...there are millions of transactions every single day in which Google (representing a publisher) tells Google (representing the marketplace) about an ad-slot for sale; whereupon Google (representing many different advertisers) places bids on that ad-slot.
Using websites in 2023 without an Ad blocker is like wrestling an octopus. Entirely unusable.
From an accessibility standpoint I fail to see how it’s not illegal. So many things steal focus from assistive technologies.
I challenge you to spend a day trying to use the web without seeing what’s on the screen, with only what your OS provides. And no ad blocker.
Or with only voice controls, or any other assistive tech. If more organisations did this, they’d soon see how actively hostile they’re being to those with accessibility needs.
Accessibility should be part of the design, testing, QA, and UAT for your website or product.
And don’t give me “but how do smaller organisations manage that?” - if this were law, within 6 months you could get off the shelf themes for WordPress or Wix or Bootstrap that manage it all for you.
It’s not a technical problem. It’s political will.
@SecurityWriter My counterpoint is #NotAllWebsites, I guess. If you really like the "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four" future, adblockers are the way to guarantee it. It's fine to correctly say "that shit doesn't work" about sites that drank too much #AdTech Koolaide, but if we throw the open-web baby out with the adtech bathwater, we won't have any #OpenWeb sites left at all.
Peter Whiting, on companies that offer you to sell your own personal data:
"""
If you know that a thief will steal your watch tomorrow so you offer it up today in return for a quarter, the core problem has not been solved. In fact, you have shown the robber a way to steal from you without even needing to mug you in the first place.
"""
#DataProtection#Privacy#Microtargeting#Adtech: "Nearly three years ago we launched Blacklight, an online tool that allows users to enter any website and find out what tracking technologies are present and who gets the visitor data they collect.
This month, Blacklight hit a significant milestone: The tool has successfully conducted more than 10 million scans. Seven million of those scans were completed in just this past year.
Blacklight was created with one guiding premise: that it would be more powerful to show people, in real time, how they were being tracked online than to merely tell them such tracking was happening."
🧵 A great thread on how #CookieConsent is so badly (and deliberately) misinterpreted to make people grumpy with the law rather than the (horrible) implementations.
Also an interesting commentary on the #AdTech industry …
Reminds me of the time when The Next Web, an adtech company, asked me and some other folks to say “I told you so” about Facebook, another adtech company.¹
I said I‘d only do it if I could call them out at the same time. They agreed.
You know why?
Because the fuckers knew they’d still make money from the article… via adtech!
In case you’re wondering how little old Kitten performs in the tests of the Big Boys…
(And that’s from a development build of a Domain page, not a deployment build so no compression, live reload script in page, etc.)
Turns out it’s pretty easy to ace such tests when you’re not spending cycles and code doing horrible things to people in your web pages (like tracking their every move and attempting to exploit their behaviour for profit). 🤔
In 1998, two Stanford kids published a paper in Computer Networks: "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," in which they wrote, "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers."
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud - when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix's merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review - but it didn't.
Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their #adtech and #fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?