As a user, ‘privacy preserving attribution’ is unappealing for a few reasons.
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It seems it would overwhelmingly benefit a type of website that I think is toxic for the internet as a whole - AI generated pages SEO’d to the gills that are designed exclusively as advertisement delivery instruments.
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It’s a tool that quantitatively aids in the refinement of clickbait, which I believe is an unethical abuse of human psychology.
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Those issues notwithstanding, it’s unrealistic to assume that PPA will make the kind of difference that Mozilla thinks it might. I believe it’s naive to imagine that any advertiser would prefer PPA to the more invasive industry standard methods of tracking. It would be nice if that wasn’t the case, but, I don’t see how PPA would be preferable for advertisers, who want more data, not less.
As a user, having more of my online activity available and distributed doesn’t help or benefit me in any way.
This is the sort of thing that the old internet could really deliver on. Chances are, a search query could lead you to some guy’s hoodie blog, and he just liked hoodies, and posted honestly about them.
Now, it’s all a mess of SEO pumped affiliate link lists filled with crapware. If the query is even thinkable, there will be AI generated pages stuffed with sponsored links, ready and waiting for you. And with search engines preferring recent results, that’s the type of page you’ll be served.
I’ve had decent luck using marginalia search to seek out some of those old internet type results. Obscurity works as a barrier to corporate infiltration. Plus you get page results that don’t have a million tracking and analytics scripts running on them, which is refreshing.