Privacy Badger doesn’t block ads unless they happen to be tracking you; in fact, one of our goals is to incentivize advertisers to adopt better privacy practices.
There is an easy solution to this --- it is called "context sensitive" advertising. And the idea is simple --- ads are prioritized based on what you're currently viewing, not your viewing history (aka "personalized ads").
What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant. Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already --- so why am I seeing auto ads when I search for pet supplies?. But if I'm currently looking at an auto dealers web site, the odds are pretty good that I'm still interested in buying one.
What's wrong with advertisers? Without any real proof, they have bought into this vision of advertising that is illogical, ineffective and simply not true in many cases --- the idea that personal browsing history is a good indicator of the future.
In the process, they have surrendered their ad budgets to a "black box" process that they have no insight into or control over and can be easily manipulated against them.
So why do I care? Because we *all* pay a price for this.
Frankly, to me it's the other way around, I don't care too much about all that tracking (even though I routinely block most of it), but I do care about the cost of having ads on the page. The cost of my attention, first of all.
Some ads are masterfully made, but even they distract me, not attract. They jump into the view, they suddenly break the page flow, they strive to be clicked by mistake. Tis is especially insufferable on mobile. They clutter the screen and obscure the real content. They eat bandwidth and battery life by loading tons of content I did not ask for. They play whole videos, some are so impudent as to play sounds. They are consciously created as an impediment to reading (or sometimes watching) the content I came for! Isn't it the definition of being actively harmful?
Then, of course, they are mostly not relevant, like, 99.7% of the time. To quote: «A general trend that the advertising business is not interested in delivering ads to the people that want the product. Their real interest is in creating a stratification of product offerings that are all roughly as valuable to the advertiser as the price paid for them. They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.» (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721611)
And they usually offer no way to say: "Hey, this is not interesting, show something else". Instead, Reader View does away with everything irrelevant in one click.
Interestingly, one of the places where I do not block ads is Facebook (which I use sparingly). It knows everything about my profile (obviously), it shows ads moderately, and in a way that's not infuriating, and it even actively asks my opinion about ads. As a result, I taught it to show me highly relevant ads: about electronic music, vintage computers, etc, stuff that I actually would be interested in clicking. This might look anti-privacy, but the tracking is mostly limited to the Facebook content, because I cut off third-party cookies.
> Without any real proof, they have bought into this vision of advertising that is illogical, ineffective and simply not true in many cases --- the idea that personal browsing history is a good indicator of the future
You're claiming they don't have any real proof, but you yourself are not providing proof of that. On the contrary, I assume there's tons of proof (data), whole oceans of the stuff, because personalized advertising goes far beyond just checking if you searched for a car, then showing you car ads.
Instead its: if you searched for marriage related stuff, a year later they'll start showing you baby stuff. If you searched for "why is my husband so..." they'll start showing you ads for divorce lawyers. If you search for "why are there no jobs", they'll start showing you extremist political ads about immigrants stealing all the jobs, and on and on.
This stuff, personalized, designed to manipulate you and hit you at the times when you're emotionally vulnerable, does work. Of course it works. Humans are easy to manipulate if you know their private wants, needs, and emotional state.
It's honestly so embarrassing and damning for HN that drivel like this is getting upvoted. To argue that personalized ads are bad for some kind of privacy argument is all well and good, but to say they're less effective than contextual ads is ridiculous. Some of the commentariate here honestly thinks they've stumbled on something ad tech and marketing companies have never thought of, or worse that there is some grand conspiracy to cover it all up. Meanwhile the people who actually work in ad tech know that there are armies of data scientists poring over every facet they can to get any 1% improvement possible. If contextual ads were actually better Google and Meta et al would instantly switch to it. But they're not.
Actually, the "he looked for a couch a week ago, let's show him all the couch ads we have" is still the best strategy in terms of CPI/CPC. And also a pretty cheap one. This is why they are doing it, not because they are dumb. It may enrage some, but what would they do, quit browsing the Internet?
uBlock Origin is an excellent privacy tool. However, uBlock Origin is not a replacement for Privacy Badger (nor is Privacy Badger a replacement for uBlock Origin).
Any extension you add so you can have more privacy is misleading. Blocking requests/modifying HTML actually makes you more unique. The only real solution for privacy is TOR browser.
We are working towards Safari on macOS support. Safari on iOS seems to lack certain extension capabilities required by Privacy Badger to function properly.
Chrome on Android does not support extensions. To use Privacy Badger on Android, install Firefox for Android.
Privacy Badger does not work with Microsoft Edge Legacy. Please switch to the new Microsoft Edge browser.
How is this better than blocking all third party content with uBlock Origin? Doing so does break a lot of websites, but you can always manually enable necessary CDNs if you care.
I doubt Privacy Badger blocks fonts.googleapis.com for example, which is a dependency A LOT of websites have and that allows Google to track people across the Internet.
PrivacyBadger adjusts what it blocks over time vs seeing it track you. It did start blocking Google Fonts for me, and I had to manually re-enable it because I wanted it.
I forget which level of blocking it was applying; some cookies it just keeps from being cross-site, it isolates them. Others it blocks entirely. You can easily adjust which it is doing for any given cookie.
I think it's true that if you have uBlock Origin you probably don't need this though, that seems likely. I don't run uBlock Origin.
I currently run Firefox nightly with cross-site cookies disabled and all the trackers/scripts blocked. I also run uBlock Origin. Any idea if privacy badger is redundant with this set up?
If you're using ublock origin in advanced mode (really miss umatrix) with JavaScript blocked by default, where you whitelist things. What does PB offer over and above this?
Click-to-active widget replacement, GPC/DNT enforcement, the ability to turn off uBO entirely for a website when you don't feel like dealing with it and then have PB take care of most problems automatically.
Been using it for years, it’s cool. Breaks a lot of websites but know to suspect it when you can’t make a payment or login somewhere. EFF does some good work but I’m much less of a fan than I used to be once I realized that at least to some degree more than merely net neutrality, they function as a telecom lobby laundered through digital ethics.
On a side note, does anybody have a good cookie consent blocker, pop-up blocker for Firefox? I uninstalled "I don't care about cookies" since he got taken over by a mysterious third party.
Google/Others DNS + Turn on all privacy/security settings on Firefox including HTTPS-Only mode and DNS-over-HTTPS + Ublock Origin + Privacy Badger + Decentraleyes = Poor man's VPN.
39 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 65.2 ms ] threadThere is an easy solution to this --- it is called "context sensitive" advertising. And the idea is simple --- ads are prioritized based on what you're currently viewing, not your viewing history (aka "personalized ads").
What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant. Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already --- so why am I seeing auto ads when I search for pet supplies?. But if I'm currently looking at an auto dealers web site, the odds are pretty good that I'm still interested in buying one.
What's wrong with advertisers? Without any real proof, they have bought into this vision of advertising that is illogical, ineffective and simply not true in many cases --- the idea that personal browsing history is a good indicator of the future.
In the process, they have surrendered their ad budgets to a "black box" process that they have no insight into or control over and can be easily manipulated against them.
So why do I care? Because we *all* pay a price for this.
Some ads are masterfully made, but even they distract me, not attract. They jump into the view, they suddenly break the page flow, they strive to be clicked by mistake. Tis is especially insufferable on mobile. They clutter the screen and obscure the real content. They eat bandwidth and battery life by loading tons of content I did not ask for. They play whole videos, some are so impudent as to play sounds. They are consciously created as an impediment to reading (or sometimes watching) the content I came for! Isn't it the definition of being actively harmful?
Then, of course, they are mostly not relevant, like, 99.7% of the time. To quote: «A general trend that the advertising business is not interested in delivering ads to the people that want the product. Their real interest is in creating a stratification of product offerings that are all roughly as valuable to the advertiser as the price paid for them. They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.» (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721611)
And they usually offer no way to say: "Hey, this is not interesting, show something else". Instead, Reader View does away with everything irrelevant in one click.
Interestingly, one of the places where I do not block ads is Facebook (which I use sparingly). It knows everything about my profile (obviously), it shows ads moderately, and in a way that's not infuriating, and it even actively asks my opinion about ads. As a result, I taught it to show me highly relevant ads: about electronic music, vintage computers, etc, stuff that I actually would be interested in clicking. This might look anti-privacy, but the tracking is mostly limited to the Facebook content, because I cut off third-party cookies.
You're claiming they don't have any real proof, but you yourself are not providing proof of that. On the contrary, I assume there's tons of proof (data), whole oceans of the stuff, because personalized advertising goes far beyond just checking if you searched for a car, then showing you car ads.
Instead its: if you searched for marriage related stuff, a year later they'll start showing you baby stuff. If you searched for "why is my husband so..." they'll start showing you ads for divorce lawyers. If you search for "why are there no jobs", they'll start showing you extremist political ads about immigrants stealing all the jobs, and on and on.
This stuff, personalized, designed to manipulate you and hit you at the times when you're emotionally vulnerable, does work. Of course it works. Humans are easy to manipulate if you know their private wants, needs, and emotional state.
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-don...
For more see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
That wiki page is a bunch of nonsense. For example:
>Redundant with Total Cookie Protection (dFPI)
https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with...
Mushroom, mushroom.
We are working towards Safari on macOS support. Safari on iOS seems to lack certain extension capabilities required by Privacy Badger to function properly.
Chrome on Android does not support extensions. To use Privacy Badger on Android, install Firefox for Android.
Privacy Badger does not work with Microsoft Edge Legacy. Please switch to the new Microsoft Edge browser.
I doubt Privacy Badger blocks fonts.googleapis.com for example, which is a dependency A LOT of websites have and that allows Google to track people across the Internet.
I forget which level of blocking it was applying; some cookies it just keeps from being cross-site, it isolates them. Others it blocks entirely. You can easily adjust which it is doing for any given cookie.
I think it's true that if you have uBlock Origin you probably don't need this though, that seems likely. I don't run uBlock Origin.
For more, see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
- https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with...
- https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
For more, see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
Just FYI, you can always disable Privacy Badger on a particular site by using the "Disable for this site" button in PB's popup.
You can also help make PB better by using the "Report broken site" button in PB's popup.
For more, see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
I don't mind having ads on the page, I do mind being tracked. But I guess there is no value to showing me ads without tracking me.