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Ad Tracking: Is Anything Being Done?

Posted by samzenpus on from the don't-track-me-bro dept.

bsk_cw (1202181) writes "The W3C's Tracking Protection Working Group has been trying to come up with a way to make targeted ads acceptable to users and useful to advertisers — and so far, hasn't gotten very far. Computerworld's Robert Mitchell has interviewed people on all sides of the issue — consumer privacy advocates, vendors of ad-blocking tools, advertisers and website publishers — to try to unravel the issues and see if any solution is possible at all."

5 of 303 comments (clear)

  1. Here's a thought by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Insightful

    a way to make targeted ads acceptable to users

    That's like trying to come up with a way to make waterboarding more enjoyable...

    Advertising, be it on television, newspapers, the internet or roadsign billboards, feels like mind rape to me.

    I'm middle-aged and I remember more ads from my youth than stuff I learned at school. Ads for products that don't even exist anymore, but I can't get rid of the stupid ads in my head. Why do advertisers give themselves the right to pollute people's memory long-term with their shit?

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:Here's a thought by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why do advertisers give themselves the right to pollute people's memory long-term with their shit?

      They don't see it as a "right" but rather their purpose.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
  2. Re:Wear the tin foil hat by L4t3r4lu5 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IMHO these websites are examples of bad design . Good design should fall back to plain html/css with ideally, minimum loss of functionality

    Yeah, but then you wouldn't have to whitelist the JavaScript to see the content and get all the advertisements too.

    Working as intended.

    --
    Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
  3. De-facto reality by sjbe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IMHO these websites are examples of bad design .

    While that is true, in practical terms it is irrelevant. Websites are now designed with little/no graceful degradation. That is simply the situation as it is, for better or worse. Websites are not designed to gracefully fall back and probably won't ever be designed that way going forward. There is insufficient economic incentive for commercial ventures to be bothered so it isn't likely to happen. Few people turn off Javascript and those that do are probably not of commercial interest so why design for them? Very annoying but I don't see any reasonably likely chance that it will change either.

    1. Re:De-facto reality by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Whatever happened to designing for accessibility?

      It got replaced by designing for profitability.