Our great sponsors
-
-
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
> their privacy is being violated and their metadata is being sold, in order for advertisers to track them everywhere they go online
This is exactly what I'm working on changing; have a look at the second half of the post?
(Or read https://github.com/WICG/turtledove)
> at the very least, the ad network will be able to see your IP and know that you like athletic shoes and visited www.wereallylikeshoes.com. If you visit some other domain first-ad-network.com owns with the same IP it within a small window of time, it can be pretty confident it's the same person and even store some client side data at that point. It feels like they can construct a reasonably good profile about their users by using that technique.
Yes, there are a lot of user identifying bits in an IP address. Chrome has two proposals: https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness I'm not sure what other browsers are thinking?
> That's considering the browser doesn't leak out any other potentially identifying information.
Which they definitely do. All the browsers are working on figuring out how to thwart fingerprinting, and it's really hard. I am glad, at least, that we were able to get Google Ads to publicly commit to not fingerprinting.
> when you click on the ad, they know one interest about you and, if you clicked in ads from other campaigns they run, they may reconstruct your profile well
Yes, when people click on ads in Turtledove the advertiser does learn something. This is a huge improvement to the status quo where advertisers learn things just by bidding, or an intermediate stage where advertisers learn things when they win an auction -- users don't click on ads very often, so the amount of information leaked this way is very low.
Exactly how much information the advertiser is able to learn on a click is still very much up in the air, so if you have views on this you might consider participating on the repo?