This language to make consent popups sound good is suspicious. Not being interrupted while you're browsing is good. A browser setting that people can turn off once, for all participating websites, is good.

>Problem one: Over-rating search, social, and app store ads

Isn't this a problem with today's ad attribution system? The author doesn't try to argue how the new system makes it worse.

>Problem two: Incentives for extra tracking

Same as above. It sounds like he's against attribution in general, which is an okay position to have, but I'd rather he say this upfront and more directly rather than spending 1k+ words on what essentially can be boiled down to "I hate Attribution Level 1 because it's attribution, and attribution is bad in general", and implying the issues he has are issues with Attribution Level 1 specifically.

Here is a more honest summary:

"This proposal hurts us, small advertisement networks and professional marketers. Reject it, or we will ramp up the tracking to compensate for the lost opportunities!"

?

This feels like a good sign, to me. I get far more worried when I see the likes of Meta, Google, Spotify, Epic etc team up.

> There’s no estimate of the environmental impact of all the extra processing

The “environmental impact” of this data processing is one of the “big two” problems with the proposal? Maybe this was just a backup filler argument but it is such a silly point that it immediately makes me question the entire article. This is a massive tell that someone is arguing in bad faith.

"Eternal September II" is when Chrome was first released to the public.

They've been there for a while now. Sadly.

I'd like to see AppsFlyer work on this as well. Moving mobile attribution to device based would be a huge privacy benefit. But it might be quite difficult for a company like AppsFlyer to do this, so it might need to end up being pushed by Apple and Google, but as both advertising companies, they might be even less incentivized for this kind of local tracking.

We need to eliminate private companies from our browsers in general. Many years ago they called it "acceptable ads".

Interestingly $1,200 is roughly 3.5% of what the average American spends per year (roughly $78k), and $1200 is roughly 15% of the average American's discretionary spending. That doesn't seem too crazy to me as a cost for the main driver of the matching and branding system of the capitalist economy of the United States.

Advertising needs to be over now.

> Technically, the way it works is that a script running on a site with ads asks the browser to record an ad impression. Then the browser keeps a record of ads seen from all the sites you visit. Later, when you buy something, the retail site can ask the browser to generate a “conversion report” that can be passed to a centralized aggregation service.

It's my view that the Founders did not think to directly mention privacy since they had no capacity to imagine technology as powerful as that which enables today's surveillance capitalists. But the sort of law that would establish a general right to privacy (or the kind of values that would lead us to establish one) would likely also hinder companies from aggregating user data for any purpose other than directly serving users. (And it would also hinder the government from surveilling its citizens.)

If such an amendment were considered, we'd all fast find that most techies aren't actually liberals. Oh wait, we saw that when they all turned to support Trump. Surprise, surprise.

I promise you that when consumer and enterprise funds dry up, every one of these AI companies will be placing ads and selling surveillance and drone tech to the government. Anthropic already dropped the part of its constitution that forbid collaboration of any kind with the military. The pressure to profitability is immense.

Today, purported morality is mostly (temporary) sophistry. Most folks will work for Zsuck or Palantir if the money is good enough.