This is the second time I’ve seen PPA and reading the details also shifted my opinion somewhat - at first glance (and based on comments elsewhere) I thought this was FF implementing FLoC or some other Google-invented adtech which sends data to advertisers and enabling it by default.
But from what it sounds like, this is really advertisers/websites providing the information to your browser so it can do conversion tracking locally then anonymously reporting the resulting conversions to an aggregator. Only the information that a conversion happened is transmitted so this is nothing like FLoC where your interests are shared, just the fact that X number of people viewed ad Y and subsequently performed action Z (such as making a purchase).
Combined with the fact that this reduces advertisers need to rely on individual tracking in order to know whether ad Y led to action Z and this could potentially be an off-ramp / compromise to de-escalate advertisers use of tracking by providing them the key metrics they want to know about ad effectiveness through a system that doesn’t make individual tracking easy.
Now the pessimist in me totally believes that they will use this new system while still aggressively using every other method of tracking shotgun style, but if this proves reliable to them then I think it’s plausible that advertisers will put up less of a fight when we add more privacy protection against traditional tracking. But that’s assuming that advertisers feel that this new system provides everything they want and won’t be at risk of being crippled. Otherwise yeah they’ll totally cling to the old way of tracking ad conversions.
They’re going to try and use this as more tracking for sure but…… it’s at least an attempt.
But they’ll always want more data because they think they’re smart and can use random little bits of info to make it better, even if that’s not real. They think it’s real and that’s all that matters.
I think this is actually a decent strategy actually when you read the article.
This is Mozilla trying to innovate something better than tracking, and I’m fairly privacy conscious.
This is the second time I’ve seen PPA and reading the details also shifted my opinion somewhat - at first glance (and based on comments elsewhere) I thought this was FF implementing FLoC or some other Google-invented adtech which sends data to advertisers and enabling it by default.
But from what it sounds like, this is really advertisers/websites providing the information to your browser so it can do conversion tracking locally then anonymously reporting the resulting conversions to an aggregator. Only the information that a conversion happened is transmitted so this is nothing like FLoC where your interests are shared, just the fact that X number of people viewed ad Y and subsequently performed action Z (such as making a purchase).
Combined with the fact that this reduces advertisers need to rely on individual tracking in order to know whether ad Y led to action Z and this could potentially be an off-ramp / compromise to de-escalate advertisers use of tracking by providing them the key metrics they want to know about ad effectiveness through a system that doesn’t make individual tracking easy.
Now the pessimist in me totally believes that they will use this new system while still aggressively using every other method of tracking shotgun style, but if this proves reliable to them then I think it’s plausible that advertisers will put up less of a fight when we add more privacy protection against traditional tracking. But that’s assuming that advertisers feel that this new system provides everything they want and won’t be at risk of being crippled. Otherwise yeah they’ll totally cling to the old way of tracking ad conversions.
They’re going to try and use this as more tracking for sure but…… it’s at least an attempt.
But they’ll always want more data because they think they’re smart and can use random little bits of info to make it better, even if that’s not real. They think it’s real and that’s all that matters.