But you cannot make this my problem by saying "let me spy on you. or your shit gets more expensive, or sites have to close". That sounds too much like "an offer you cannot refuse". I will not surrender my privacy for failed business models.
The same couldn't work with the internet because essentially every ID would be known to potential bad actors, as they'd be tracking every single one of them (among other data points) and can easily defeat the rotation of those IDs based on other data points which don't change.
Define "hurt".
I'd rather make a decision to pay $5/month for a service than to be the product and get spied on
This cannot be an afterthought—it must be the central question all advertising skeptics must start with.
That might be legal for the moment but it is in no way moral.
Democracies are bought on advertising.
Hiding the price of the user's attention is not a positive side effect to the user. Hiding who buys the user's attention is not a positive side effect to the user. Hiding how many other people's attentions are also being sold is not a positive side effect to the user. All of these are detriments to the user.
How, exactly? It's entirely opaque to the user.
At a minimum, you should offer a free, ad-supported version alongside a paid, ad-free (and tracking free) experience.
But what is a fair price? That depends on the traffic, but we are positing that detection of "is this a real user" is not possible, right?
Traditionally, advertisers have gone by Nielsen style ratings for broadcast media (pay people to track what they consume, extrapolate) and circulation numbers for print media. In our hypothetical world the former would still be possible but the latter wouldn't. Unfortunately, in addition to being really inefficient, if you pay people to track what they consume you will essentially never compensate niche publications. This strongly promotes centralization.
Privacy Pass / Trust Tokens / etc seem much more promising to me?
Couldn't the price just be based on the actual payoff the advertiser gets (aka increased product sales)? The publisher is incentivized to set the maximum price that the advertiser will pay, and the advertiser is incentivized to get the most bang for their buck, so at the very least they would never pay more than what the ad brings them in terms of revenue.
Over time, this should reach an equilibrium. Niche publications may have to charge low prices at the start as they build their reputation among advertisers, but I think that's a worthwhile price to pay if it means better privacy and eliminating a problematic advertising model of CPM/CPC (where fraud is possible and tracking is required to battle it).
Getting the initial price is going to be hard, but over time, rates will start to become known.
Ok I agree that ad fraud is hurting publishers, as a secondary effect hurting consumers but the damage consumer getting in this current system is much much bigger. This is like saying you continue taking 5x damage, cause 1x damage to your publisher will effect you negative.
Ad spend as a percentage of GDP has been surprisingly constant for the past century. IOW, companies do not spend more on ads just because they can better target their potential customers, nor will they spend less if they lose that ability.
When you use a service that is funded by advertising, the service only gets that funding because the advertisers trust that they are getting their ads in front of real users. Some advertisers are able to precisely measure the quality of their traffic, for example by seeing whether the traffic they get buys things, but most are in businesses where that's not possible (no one clicks on an ad for Coca-Cola and then places an order for Coke). Ad fraud means that advertisers are less willing to pay to be shown on the service, so the service's funding decreases.
Very likely, less funding for the service hurts you as a consumer: they are probably spending their funding in support of the site. For example, I believe that the ads here fund the moderators.
> why should you be allowed to spy on me - who never defrauded any advertisers - to fix your problem?
See my response to wil421: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25430453 I think that fix here is some thing like https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-supports-privacy-pass... or https://web.dev/trust-tokens/ that allows detecting and preventing fraud in a privacy preserving manner.