A ban on tracking-based personalised advertising will provide an incentive to reinforce sustainable alternative models and, in fact, will be a condition for making them viable. The advertising industry already has sustainable, proven concepts for effective online advertising that do not require targeted tracking and personalisation (e.g. contextual advertising).
Contextual advertising works. Targeted advertising? Who knows!
Let’s see all that proof that 400+ requests for thirsty ass always-running JavaScript is just what we have to do to make advertising good.
This is disgusting, if unsurprising: Google aren’t going to deprecate third-party cookies after all.
Make no mistake, Chrome is not a user agent. It is an agent for the behavioural advertising industry.
The bar to overriding browser defaults should be way higher than it is.
Amen!
Huh! I did not know this. Good to know!
James describes his process for designing fluid grid layouts, which very much involves working with the grain of the web but against the grain of our design tools:
In 2022 our design tools are still based around fixed-size artboards, while we’re trying to design products which scale gracefully to suit any screen.
If you were at dConstruct on Friday and you enjoyed the mood music during the breaks, this is what you were listening to.
Okay, combining flex-basis and clamp() is pretty cool!
Targeted advertising based on online behavior doesn’t just hurt privacy. It also contributes to a range of other harms.
I very much agree with this call to action from the EFF.
Maybe we can finally get away from the ludicrious idea that behavioural advertising is the only possible form of effective advertising. It’s simply not true.
I really hope that Betteridge’s Law doesn’t apply to this headline.
Simply put, the popups asking people for consent whenever they land on a site are illegal.
Google Topics is the successor to Google FLoC. It seems to require collusion from your “user agent”:
I can’t see why any other browser would consider supporting Topics. Google wants to keep tracking users across the entire web in a world where users realize they don’t want to be tracked. Why help Google?
Google sees Chrome as a way to embed the entire web into an iframe on Google.com.
While the dream of “personalized” ads has turned out to be mostly a nightmare, adtech has built some of the wealthiest companies in the world based on tracking us. It’s no surprise to me that as Members of the European Parliament contemplate tackling these many harms, Big Tech is throwing millions of Euros behind a “necessary evil” PR defense for its business model.
But tracking is an unnecessary evil.
Even in today’s tracking-obsessed digital ecosystem it’s perfectly possible to target ads successfully without placing people under surveillance. In fact right now, some of the most effective and highly valued online advertising is contextual — based on search terms, other non-tracking based data, and the context of websites rather than intrusive, dangerous surveillance.
Let’s be clear. Advertising is essential for small and medium size businesses, but tracking is not.
Rather than creating advertising that is more relevant, more timely and more likable we are creating advertising that is more annoying, more disliked, and more avoided.
I promise you, the minute tracking is outlawed, Facebook, Google and the rest of the adtech giants will claim that their new targeting mechanisms (whatever they turn out to be) are superior to tracking.
Behavioral ads are only more profitable than context ads if all the costs of surveillance – the emotional burden of being watched; the risk of breach, identity-theft and fraud; the potential for government seizure of surveillance data – is pushed onto internet users. If companies have to bear those costs, behavioral ads are a total failure, because no one in the history of the human race would actually grant consent to all the things that gets done with our data.
Google and the entire tracking industry relies on IAB Europe’s consent system, which has now been found to be illegal.
The discussions around data policy still feel like they are framing data as oil - as a vast, passive resource that either needs to be exploited or protected. But this data isn’t dead fish from millions of years ago - it’s the thoughts, emotions and behaviours of over a third of the world’s population, the largest record of human thought and activity ever collected. It’s not oil, it’s history. It’s people. It’s us.
Privacy-invasive user tracking is to Google and Facebook what carbon emissions are to fossil fuel companies — a form of highly profitable pollution that for a very long time few people in the mainstream cared about, but now, seemingly suddenly, very many care about quite a bit.
Oh, nice! A version of the classic Proxima Nova that’s a variable font that allows you to vary weight, width, and slant.
Removing
mediasupport from HTML video was a mistake.
Damn right! It was basically Hixie throwing a strop, trying to sabotage responsive images. Considering how hard it is usually to remove a shipped feature from browsers, it’s bizarre that a good working feature was pulled out of production.