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Browser battles shouldn’t take away freedoms, or harm publishers, on the open web (Getty)
We’ve all lived under our parents’ roofs, but many of us in adulthood wouldn’t choose to live by their rules. We believe ourselves capable of making our own choices and keeping ourselves safe. If we’re worried about security, we shop around and buy a security system. If we want privacy, we pick out some curtains, plant arborvitae, or choose not to buy a home within stone’s throw of a neighbor. We don’t need or want overbearing parents making these decisions for us. So why are some browsers acting like helicopter parents?
Browsers are, metaphorically speaking, our homes on the web, the confines within which we live out our digital lives. Apple’s Safari browser and Mozilla’s Firefox browser recently announced changes to their default privacy protections. Safari already blocks most tracking tags by default and has now tightened its “Intelligent Tracking Prevention” feature, which disrupts many of the services that are used to deliver display ads and measure conversions on the web by rendering them cookie-less. Firefox is on its way to block all cross-site trackers. Mozilla has said its effort is largely about increasing the speed of the internet, building trust with users is second on its baderted list of motivators—of course we all think the internet is too damn slow. (The average speed of the internet has grown around 400% over the last 10 years.)
At face value, these moves seem to be good for privacy and good for consumers, right? Not so fast. The deeper one digs into the implications of these sorts of decisions, made putatively on behalf of web users, the more one has to question if anyone besides these two companies—one of which owns an App Store that is plenty supportive of app tracking and personalized ads—really benefits.
None of these browser’s actions lead to fewer ads, by the way, only ones less relevant to your interests. Apple knows this, which is why it doesn’t hold its own app environment to the same standards, where it has expanded its wager on search ads. As Ad Age has pointed out, “Part of the reason for [Apple’s] ROI is the extreme targeting that Apple deploys. The company only shows very targeted ads based on intent, which means that irrelevant results seldom appear even if an advertiser tries to buy them.” So, while it might use Safari to cut back on open-web tracking, it has ramped up tracking in apps. In its own words, here’s how Apple says it does personalized advertising, in addition to what it does in location-based and other forms of targeted app ads: “Additionally to ensure ads are relevant, Apple’s advertising platform creates groups of people, called segments, who share similar characteristics and uses these groups for delivering targeted ads. Information about you is used to determine which segments you are badigned to, and thus, which ads you receive.”
What’s Really Going On?
The result is, despite grand and virtuous privacy claims each time browsers make these kinds of announcements and garner headlines about their theoretical interests in protecting users’ interests, others in the ecosystem like advertisers and those who service them by not jamming up the traditional cookie-based structure of the web get implicitly labeled as the enemy of the people. Sounds so nice and moral and simple!
The problem is, in addition to the intensifying tracking in apps, when you take away the value from cookies in the open web, you have collateral damage that diminishes the other players and threatens especially many smaller-scale sites, which might need to put up paywalls to survive and get into a spiral of fewer readers-fewer ads-less income…. The diversity of voices and choices gets constrained by these big browsers deciding they know what’s best for us and risking reduction in the digital advertising economy, a true bright spot in innovation in the American economy. Without tracking mechanisms, publishers can’t earn a premium by selling advertising space to specific audiences. These revenues power much of the billions of dollars of growth over the last number of years. The latest figures available show that for the full-year 2017 digital advertising revenues were at $88 billion, which makes it now the largest advertising medium. While a lot of that goes to the market leaders, it also feeds local news publishers, mom-and-pop website owners, and online content entrepreneurs.
On top of all these issues, it also takes away freedoms from users to choose how they control their privacy online. There are already tools individual consumers are opting to use to manage their privacy settings on their own. Chrome (the leading browser, at least for the moment) has them. Third-party apps like Ghostery have them, too. Apple and Mozilla aren’t rescuing people from anything they can’t rescue themselves from if they wanted to.
Responsible People, Responsible Choices=Vibrant Web
People also vote with their browser choice. In August 2018, Safari had 13% and Firefox had 7.1% of the market. Neither has ever been the most popular browser. Firefox has been on a long, slow decline for about 8 years. Historically, Safari has reason to celebrate if its share tops just 15%. It would seem in the free economy that winners win consumers when they deliver what consumers actually want.
Both the Firefox and Apple brands have regularly championed the choices they make (and take away from) consumers in service of protecting their privacy, and it hasn’t changed their fates. Safari has long blocked some uses of third-party cookies. (Cookies are the anonymous tags that advertisers, publishers, and their service providers use to track consumer behaviors online in order to increase the value and effectiveness of advertising.) Firefox attempted to block cookies once before in 2013, but after industry pressure and consumer yawns, the browser continued its percentage decline and gave up.
While all browsers have settings turned on by default, they become like those helicoptering parents when they take away choices responsible people can make for themselves—and blithely decide to impose rules that take income away from the smaller players that make the open web so vibrant. The battle for browser dominance shouldn’t result in a loss of publishers. The job of browsers is to give us all the freedom to choose how we explore a vast and endless internet, not to take it away.
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Browser battles shouldn’t take away freedoms, or harm publishers, on the open web (Getty)
We’ve all lived under our parents’ roofs, but many of us in adulthood wouldn’t choose to live by their rules. We believe ourselves capable of making our own choices and keeping ourselves safe. If we’re worried about security, we shop around and buy a security system. If we want privacy, we pick out some curtains, plant arborvitae, or choose not to buy a home within stone’s throw of a neighbor. We don’t need or want overbearing parents making these decisions for us. So why are some browsers acting like helicopter parents?
Browsers are, metaphorically speaking, our homes on the web, the confines within which we live out our digital lives. Apple’s Safari browser and Mozilla’s Firefox browser recently announced changes to their default privacy protections. Safari already blocks most tracking tags by default and has now tightened its “Intelligent Tracking Prevention” feature, which disrupts many of the services that are used to deliver display ads and measure conversions on the web by rendering them cookie-less. Firefox is on its way to block all cross-site trackers. Mozilla has said its effort is largely about increasing the speed of the internet, building trust with users is second on its baderted list of motivators—of course we all think the internet is too damn slow. (The average speed of the internet has grown around 400% over the last 10 years.)
At face value, these moves seem to be good for privacy and good for consumers, right? Not so fast. The deeper one digs into the implications of these sorts of decisions, made putatively on behalf of web users, the more one has to question if anyone besides these two companies—one of which owns an App Store that is plenty supportive of app tracking and personalized ads—really benefits.
None of these browser’s actions lead to fewer ads, by the way, only ones less relevant to your interests. Apple knows this, which is why it doesn’t hold its own app environment to the same standards, where it has expanded its wager on search ads. As Ad Age has pointed out, “Part of the reason for [Apple’s] ROI is the extreme targeting that Apple deploys. The company only shows very targeted ads based on intent, which means that irrelevant results seldom appear even if an advertiser tries to buy them.” So, while it might use Safari to cut back on open-web tracking, it has ramped up tracking in apps. In its own words, here’s how Apple says it does personalized advertising, in addition to what it does in location-based and other forms of targeted app ads: “Additionally to ensure ads are relevant, Apple’s advertising platform creates groups of people, called segments, who share similar characteristics and uses these groups for delivering targeted ads. Information about you is used to determine which segments you are badigned to, and thus, which ads you receive.”
What’s Really Going On?
The result is, despite grand and virtuous privacy claims each time browsers make these kinds of announcements and garner headlines about their theoretical interests in protecting users’ interests, others in the ecosystem like advertisers and those who service them by not jamming up the traditional cookie-based structure of the web get implicitly labeled as the enemy of the people. Sounds so nice and moral and simple!
The problem is, in addition to the intensifying tracking in apps, when you take away the value from cookies in the open web, you have collateral damage that diminishes the other players and threatens especially many smaller-scale sites, which might need to put up paywalls to survive and get into a spiral of fewer readers-fewer ads-less income…. The diversity of voices and choices gets constrained by these big browsers deciding they know what’s best for us and risking reduction in the digital advertising economy, a true bright spot in innovation in the American economy. Without tracking mechanisms, publishers can’t earn a premium by selling advertising space to specific audiences. These revenues power much of the billions of dollars of growth over the last number of years. The latest figures available show that for the full-year 2017 digital advertising revenues were at $88 billion, which makes it now the largest advertising medium. While a lot of that goes to the market leaders, it also feeds local news publishers, mom-and-pop website owners, and online content entrepreneurs.
On top of all these issues, it also takes away freedoms from users to choose how they control their privacy online. There are already tools individual consumers are opting to use to manage their privacy settings on their own. Chrome (the leading browser, at least for the moment) has them. Third-party apps like Ghostery have them, too. Apple and Mozilla aren’t rescuing people from anything they can’t rescue themselves from if they wanted to.
Responsible People, Responsible Choices=Vibrant Web
People also vote with their browser choice. In August 2018, Safari had 13% and Firefox had 7.1% of the market. Neither has ever been the most popular browser. Firefox has been on a long, slow decline for about 8 years. Historically, Safari has reason to celebrate if its share tops just 15%. It would seem in the free economy that winners win consumers when they deliver what consumers actually want.
Both the Firefox and Apple brands have regularly championed the choices they make (and take away from) consumers in service of protecting their privacy, and it hasn’t changed their fates. Safari has long blocked some uses of third-party cookies. (Cookies are the anonymous tags that advertisers, publishers, and their service providers use to track consumer behaviors online in order to increase the value and effectiveness of advertising.) Firefox attempted to block cookies once before in 2013, but after industry pressure and consumer yawns, the browser continued its percentage decline and gave up.
While all browsers have settings turned on by default, they become like those helicoptering parents when they take away choices responsible people can make for themselves—and blithely decide to impose rules that take income away from the smaller players that make the open web so vibrant. The battle for browser dominance shouldn’t result in a loss of publishers. The job of browsers is to give us all the freedom to choose how we explore a vast and endless internet, not to take it away.
