Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

There is a German movie about the system that is used to gather TV ratings. It's a special box that some users get which reports what they are watching. Small sample size goes into a big statistic (not sure how accurate the portrayal of the system in the movie is). These boxes are given to the people who pay the German public TV fee, which excludes i.e. students (they don't have to pay) and some other groups. This group of critical people figured that out and started to hack into these machines to fake ratings. They faked the ratings away from stupid trash TV towards some higher quality stuff, documentaries, culture, ... Obviously in the movie then the country saw a renaissance, everyone got smarter, yadda yadda, you get it.

I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them).

Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud. Send come fake traffic away from Facebook and over to Wikipedia.

As someone who has been in one or another meeting with German TV stations I can assure you this is not completely far fetched. The people deciding what is running at these stations are of the mindset (a translated quote):

> Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while doing the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be understood by them

and then they will serenade about how they would "love to have a bit more sophisticated things", but as they are the only ones who really understand their audience, they cannot allow this, although they support the values of the 68 generation etc. pp.

From my standpoint the German television landscape is completely doomed, because the people at the levers are in the illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while in fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible stupid and must not ever be confronted with content that shows them that there is still stuff to learn and understand in the world.

That is always the problem with data: it is reactive. Sure the average watcher is 65, and wants easy to understand stuff: that is what the data shows (I'll assume for discussion that is what the data shows, but I have no insight into if it is true or not). What the data doesn't show is if content would draw in day 25 year olds, they need several years of trying those other shows to see if it makes a difference - a very risky best that could run them out of business even if true (that is the older crowd stops watching faster than the younger crowd figured out it is worth watching meaning advertisers don't pay enough to keep producing content).

Of course TV in the US has figured out that the 65+ crowd is very valuable to customers (the advertisers, not viewers!), so even though they could get more viewers by not showing the nightly news, the nightly news is what they show.

This the same problem as interviewing people for a job nd collecting data about which “features” from interviews correlate with job performance… Without tracking the performance of any of the candidates who weren’t offered jobs—or turned down an offer.

Something, something, a diagram of a plane showing where the damage was on those that returned from missions.

> Something, something, a diagram of a plane showing where the damage was on those that returned from missions.

Ahahahah I love this dogwhistle. You always know you're in good company when someone waves their hands around and says "put the armor where there AREN'T bullet holes" and gives you a significant look. XD

In the US there's actually an FCC requirement that television channels air news.

From https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-broadcasting: "virtually every station has an obligation to provide news, public affairs, and other programming that specifically treats the important issues facing its community." The details are specific to the license, but almost every station is required to air at least an hour of news a day.

There's also requirements to air a certain number of hours of educational material for children (https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-educational-t...).

> In the US there's actually an FCC requirement that television channels air news.

Except, I thought, if they're explicitly registered as entertainment channels? (Like... Fox "News".)

The regulation is concerning over the air broadcasters. Cable stations like Fox don't fall under the regulation as they don't use public airways.

This is true, but it's worth noting that the FCC revoked the fairness doctrine in 1987.

Does the requirement mean air news during prime time though, or can they do it at times when most people are not even able to watch TV?

It's unclear, because the exact details are specific to the license and therefore may vary from station to station. My local television stations usually air the news at 11, which is after primetime.

Reminds me of a thread a while ago pointing out that a single show dominates the MTV programming lineup almost every day [1]. It's as if there is some algorithm running without human intervention that feeds on itself by reacting only to current viewing habits:

    foreach (show s in lineup)
        if (s.viewers > THRESHOLD)
            lineup.replace_with_more (s)

Obviously resulting in this weird local maxima where no other shows get broadcast.

1: https://twitter.com/MTVSchedule/status/1422934028253081603

I don't have MTV so I had to look up what "Ridiculousness" is. Apparently they play Youtube/Tiktok/etc... clips? Sounds like it must be incredibly cheap to produce. This is what it looks like when you let a race to the bottom continue on indefinitely.

And the cable industry can't understand why people keep cutting the cord. Can you imagine shelling out $120/month to have some producers pick out Youtube clips for you?

I went to a big box bar/restaurant a couple years ago, and they had a big screen TV playing basically what you describe. I wonder if that is the audience, subscribers using is as essentially something in the background? It's hard to believe there are enough that want this to make it economically viable...

"you don't build bridges by measuring swimmers" or whatever that quote is.

This is precisely why the internet wins. It can both show the nightly news and a million other things at the same time, catering to a 60-year-old housewife, a 40-year-old car enthusiast, a 30-year old gardener, a 20-year-old fan of obscure Linux distributions and a Taiwanese 10-year-old kid living in Ireland, all at the same time. Youtube regularly recommends videos that I personally like, but that onlyhave a couple thousand views.

Well, you say that, but isn't that exactly why Netflix got rid of ratings?

All the documentaries were getting really high ratings, so would display highly in searches, but not many people actually watched them.

It's the same for most content, I read a huge amount. I do read some intellectual books, but only occasionally. The rest of the time I read utter, thoroughly entertaining, trash.

I don't want to read about an existential crisis after programming all day, I want someone to hit something with a big sword and get the girl.

> Well, you say that, but isn't that exactly why Netflix got rid of ratings?

> All the documentaries were getting really high ratings, so would display highly in searches, but not many people actually watched them.

This rather shows that ratings do work, but are used wrongly for giving recommendations:

If you want to create suggestions for a user, in many case the wrong answer is "suggest what has really high ratings", but rather "given the ratings that this user gave and the films that he watched, what will he also like."

The fact that these documentaries get high ratings (the same might hold for art house films) shows that there is some (niche?) audience which really loves this kind of films, but not that "John Doe" will love it, too.

Predicting exactly this was the premise of the famous Netflix Prize, one of the first open machine learning challenges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize

I remember when that competition was released, I was working (as an undergrad) in GroupLens, which had MovieLens still around but it was getting a bit of bitrot.

It was always weird to me that GroupLens didn't spin up a team for it, but it seemed like everyone in the research group had moved on to other things and didn't want to context switch back. Someone mentioned something like "shame they didn't do this 10 years ago, a million dollars would have been nice". I think someone was doing tagging on movielens, but I don't remember the details.

I got the sense that neither Riedl nor Konstan (or any of the current grad students it seemed) wanted to pursue it (Terveen, I think, wasn't in to recommender systems at all in the first place).

I don't think the lab had any funding problems haha, so maybe that was what it came down to.

I remember my professor talking about the ensemble approach the competitors were taking in a data mining class I took. I was saddened when Netflix ended up not using it because it was too slow and expensive or something.

It didn't promote Netflix content above third party content. Not enough control for the algorithm is unacceptable for the marketing guys.

Thanks! I'd totally forgotten the real reason.

> This rather shows that ratings do work, but are used wrongly for giving recommendations

And I know I'm (possibly) a minority on hacker news, but I prefer the new system. I was giving everything I wanted to watch more 4 or 5, even when it was clearly not the case, but because I want recommendations of things I'm going to like AND actually watch

Isn’t this why it now says something like “your match: n%” now?

That is how it is with documentaries. Just because they are getting lower viewing numbers doesn't mean you shouldn't keep promoting them. Certainly there should be a mix of entertainment and public interest stuff, but following audience preferences for entertainment creates a feedback loop that damages society.

Things like documentaries are mostly watched by already well-off people (mostly middle class and up).

In Germany, public TV is paid for by (nearly?) every household. [0]

Forcing everyone, including poor people, to subsidize rich people's taste for documentaries seems a bit.. off?

Similar arguments apply to public libraries and opera houses, though at least there the financing is done mostly via progressive taxation.

Of course, you can argue that we sophisticated people know what's good for those unwashed masses, and if only they watched their documentaries like they are supposed to, they would soon see the light. Colour me skeptical.

[0] As far as I am concerned, private broadcasters can and should do what they feel like.

People choose from what is presented to them. That's consumerism. It's not like people get to pick what gets produced. If more public interest material is available and advertised, it'll get watched more. The alternative is to watch less TV and engage with society directly more. Both of those outcomes would be preferable to the excessive production and consumption of entertainment.

Private broadcasters do not pick material based on public interest or even their judgment of what is good. It is far more mechanical and influenced entirely by market forces. Herman and Chomsky discuss this in Chapter 1 of Manufacturing Consent.

https://ia802700.us.archive.org/31/items/pdfy-NekqfnoWIEuYgd...

> The alternative is to watch less TV and engage with society directly more. Both of those outcomes would be preferable to the excessive production and consumption of entertainment.

I agree. And economically, if you want less of a good to be consumed, ceasing to subsidize its production with tax payer money is a good first step. If you want to go further, perhaps even tax its production.

> Private broadcasters do not pick material based on public interest or even their judgment of what is good. It is far more mechanical and influenced entirely by market forces.

How do market forces differ from public interest?

Or rather, what do you mean by 'public interest'? It's what the general public is interested in?

Market forces come from people.

Market forces come from people.

Market forces tend toward baseness. It takes active intent to elevate society above the lowest possible level. Just as one doesn't want to hire at the median skill level of their company lest the average continue to drop over time, a society has to aim higher than what the impulsive market optimizes for, or it will decay.

Revealed preference is just code for exploitation of vice.

'Market forces' are just what people want and are willing to pay for.

Of course, there are always enlightened and sophisticated people like yourself that know better what's good for the unwashed masses.

Well, when people complain about a growing wealth divide, and those who are doing okay financially say that childhood access to public libraries and documentaries made them who they are, shouldn't those things receive funding?

“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”

- Good Will Hunting

edit: btw, speaking of libraries, copyrighteousness is destroying our society

Of course, Good Will Hunting is wrong.

Receiving education isn't about learning. At least not primary. It's about getting a piece of paper at the end.

Public libraries and free internet resources are one argument in this direction. Another: professors are usually more than happy for you to sit in on lectures, even if you don't pay any tuition.

That's a bit like asking healthy people. You'll get answers ranging from things like exercise to homeopathy.

Answers from people can be used to suggest avenues for investigation, but shouldn't make you fund expensive stuff outright. (Assuming here that homeopathy is obvious nonsense, that people still swear by.)

And, of course, public libraries and documentaries don't have to just produce good effects. In order to justify public funding, you'd need to do a whole cost-benefit analysis and look at opportunity costs.

So look at what you get from public libraries vs libraries financed from private charity _plus_ whatever other good things the public money saved could do (including just outright giving it to poor people).

I deliberately picked public libraries here as a provocative examples. I suspect they might actually pass the cost-benefit test without too much contortion of metrics and data.

I am much less sanguine about the bang-for-buck of publicly financed opera houses, theatres and symphony orchestras, which Germany is quite fond of. And of course, publicly financed radio and TV broadcasters.

Without US public broadcasting, I and countless others would have grown up on GI Joe instead of Mr. Rogers.

Further, I generally strongly oppose charity as a component of future plans (leaving aside whether charity is good or necessary in the present). We should never be building society such that it depends on the funding whims of rich philanthropists.

Sure, there should be some kind of analysis of benefits, but some things simply have to exist for a society to be a society, because without them, the loss of their intangible and second-order benefits will cause a society to implode Idiocracy style, and nobody will know why.

And I am suggesting we should do careful cost benefit analysis, instead of just assuming that our favourite pet causes will surely come out ahead.

On top of cost-benefit analysis, you will have to explain to everyone whose life trajectory was meaningfully improved by a resource what alternative path you are providing so that future people can also find their way to a better life.

When I was first living on my own barely making rent, PBS documentaries were the most interesting thing on broadcast TV. Infinitely more entertaining than drivel like the Bachelor. Other than available time and offered free content I doubt preference of documentaries is different among income classes.

Social class is correlated with income, but it's not the same.

Similarly, entertainment preferences are correlated with social class (and with income), but again, they are not perfect predictors of each other.

So a few anecdata wouldn't undermine anything here. Though in fact, your example actually strengthens the argument I am making: you are the kind of person that prefers watching documentaries over other drivel, and you are the kind of person who managed to get themselves out of poverty. That's likely because you have the preferences, habits and skills of someone who is at least middle class in a social sense, even if your income took a while to catch up.

(Keep in mind that we are talking about social class in a rather abstract fashion here. German middle class mores are different from American middle class mores.)

Wow, that is some overt classism right there. The world is a much better place is you just see people as people. Everybody is trying to achieve the same thing regardless of their "class". Security and safety for self and loved ones by whatever means are available to them with their skills and knowledge.

It's crazy how many people believe being poor means you're stupid. Not true! Thank you for pushing back!

Who said anything to that effect?

Are you implying that people who have better things to do than watch documentaries are stupid?

> Things like documentaries are mostly watched by already well-off people (mostly middle class and up).

assuming a normal distribution, wouldn't this then be the majority of people?

This question would benefit from some empirical data.

Arguing from definitions won't help us. (Keep in mind that 'middle class' doesn't mean 'median income' or something statistically simple like that.)

How many of these documentaries are actually public interest though? Versus propaganda by someone with an agenda to push under the guise of intellectualism?

Off course the so called "social issue" documentaries are nothing more than propaganda often created by think tanks or publicly funded "opinionators", these are very rarely not a waste of money and attention. It doesn't take away the fact that nature/science documentaries (if produced well, with sufficient funds) can capture imagination of a general knowledge of the layman public.

> It's the same for most content, I read a huge amount. I do read some intellectual books, but only occasionally. The rest of the time I read utter, thoroughly entertaining, trash.

I feel the same way. However I force myself to read things that will better me once in a while anyway. I too want to hit things with a big sword (without the pain of getting hit), and get the girl (without cheating on my wife), but the world including me is better if I do something else anyway. Which is why I do sometimes read a complex math book.

> Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while doing the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be understood by them

So like, sticking only to the first and second derivative in soap opera plots about retired civil engineers?

No late-period Beethoven sonatas as background music?

That must be difficult for you as a German.

Meanwhile, here in America we're perhaps a few years away from something like the movie "Ass" from Idiocracy winning an Oscar.

Are you joking, or do you have perhaps too high an opinion of German TV?

On the one hand: yes, I am.

On the other-- we have a network that bills itself as educational and spends over a month marketing a full week of programming dedicated to propagandizing its audience to be maximally afraid of sharks.

It broadcast a wildly popular movie where a tornado full of sharks attacks a city.

German TV could be an order of magnitude worse than my parody and it still wouldn't even register on the American scale of stupidity.

It reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) reasoning behind the cancellation of "Police Squad" back in the day: that people would have to pay attention to get the jokes.

https://boingboing.net/2014/07/04/police-squad-was-cancelled...

> Meanwhile, here in America we're perhaps a few years away from something like the movie "Ass" from Idiocracy winning an Oscar.

Very true, this is the first thing I thought of when I head of the popular show "Naked and Afraid".

I stopped watching TV more than 10 years ago because I was worried to turn stupid from it. Not so far fetched after all.

There are some high quality shows and TV stations though. Namely Phoenix (similar to PBS in the U.S.) and some of the news magazines that run in the late evenings. Of course there are also all the other public stations with higher quality programs but I find the program most of the time quite random and sometimes even a bit elitarian.

> Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while doing the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be understood by them

> because the people at the levers are in the illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while in fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible stupid

So basically they have a Hacker News mindset!

In every thread about a dumbed down GUI/website it is argued that granny wouldn't understand it otherwise. No power user allowed, because data shows user is monkey.

> > Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while doing the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be understood by them

I haven't watched german TV in ages, but I distinctly remember science shows degrading from science to thinly veiled ads - things like literally running a companies marketing video or making a "scientific comparison" where they hand out random style points at the end to make a specific product win. I think they even got into trouble over it since ads and science/education shows are taxed differently. Anyone pretending that they are doing that for their viewers is living in denial at best, but probably just outright lying.

The biggest problem on television is lying, and that problem is prevalent not just on German TV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMlMH1RfnF0

The '68 generation' is pretty much the same generation that's now 65 years old and washing dishes..

> From my standpoint the German television landscape is completely doomed, because the people at the levers are in the illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while in fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible stupid and must not ever be confronted with content that shows them that there is still stuff to learn and understand in the world.

Well, that would be more bearable, if half the TV market wouldn't be allowed to essentially tax everyone to finance their drivel.

Is it the Simpsons or Seinfeld where in one episode one of the characters gets a Nielsen box that is used for measuring tv viewership and they can’t leave the house for fear of shows being canceled if they’re not home to watch it.

They did something similar in “Roseanne.” The Connors were selected to be a Nielsen family and Roseanne made the family watch nothing but PBS, documentaries, etc the whole time. She wanted to hack the ratings so that over time, regular folks like her family would get exposed to a better class of information.

Happens in Family Guy too.

I want to believe that you just remembered that, like if the top of your head.

The idea that some die hard Alf fan just made they way past my post on hacker news really puts a smile on my face.

You mean something like AdNauseam?

https://adnauseam.io/

Edit: it's an adblocker that is supposed to click on EVERY ad that it blocks.

What GP describes would be stronger than AdNauseum. Instead of sending clicks indiscriminately for every ad, you would send clicks for high quality content.

That'd just end up costing the high quality content providers money. Ads wouldn't just get cheaper for them.

On the contrary, clicking only on trash, and having the high quality content have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio would have the desired effect.

Maybe.

The idea is not so much of clicking on high quality content ads, but sending visits to high quality content pages and click on the ads of those pages, to get them more money. Would obviously stop working if the sales after the ad click are not made.

But, hey this isn't a gameplan, this was just a "what if" :D

That could work, or indeed it could get them dropped quicker because they have a high fraud rate :)

I'm fully on board with the AdNauseam model which fucks about indiscriminately. The ad industry can burn.

Cannot agree more. Since the the advertisers have that much to spend, let's make them to spend more for nothing. Also by doing so, it will literally put enough noise into the data those trackers collect and renders the user profiling useless and effectively protecting us from being tracked.

If we only click ads on high quality contents, those content owner might benefit from it in short term but in long run it most likely going to back fire and make them penalized as for sure there is going to be counter measures. If we simply click every ad indiscriminately, there is no way to tell or they have to penalize everyone which almost equals to do nothing.

> to get them more money

Wouldn’t they just lose money? Ad clicks are not valuable to the businesses themselves. Only to the ad companies.

>That'd just end up costing the high quality content providers money.

I always click on Taboola bitcoin scam links for that exact reason. It's like scambaiting an algorithm.

Pretty much all pay per click ads are trash… and I guess most other ads too. No complicated logic needed here!

Plus, low quality content providers would have a high click-through ratio but very low conversion rate.

Might be interesting.

Last time I checked you could configured click frequency in AdNauseum.

I think it wouldn't be about the ads, but the visit tracking. Like, block GA from seeing your visits on trash sites, but allow when it's a high quality post/content/source, so we skew the numbers for high quality content

That's actually very interesting.

Is there any extension that blocks analytics selectively?

AFAIK, no. You would need to manually add exceptions by domain

"large scale AdWords fraud."

Be carefull - fraud is a crime. But I am under no obligation to provide AdWords any data, let alone true and reliable data.

Considering the tracking and spying, and my legitimate interest in privacy, there is no room for fraud argument here.

PS: this would be probably a Hoax

It's not actual fraud. You're not bound by the terms of service of ad providers. Your device is actually sending requests to the ads, which they are counting themselves to determine payment rates. If it's fraud to send ad impressions to sites I like without visiting them, it could be fraud to deny ad impressions to sites that I do visit (with my ad blocker on.)

If the sites set it up themselves, it's fraud. If you conspire with the sites to set it up, it's fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud. But if I'm prosecuted for the crime of not actually looking at ads I request, that's just a judge with an agenda. Whether it went one way or another at every layer of appeal would probably be a coin flip, though.

Fraud would involve financially benefiting from it - if you don't benefit I don't think it would count as fraud in most countries.

In England and Wales, all three types of fraud covered by the 2006 Act have as substantive elements of the offence a requirement that a defendant intends to either "make a gain for himself or another" or "cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss", where gain and loss are defined as only referring to "money or other property".

Note also that the offence is framed in terms of intention to gain or cause loss. Even if no material gain or loss happens, the intention is what matters. (The equivalent mental element for theft in England is that one dishonestly intends to permanently deprive someone of the property being taken.)

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35

This applies to online ad 'click fraud' in both ways—if a publisher fraudulently clicks on adverts to make money, that'd potentially be fraud to make a gain for themselves. If a competitor clicks on adverts to get their competitor to lose money on pay-per-click, that'd potentially be fraud to cause a loss to another.

I can't speak for jurisdictions other than England and Wales but I'd be surprised if a fair number of other jurisdictions didn't also define fraud in a way that covers both gain and loss scenarios.

Where did you get this notion from? That’s absolutely not true, and there are many acts that can be illegal without benefitting from them.

I don’t think AdNauseum users would be prosecuted, but you’re still wrong.

source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud

lots of acts can be illegal, but that does not make them fraud.

You may want to read the CFAA and report back.

Spoiler alert, it doesn’t involve your intentions or money.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

We are talking about general fraud, not CFAA, which is a 'hacking' law.

The companies spying on me should be the first in line to be tried under CFAA

I think it is just a matter of semantics. Let's call it "large scale AdWords statistics improvement". Look, sounds much better now!

Agree. I'm genuinely want to click every ad I see to protect myself from being tracked. If that could be fraud, will there be anything not a fraud?

Correct, fraud isn’t the correct term here. The op grabbed the first word that probably presented itself, and others nearly ad nauseam (lowercase) have discussed its merits as the term.

What’s needed is a better term.

I propose either AdTurfing (hat tip AstroTurfing) or AdLighting (hat tip GasLighting). My personal preference is the second.

Isn't it just vandalism?

Vandalism is, again a crime against property that is legitimately placed on the street or somewhere.

Ad biz is a business model, not property, and a predatory one as that. You are not obligated to enable someone else's business for free.

They are claiming their clicks and impressions mean something - its their problem to ensure they are accurate.

Imagine someone is doing a survey of sex habbits, and selling the results. Is it a fraud to lie? Ofcourse not, why should you be responsible for their profits.

The fact that people think they are legally obligated to enable this is really fucked up.

While legally we are probably far away from this being a fraud, nothing stops google from adding something to their TOS and banning your account on that basis... This is the only reason I'm not using those noise generators even though all ad-tech should burn in a trashcan fire in my opinion.

Don't modern internet-connected TV boxes snitch on what people are watching? Surely we don't need a sampling anymore?

Just thinking that the elderly population is probably the least likely to use those boxes (though I am not even sure of that), whereas they constitute the (dying) core of traditional TV viewership.

Ironically, modern streaming apps have far more accurate numbers than anything Nielsen ever cooked up sampling people, but Netflix made the precedence that they should be "secret sauce" and not shared publicly and most of the "Streaming Wars" diaspora today are following that policy/precedent.

We're in something of a worst of both worlds situation where Nielsen has an increasingly small number of viewers where traditional TV boxes work to get decent samples, has to rely more than ever on surveys, and distrusts all streaming viewership numbers because they are cloak and dagger white lies between competitors, despite in theory being way more accurate than all the previous tools (the surveys and the TV boxes).

It's almost wild. The most forthcoming to shareholders/the general public over the years has been Hulu and Hulu's numbers at times have suggested Nielsen's data is very, very wrong right now, but Nielsen doesn't trust Hulu's data at all because it smells like lies because Netflix does nothing but lie or ghost them.

I have been exploring ways to avoid sending this data to them. To start: using an instance of Pi-Hole and running all your apps will remove some tracking from them.

Following this up with paying for your subscription but pirating all the shows might help remove you from the cycle completely.

I understand the second point is not realistic for the majority of people but I wonder if in the future we might have an easy to use version of Pi-Hole that most people can just flip on and strip a large chunk of tracking from the apps.

That just gets us back to the topic way above: if we aren't giving that tracking data to TV producers, it's tough to complain when our favorite nerdy/intelligent shows get cancelled.

That's the deep weird irony that we live in a world where we could have the best possible numbers (directly tracked statistics), and yet TV Producers are still relying (for the most part) on Phone and Snail Mail Survey Results because they don't think they can trust streaming provider numbers. Pi-Holing those numbers just gives those Producers even more reason to feel that they are lies or wrong. At what point do you Pi-Hole too many telemetrics to oblivion and aren't allowed to complain when your favorite TV shows get canceled because "no one" was watching it?

I guess this contributes to me watching less and less shows because I am tired of stuff being canceled midseason. It might be a self fulfilling prophecy. Less people watch these shows/appear to watch these shows, the networks stop producing it and these people don't come back to whatever the network does end up producing.

From what I am hearing, traditional forms of media are in decline because people are spending their time on Youtube/Twitch/Social media instead.

Modern TVs do snitch but there are two issues with relying on that:

1. There is a disparity between age groups and other demographic dividers who have newer TVs. This could significantly skew the results for some advertisers.

2. The data is going to the TV manufacturer, and they will not share that freely between themselves or with anyone else. This will complicate collating the data as there are several entities to negotiate with in order to get an overall picture.

And the tech savvy people never connect their "smart" tvs to the internet.

My "smart" TV has one job - show the signal fed to it via HDMI from my linux box.

You know a connected TV / set-top box is on a channel but you don't know how many / which persons in the house is in front of it.

How long until they start putting cameras in them and doing facial recognition?

So I found out my neighbors were proud to be participating in some new Neilson study. Apparently they pay you to wear these boxes in your pocket that pick up sound. At the end of the day it syncs what it heard to their servers and you get points, which eventually translates to money.

Essentially the stated purpose is so that it can pick up what music you listen to throughout the day, but in reality it's picking up everything.

Oh so like a cell/mobile phone, but only with the purpose stated out right?

Nah, they get paid to have the box in their pocket, you pay to have your box in your pocket.

Some sort of localised motion sensor would probably be sufficient to tell you how many people are watching without invading too much on people's privacy. You wouldn't know the age, but you already have ton of information by knowing the address and the subscriber already.

> Some sort of localised motion sensor would probably be sufficient to tell you how many people are watching

You'd also have pets captured, curtains flapping by an open window captured, and any toys kids are playing with (like balls) potentially captured as another viewer too.

Meanwhile pap who likes to sit motionlessly while the kids round around him, isn't detected.

> without invading too much on people's privacy

Motion detection feels like a pretty major privacy violation to me.

> You wouldn't know the age, but you already have ton of information by knowing the address and the subscriber already.

Except when you have friends or family over.

Cameras are here and we have no idea what they do with them.

They could put an IR camera right next to the remote sensor. Since it's behind a glass that is opaque to visible-light you wouldn't even know the camera's there, and if you put tape on it your remote wouldn't work anymore.

Thank you for giving such great ideas for free to CIA, I just can't help to wait until it's implemented in my next smart tv /s

>Since it's behind a glass that is opaque to visible-light you wouldn't even know the camera's there

If it's opaque to visible light how does the camera produce an image?

>if you put tape on it your remote wouldn't work anymore.

Not really? You just have to be more careful placing the tape. Besides, nowadays many smart TV have app remote controls, or RF-based remote controls so the IR sensor being blocked is a non-issue

> If it's opaque to visible light how does the camera produce an image?

It isn't opaque to infrared light though. The image is still high enough quality to make out people, it looks funny but it is good enough for their purposes.

Most "smart" TVs have cameras these days...

So does your cable provider's set top box. So does your Roku/Fire/AppleTV/etc, except it is at the app level.

> Don't modern internet-connected TV boxes snitch on what people are watching?

Yes, which is why I will never own one.

Just wait until 5g is everywhere and companies will just add its functionality to your tv and connect regardless of what you do.

They can't add functionality to a device that I don't own.

> Surely we don't need a sampling anymore?

Depends, are the TV networks buying that information? Or just advertisers?

So you want more targeted ads for tech savvy people? I wouldn’t give ad tech that much credit. Many tech savvy people have cut the cord and watch TV through streaming. Anecdotally, I watch Hulu. Hulu knows so so so much about me yet zero of the ads are targeted. They very much have this capability (engineering resources) but due to a number of reasons I can only assume (network contracts, ad bids) it just probably isn’t going to happen. I would love if I could have an ad blocklist cause one more Progressive Ad will drive me bonkers.

I don't live in the ad tech world, so I only vague know what is interconnected. Do the tech giants just sell info back and forth to each other?

For example, When I watch youtube on my Roku, if im not signed in, does roku still aggregate what I watched on youtube, could that be sold to Hulu, for ads when I watch that on the same tv?

I work in the CTV ad-tech space. Viewership data is highly guarded by every company. It's how every company is trying to differentiate themselves from each other. So, no, YouTube and Hulu etc wouldn't share information.

Ad data is known by the DSP that serves the ad (if the company doesn't serve their own ads), but viewership data is secret as a competitive advantage.

> which excludes i.e. students (they don't have to pay)

That is incorrect, they do have to pay (once per household). But if you get BAFÖG (student loan/social benefit mix that require you and your parents to be below a certain income bracket), you don’t.

I know that very well, I had to pay it because there is no BAFÖG for foreign students. Just felt it might not be an important enough detail to explain BAFÖG to the international audience.

You could have called them and they would usually give you an exception. Not sure if that situation has changed now.

> Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud.

You may like the "Google will eat itself" idea.

https://www.gwei.org/index.php

Isn't this just investing the results of ad fraud into Google? Probably a profitable idea, but I'm not seeing the "Google eating itself" aspect.

According to their numbers they netted $400,000 worth of Google, essentially for free. Mind, that hasn't been updated in close to a decade; nowadays their 819 shares would be worth about $2.4 million.

"202.345.117 Years until GWEI fully owns Google."

Nice cosmological time scale idea

> Google Shares owned by GWEI: 819

Those 819 shares are worth $2,371,005 now

> They faked the ratings away from stupid trash TV towards some higher quality stuff, documentaries, culture, ... Obviously in the movie then the country saw a renaissance, everyone got smarter, yadda yadda, you get it.

> I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them).

I think this is right - ad-traffic is manipulative and actually I don't think it is a societal 'good' at all.

A few personal examples:

* On Youtube almost all my adverts are encouraging me to start Forex / Stock / Property investment and trading, and sign up for courses on these. These courses are scams (or at best, 'half-scams' and poor/generic advice repackaged and sold for thousands), and in general provide poor financial advice (either through extortionate courses, recommending you become too heavily leveraged or advising you to day-trade high-volatility stocks by just looking at charts). Presumably it does this because I am 32 and male, so I am considered 'prime' for this marketing.

* One of the friends I know is a girl, and she has never seen the above adverts. We were talking and she says every single advert is just about pregnancy and fertility. I wonder how many of these adverts are just reinforcing gender-stereotypes in a wider sense, i.e. while google claims to be progressive and care about 'equality' really is their business model at it's core really just targeting women and telling them that they should be getting pregnant, while telling guys that they should be the bread-winners and earn money via stocks/shares?

* While my adverts are for forex, and my apparently fertile friend is getting adverts for pregnancy tests, my older parents just get targeted adverts for pre-paid funerals. One or two are probably be fine, but they are just on constant repeat - and I can't help but think that I wouldn't the constant reminder of death before every youtube video.

* My laptop is convinced that I want to go camping. It's only my laptop, every advert is camping related. Sleeping bags, tents... and the strange thing is that when it started I didn't want to go camping, but it's been so consistent across the last few months now that I kinda wanna go camping. Like it's sold me this romantic vision which I know wasn't there before, so even though I would usually like to say I can't be manipulated through marketing, it's really made me realise I can be.

Is the above really making society better? And if it's not, why should we put up with it? IMO the biggest lie we have been told by Google is that 'personalised ads' are a good thing.

> The advertiser has a tracker that it places on multiple sites and tracks me around. So it doesn't know what I bought, but it does know what I looked at, probably over a long period of time, across many sites. Using this information, its painstakingly trained AI makes conclusions about which other things I might want to look at, based on...

> ...well, based on what? …Probably what it does is infer my gender, age, income level, and marital status. After that, it sells me cars and gadgets if I'm a guy, and fashion if I'm a woman. Not because all guys like cars and gadgets, but because some very uncreative human got into the loop and said "please sell my car mostly to men" and "please sell my fashion items mostly to women."… You know this is how it works, right? It has to be. You can infer it from how bad the ads are. Anyone can, in a few seconds, think of some stuff they really want to buy which The Algorithm has failed to offer them, all while Outbrain makes zillions of dollars sending links about car insurance to non-car-owning Manhattanites. It might as well be a 1990s late-night TV infomercial, where all they knew for sure about my demographic profile is that I was still awake.

> You tracked me everywhere I go, logging it forever, begging for someone to steal your database, desperately fearing that some new EU privacy regulation might destroy your business... for this? [1]

[1] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201

>why should we put up with it?

You, your friends, and your family personally don't have to put up with it. Ublock Origin can block ads on Youtube with ease.

I agree on a personal level, although at a societal level I believe regulation is required.

As per the parent comment to my original one, I just fundamentally do not believe that most advertising contributes anything positive to society and mostly generates negative externalities.

The argument for advertising is that it's so difficult for a new entrant to a market to challenge an entrenched incumbent, unless they can advertise.

I honestly don't know if that argument holds water.

Intuitively, I'd say it doesn't hold water: Entrenched incumbents would generally tend to have more money than new competitors, so the incumbent can afford more advertising to drown out that of the challenger.

The only net gain I can see is for the advertising industry, which extracts money from both challenger and incumbent.

It isn't available on all plateform utube is unfortunately.

Your female friend should probably take a pregnancy test. During my wife's first pregnancy, my Kindle started displaying diaper ads within days.

On the other side of the coin, my ex-wife continued to get diaper/formula/etc ads for years after our miscarriage.

Just change your gender to trans/alien and your age to 5...

"trans" isn't a gender. But, I am trans, and advertisers are more than prepared to advertise to me. So I'm not sure what the goal would be there.

Irrelevant ads are less likely to work.

Probably, but they are much more annoying.

Exactly like https://syntheticmessenger.labr.io/

Though, I would say this can actually hurt publishers in the long run

This is funny to me, because there's an American movie where Danny DeVito manipulates TV ratings to get his own (worse) shows on the air: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087979/

Untill your last paragraph I was thinking you were going to say "so let's lead from the front and let the trackers see the real internet."

I think very few actual people click on ads. Ad exchange platforms get majority of their revenue from impressions anyway.

> the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them)

Believe it’s Scott Galloway who said advertising is a tax on the poor and technologically illiterate.

There is the Nielsen system in the US and I wonder if it is the other way around. That is, in reality, nobody has watched MTV since 1994 but Viacom bribed a Nielsen family to tune a TV to it and keep it there.

> Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud.

Data poisoning for something the scale of Google I fear would be ineffective to the point of laughability, sadly.

I meant Free Rainer, didn't know that who am I had similar themes. Is it good?

Oh. I must have remembered wrong then. Maybe I mixed those up. I think it is worth watching.

Edit: Note: Free Rainer also goes under the name "Reclaim your brain"

What’s the name of the movie?

Do you have any links or references to that? It's fascinating.

What's the name of the movie? I'll add it to my watchlist

This movie sounds great and I would love to watch it. It's a shame there's no legal way to watch many international movies like this if you are in the US.

I make a point of watching a non-US film on every international flight I take - I find it to be a unique opportunity to watch interesting non-US movies with English subs. I have discovered two excellent oddball comedies from in flight movies (Die Goldfische from Germany and Le Grand Partage from France), but when I tried to rewatch these films with others in the US, I discovered it was basically impossible. There must be so many other great movies from around the world we are missing out on.

It's called "Reclaim Your Brain" in the US and you can buy/rent it via Apple TV.

Hacking democracy (ratings voting system, whatever) to indirectly effect a supposedly benevolent unilateral outcome? Sounds familiar.

It's not exactly hacking democracy. Democracy implies every gets a vote. This is P hacking small sample sizes.

So it's engineering falsified scientific conclusions then. Still sounds familiar.

It's not hacking, it's statistics.

There's a Family Guy episode where Peter does the opposite.

Do you remember the name of this movie? Might it have English subtitles?

Free Rainer is the one I'm referring to.

What even gives you the idea I am saying that? Did I say it? Nope.

I don't block ads. I remember what the internet was about to become before ads stepped in. Everything of value was going to be pull behind paywalls.

Let's say everyone get their wish and ads go away. Everything will require a purchase. Those purchases are logged to a real name/address. You end up with bigger privacy leaks.

People will still be tracking you the way they are now. And at the credit card level.

As an adult in the first world I can afford to pay for adfree solutions. Most people can't. Ads level the playing field.

> Let's say everyone get their wish and ads go away. Everything will require a purchase.

No, it won't. There was plenty of high quality stuff on the internet before ads or payment was even possible, and there's plenty of high quality stuff that don't track you or require payment right now. There's no reason to think that would all evaporate.

We will see plenty of high quality stuff still I agree. But much of the free stuff will be about converting you to the paid stuff.

With ads or not you are still the product. You will still be tracked because people want you to spend money on their service. People will sell that information. Companies will use it.

Sure, much of it will. But certainly not all of it. The amount of actually free content will certainly not decrease, and it would probably increase, even if by only a little.

> With ads or not you are still the product.

It depends on the site. There are lots of sites where the site operator has no interest in it generating an income, let alone a profit. You are not the product there.

Ads have bloated the useful internet to the point that it is more expensive and less functional. We have 8,000 websites trying to show me a recipe for chicken parm, most of them with pages of family history and backstory, because they are all trying to get me to see their ads. A lightweight Wikipedia for recipes and a few high value added websites charging a trivial amount for access to their recipe catalog would be highly value added for me, and run on a fraction of the infrastructure.

Ads obscure solutions, and add redundancy and complexity with zero value added, because solving a problem means you no longer are on the page seeing ads. Simplifying or automating a process means you are clicking less pages less often and not seeing ads. If you automate something to directly connect users with what they need, then they don’t need to come back and see your ads. So we have automations they bring us to some middle man that can show us some ads before we can get to what we need.

Ads mean that maximizing the time your attention is held is the core value. High quality content that leaves you informed/satisfied/fulfilled is worthless compared to low quality content that is just good enough to keep you from leaving, without being having enough substance to actual fulfill you, because then you might leave and not see the ads we have to show you.

Podcasts show us that a tiny minority of users able to pay for content subsidize an incredible amount of added value content for everyone, whether they can pay or not.

Ads don’t level the playing field. Ads are an ever growing tumor, sapping resources and weighing everything down in a mindless effort to replicate.

While that speculation is plausible, another view would be that companies would offer quality content without tracking users and invading their privacy (how many paid services still flood you with ads?), and possibly free alternatives would start to come up.

From your point of view, free open source is something that wouldn't exist

The hobbiest websites will not go away. Open source existed long before the internet.

What you are left with is the hobbiest websites or the mega brands that want to funnel you into their ecosystem. To offer anything that cost resources that you are willing to spend you must be a megabrand using this as a loss leader opportunity.

I don't think we want that world. We may think we do but look at what happened in Mr. Robot.

> I don't think we want that world.

That's the world we have right now, though, just with the addition of the spying that advertising brings.

The spying still happens regardless. We just don't have advertising (benefits and drawbacks)

I don't think the playing field is disleveled without ads. Wikipedia has no ads.

If you're willing to handle ads, they should at the least be untargetted.

Your personal prosperity depends on a prosperous online ad industry; doesn't it?

The last time I worked in adtech was 2012.

Is this the fee you have to pay even if you are blind or deaf, or do not have a Radio or TV? Gives you the most boring TV News in the world, plus 600 movies per year nobody wants to watch, because they are horrible? But they collected the tax and they have to spend it, as the German actors guild is worst than a cartel? :-)

https://www.german-way.com/germanys-tv-tax-the-debate-over-t...

I personally prefer boring news backed by quality journalism and funded by people rather than sensational, outrageous and superficially controversial news! If I want the excitement I watch a drama or action movie. I think the news articles/pieces work like clickbait; the more head-turning they get, the more viewers they acquire which results in higher profits.

I am not talking about sensational or misleading like in FoxNews or CNN :-) I am talking about boring as in....very serious persons, on a serious background, reading very serious the Reuters or Ap news of the day. As the service was paid and it has to provided ;-) A better model would be instead having to provide good analysis or quality content otherwise your audience will go somewhere. As in for example, the FT or the Economist.

Actually thinking about it, the issue is wider than just the news and I think the financing mode of the mandatory tax is a big part of it. What is really a shame, as Germany has a rich culture of hundreds of years so great content in all forms should not be a problem.

"Why is TV in Germany so bad?" https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/3d4vxz/why_is_tv_i...

"Why is German TV so crap?" https://www.exberliner.com/blogs/the-berlinale-blog/berlinal...

You might comment the BBC financing model is similar and I would agree. I think the difference is that the BBC also embraced a highly commercial model of selling content like Top Gear and other stuff worldwide. In this case the English language content with its planetary audience, pushed for a more competitive/commercial model and the German TV stayed too insular in my view.

Audience engagement chases entertainment (and thus reproduces CNN/MSNBC/Fox etc). You won't get what you want by tweaking that metric alone.

> Is this the fee you have to pay even if you are blind or deaf [...]

That's not correct. If you are deaf, you get a reduction - if you are blind, you get a reduction. If you are deaf-blind, you don't pay at all. If you are already receiving financial help because of your blindness, you don't pay at all.

You are right about it, did that change recently? According to the reference below it depends on the degree of deafness or blindness...if you can still hear or see something still have to pay...

https://www.rundfunkbeitrag.de/buergerinnen_und_buerger/info...

Not a big fan of the GIS either, but my stance is not as extreme. I see benefits, but there is problems as well. It could be a good system if there was a proper reform and if you get politicians out of the system.

Deutschlandfunk alone is worth it imho

I can't quite understand this. By "exploiting" you simply mean targeting ads?

The real harm seems to be from the tech giants censoring speech and policing payments, but what's the harm that someone targets a pair of shorts that I might like or show an ad for a conference I might be interested in?

It's a question of control; no should mean no.

Some people don't want to be tracked or monitored by advertising companies and it should be enough to just say so without companies like Facebook always trying to sneak tracking back in via dark pattens, shadow profiles, etc, etc.

For example once you've seen a website offer you the same product for different prices based on arbitrary tracking it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

I.e. ads, facebooks feed, endless scrollers like 9gag -> they like to use dark patterns and exploit tricks against the human mind to keep and guide your attention.

The harm if targeted ads depends on your viewpoint.

A targeted ad might serve you something you were looking for anyway, or it might manipulate you into spending on something you don't actually need. I.e. look at Instagram influencers, showing off their fake perfect live, making the viewer feel small and then try to buy the same happiness by buying the same product.

At best, ads are information that you need, at worst, they use psychology to manipulate you.

I think you might have the meaning of 'i.e.' (that is, namely) confused with 'e.g.' (for example).

Thank you very much, I am proud to say that I did this wrong for at least 10 years :D

Thanks!

There is a shortcut to remember this: 'e.g.' for 'example given' (and therefore, 'i.e.' for 'that is').

('E.g.' doesn't really mean 'example given' in English - it means 'exempli gratia' in Latin. But it's a useful mnemonic.)

I also use "in essence" for "i.e." even though it's actually 'id est' in Latin.

In my mind, when I see i.e., i think "in other words", and when I see e.g., I think "for example"

Seriously, you're worried about someone spending more time on their phone or spending more money on goods and services? Spending their own money — not the public money? That's what freedom is to you? Not the freedom to talk to whoever you want, say whatever you want or pay whoever you want?

I have no clue where you derive any of these things from. I certainly never said any of it. I never even made a claim a out freedom.

I was talking about how ads, tv programming, trackers and such have a tendency to create a positive feedback loop, which leads people towards less quality and mindless consumption. And about a fun idea from a movie, to break this feedback loop and replace it with another one, that promotes higher quality content.

You then started talking about a different topic and are now accusing me of not being interested in free speech.

hkai's mind is like a hammer: whenever it sees an opinion relating to human choice, it sees a nail.

I expected these numbers to be higher. However, an even more interesting metric is the 88% block in Firefox.

Firefox may not have a great market share, but based on these numbers it's market share may very well be eight times higher than your analytics report. This can change the argument of "it's only 3% of our users so we don't need to test on FF" to "it's a quarter of our user base, we should at least test it", depending on your target audience. I've seen tons of people claim general Firefox usage is negligible based on public data from websites such as statcounter, but these metrics prove that those statistics are unreliable and should not be used.

The best you can do is use server side UA inspection, though you can't really distinguish bots from real users that way.

The reason Firefox is higher is probably because it's the easiest one to block ads on mobile. Most people I know who use Firefox on mobile do so specifically to have ublock origin. I personally use chrome on desktop but Firefox on mobile.

The reason Firefox is higher is probably because users who choose it are more educated about the internet and are probably the ones who know how to use an adblocker. So it is unlikely that the proportion of users who use Firefox globally is higher than what stats give us.

I thought Firefox desktop and mobile blocked Google Analytics by default these days, as part of the general anti-tracking protections. Maybe I’m wrong, though?

Funnily enough, Privacy Badger is an excellent ad blocker. Turns out 99% of ads come from tracking domains. You'd think the ad people would split up the tracking from actually showing the ad, but apparently it's not worth showing an impression without also tracking the user.

Firefox is likely higher because FF users are more likely to have Ublock or some other content blocker installed. I'd also guess FF users are older, on average. Some will remember a time when FF was the clear choice over IE6. I used Chrome exclusively for a long time, then went back to FF once Chrome started to automatically log me into Chrome with my Google account.

There's a whole generation of users who first experienced the web via mobile browsers that don't block anything. When they become old enough to start using laptops and desktops, I imagine that it won't occur to them that an analytics-free and ad-free world is possible.

You have to be on Android to use addons with mobile Firefox. Since Android=Google, doesn't that mean you are giving Google all your data including browsing data and the fact that you are blocking ads?

Yes, but at least I don't have to see as many ads, and my phone's CPU doesn't spend as much time rendering ads, and my limited mobile bandwidth isn't all sucked up by ads.

Only if you are running Google Play services. You can certainly opt out of this if you like. I run LineageOS and do just that, but I also don't need my phone for much more than the basics, and F-Droid can fill those in for my use case.

Why would you assume they are getting all browsing data?

Motive + ability. They want all the data and they own the OS.

Why would you assume they aren't?

Motive + ability aren't the only things. That'd be a clear invasion of privacy that you could expect to win a court case over.

there's never been any evidence that Google is capturing all internet traffic on android devices.

that being said...

The other option is even less anti-consumer than privacy hating Google.

There's no Apple phone with an sdcard slot. No Apple phone with a headphone jack. Repair your iPhone ? Well Apple just slows down your device under the guise of prolonging its life.

No Apple phone where you can install apps through a non-Apple owned store.

Not a single iPhone has a built in FM tuner.

And for all the privacy flag waving from Apple over the years, they're now scanning local files for child porn. This is a feature set that will just grow.

I don't know, but it definitely blocks ads which is why I use it.

Ad Block Plus browser on Android is easier. I use both but don't bother blocking ads in FF since I use reader mode 99% of the time.

With so many options for Chromium-based browsers, is there a reason why you still use Chrome?

I personally use Edge on desktop and iPhone because I give so much data to Google by using a gmail account that it lightens the load a little bit to use something other than Chrome. It functions the same as far as I see and it runs all the same plugins.

My reason for using chrome is I don't mind it. I think I'm less suspicious of Google than most of HN. They don't allow extensions on mobile though

Not op.

I also use Edge on my Android, it has a built-in adblock plus. I prefer unlock origin, but it's better than nothing.

Doesn't firefox on android allow ublock origin?

and privacy badger, https everywhere, decentraleyes and a number of privacy addons.

>I expected these numbers to be higher.

Home vs office.

On my company laptop I am often not allowed to install software (but I'm allowed to develop the software that companies trust to handle billions of dollars in transactions) so my usage would look 60% chrome with no add blocking and 40% completely locked down firefox.

I expected these numbers to be higher.

These numbers are iffy or at least, very poorly described. They're not a percentage of HN or Reddit users - in the HN case, the sample is HN users who clicked on a front page link to a post about switching to Linux from MacOS. It's a fairly small sample biased in ways that are unknowable when all you have is that one sample. As a methodology, this is flaky enough to not warrant the headline and the significant digits in these numbers.

"it's only 3% of our users so we don't need to test on FF" to "it's a quarter of our user base, we should at least test it"

To nitpick. Starting with 3/100 FF, times 8 unaccounted for, you get 24/121, 20%.

Why 121? I suppose visitors are counted by more reliable web server logs.

If you're counting 3% Firefox usage in your analytics, that's 3 users in every 100 using FF, and 97 using other browsers. If we assume actual FF usage is 8x what's being reported, you actually have 24 FF users and 97 other users, for a total of 121.

> I expected these numbers to be higher.

The actual numbers might be higher, the article notes that these numbers still don't include anyone who blocks first-party JS completely.

I don't know if any of the sampled websites actually work without first-party JS.

I feel this heavily depends on your goal.

IMHO, this points at Firefox being used mostly by ad-averse, tech-savvy users, while the less-adverse, less-savvy users prefer Safari and/or Chrome.

If your objective is to maximize ad revenue, the most obvious approach would now be to ignore Firefox completely and focus on non-FF browsers.

Of course, following web standards would be the Golden Way, and more selfless actors follow that rule, but that song has been sung ever since the old Netscape/MSIE wars.

> If your objective is to maximize ad revenue, the most obvious approach would now be to ignore Firefox completely and focus on non-FF browsers.

No, your best approach is to test firefox carefully to ensure it is broken. That way you encourage people to use something more friendly to you.

I hope I didn't give anyone ideas.

It's less of a joke than it sounds.

I have to keep Chromium around not just for testing in it, but also to make certain purchases, reservations, etc, because some sites just fail to work in regular Firefox, even with enhanced protection off. Not many, maybe 0.1%, but in a pinch there's no other way than to fire up MISE^W Chromium.

Dont give Google Maps and YouTube ideas. Wait...

Also Google Meet. I've noticed my webcam always comes through crystal clear in Meet on Chrome, but is reliably blurry in Firefox.

Is there a good blocking solution for Safari? From what I understand uBlock Origin cannot operate on Safari due to the way that it disallows some allows access to the underlying source of the webpage.

Also it seems like extensions on Safari require you to install them via the App Store which just seems so dumb and unintuitive compared to Chrome/Firefox.

If they fixed these two issues, I think Safari usage would be much greater. That browser is so incredibly fast and snappy especially on the new M1 macs but not having proper ad-blocking is a complete deal breaker.

Add these to hosts:

0.0.0.0 www.google.com

0.0.0.0 www.google-analytics.com

0.0.0.0 www.googletagmanager.com

0.0.0.0 www.googletagservices.com

0.0.0.0 pagead2.googlesyndication.com

0.0.0.0 fonts.googleapis.com

0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com

0.0.0.0 twitter.com

0.0.0.0 platform.twitter.com

Doesn't Firefox still include google analytics into its Preferences dialog boxes or something? Im finding these stats ironic.

If you're referring to Firefox using Google Analytics for the Firefox Add-ons frontend, as of July 2017, Mozilla has disabled Google Analytics for any browser that has Do Not Track enabled.

https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785#issue...

This change was made in response to pressure from HN readers, so thanks to everyone for that.

It's odd a company of that size cannot roll their own solution.

It's odd a company of the size of GM cannot roll their own gas station and toad construction network.

What's the purpose of the Mozilla organisation? Is it in creating a analytics platform? Mind that value of GA comes from all the info they have and thus can estimate age, gender, social things, ... of users etc. Building an comparable service is a notable effort with little synergies to what Mozilla does. (Whereas Google can combine with information from other businesses)

I’m a Firefox user but let’s face it, Mozilla doesn’t have to make their own — there are plenty of open-source, self-hostable analytics solutions.

(Also the “toad construction network” made me laugh)

The question is: Why does Mozilla need analytics at all? Sure, counting downloads is good, but what other useful information are they pulling out of analytics?

Maybe it's a condition of their funding deals with Google?

Mozilla has a special agreement with Google about how their analytics data is stored and handled. I thought they only used it on their websites but it is not impossible that they use it for software telemetry.

I don't have any proof or study on it, but I suspect they don't do it. My anecdotal evidence is that I use an application firewall and Firefox by itself pings only telemetry.mozila.org or accounts.mozilla.org and stuff like that. It uses domains that explicitly say what they mean to be used for. At least in my experience

> The best you can do is use server side UA inspection

No, the best you can do is to stop caring. A distant second is this "server side UA inspection." Whatever that means exactly.

Server side useragent inspection

Recommend

这两天是 SpringOne

MYSQL Json 字段操作疑问

Hyper-V 第二代虚拟机不需要安装 [集成服务] 了吗？

大佬们有没有好看点的测试报告模板分享下

9月纽约时装周将回归线下，14家华裔设计师品牌参与

怎么样知道 Vue 模板编译成渲染函数之后的代码？

新品牌小红书内容营销？看这28条建议！

Google, Apple Hit by First Law Threatening Dominance Over App-Store Payments

决心止损！LVMH 集团主席 Arnault 将出售在家乐福集团持有的全部股权

人工智能共享代码库 0.1

About Joyk