected companies to go full-idiot just to keep processing and collecting data, rather than just comply with the law in the simplest possible way
But there was over a decade of frameworks built on the old "collect everything and use it later" model. By default, even Apache collects enough information to be considered a GDPR violation.
Throwing a dialog up and putting one cookie on the end-user's machine was the simplest possible way; the alternative was a mass audit of all dependencies.
(... and if anyone drafting the law didn't realize this, it would strongly indicate they didn't pull enough industry people into the process to draft a good law).
> do we want an ever-escalating arms race or a negotiated peace?
I have yet to see an evidence that a negotiated peace is possible, and I have seen a lot of evidence that suggests to me that it is impossible.
I personally would rather see hard anti-fingerprinting features in browsers, potentially combined with legislation to fill in the gaps. I have seen a lot of evidence from platforms like iOS, and from web standards like deprecating cookies, that advertisers are only willing to come to the table after they've already lost, and that they only come to the table to weaken existing standards.
I have a lot of criticism of Apple, but I look at some of the changes in iOS that were made in regards to Facebook, and it's hard for me not to conclude that the best ways to tangibly improve privacy on platforms like Facebook are to just move forward without its permission. I look at adblockers the same way, there were no conversations about acceptable ads until advertisers thought it was possible that adblockers might become widespread.
It's not clear to me what a negotiated peace would entail or how to get there, but it is very clear to me how to improve anti-fingerprinting measures and how to pass legislation. Yes, that means that we're in an arms race, but if we understand that advertisers are always going to advocate for more tracking, it follows that a theoretical negotiated peace would also need to be constantly renegotiated over and over again.
Short of burning the industry to the ground and not having ads online, which I think is a separate conversation, I don't believe there is a stable solution to advertising and privacy. Whether it's legislation or technology or industry standards, they will always need to be defended and reinforced and renegotiated. There will always be advertisers arguing that they should be more lax. And I think that's part of why the idea of an arms race isn't that scary to me, because to me all of it is an arms race, including negotiated acceptable ad standards.
> Legislation definitely needs to be part of the solution.
Yup, that's about where I'm at. Standard Oil wasn't broken up because a lot of people made extremely rational arguments about how much monopolies hurt long term economic health to Rockefeller and he just changed his mind. It was broken up because the government stepped in.
Advertising is costing America an intense amount of productivity and we're going to need regulations and constraints to help restrict it (vermont has greatly benefited from said billboard restrictions)
It is devaluing our services causing them to be less competitive and decreasing worker productivity by lowering the enjoyment of leisure activities leading to higher stress and increasing tool friction. If you want numbers - I don't have them... but the effects on our mental health are pretty clear.
> More generally, though, I have to ask: do we want an ever-escalating arms race or a negotiated peace?
That's not a choice that's being offered. There is no reason to expect advertising platforms like Google or Facebook to ever be happy with "enough tracking". If they can get more information, they will want more, regardless of any "negotiations". This has been shown pretty clearly with the DoNotTrack header (now itself a tracking element), and the GDPR cookie policies.
That's not the expectation at all, in fact quite the opposite.
Giving concessions to advertisers doesn't make anything change. Anti-fingerprinting is the way you stop advertisers from fingerprinting. Nothing else short of legislation will work, and even legislation doesn't always work in every scenario.
Expecting advertisers to behave just because you gave them a more private attribution system is like expecting ants to stop going onto your countertops just because you put a cupcake on the floor.
The question is, given that Facebook will always take as much data as they are able to technically extract from the browser, and given that you're correct and advertisers are not going to stop advertising on the Internet regardless of what restrictions are put up -- why is it important to make them happy or to give the company concessions? Building a system that Facebook is happy with won't make its behavior change, so why do we care if they like the things we build?