March 2003: MS03-007 released with only the ntdll.dll file, and there was a problem on Windows 2000 SP2 with certain versions of ntoskrnl.exe.
April 2003: MS03-013 was released with additional files to solve these problems, which also became standard for all the hotfixes.
June 2003: Windows 2000 SP4 released toward the end of June, and Windows 2000 SP2 support was supposed to end at the same time.
July 2003: MS03-026 was released just after Windows 2000 SP4.
August 2003: The Blaster worm hits, and people found out that MS03-026 could still be installed on Windows 2000 SP2. (This is not true for all of them during the period)
September 2003: MS offers "Custom Support" for Windows 2000 SP2 (originally until the end of the year), and also released MS03-039 that also works on Windows 2000 SP2 as an "exception". (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/custom$20support$20for$20Windows$202000$20sp2/microsoft.public.win2000.advanced_server/r-BWxTnT8Zk/Y6n5AzomkVoJ)
October 2003: MS officially extends support for Windows 2000 SP2 to June 2004 and introduced "Patch Tuesday". Trivia: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/securitybulletins/2003/ms03-045 has a file date of August 2003.
April 2004: MS04-011 released with a long list of files, including even NetMeeting! (though at least RPC was a separate MS04-012) Trivia: The bug used by Sasser that was patched was reported by eEye in October 2003 (http://web.archive.org/web/20050307234702/http://www.eeye.com/html/Research/Advisories/AD20040413C.html), but not many patches for Windows 2000 was released in the meantime.
June 2004: Windows 2000 SP2 support was ended.
October 2004: MS04-032 was released with a much shorter list. For example, because of the end of support of Windows 2000 SP2, there was no ntdll.dll file.
June 2005: Windows 2000 SP3 support was ended, with six-month "Custom Support" available. From then, each patch/hotfix only patched a few files (at least the non Custom Support versions).
Yuhong Bao's blog
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Monday, September 10, 2018
Google DoubleClick Mozilla overview (second draft)
Note: Notice the malware part has been removed.
There are many problems with web advertising in general, including annoying features like autoplay video ads and pop-ups and also problems like “click fraud” which matter to advertisers. This essay will however be focusing on the privacy issues with some of the kinds of ads that Google produces and the history behind them, and why Larry/Sergey didn’t consider them when buying DoubleClick for example. Also discussed is Mozilla and how they are involved (like in the Google/Mozilla search deal), including Brendan Eich who created JavaScript that eventually left Mozilla to found Brave. There is also the difficulty of solving these issues, which will also be discussed. Of course, advertising is not limited to the web and there are often many benefits and risks (like deceptive advertising) to advertising in general, most of which will not be discussed here.
There are many problems with web advertising in general, including annoying features like autoplay video ads and pop-ups and also problems like “click fraud” which matter to advertisers. This essay will however be focusing on the privacy issues with some of the kinds of ads that Google produces and the history behind them, and why Larry/Sergey didn’t consider them when buying DoubleClick for example. Also discussed is Mozilla and how they are involved (like in the Google/Mozilla search deal), including Brendan Eich who created JavaScript that eventually left Mozilla to found Brave. There is also the difficulty of solving these issues, which will also be discussed. Of course, advertising is not limited to the web and there are often many benefits and risks (like deceptive advertising) to advertising in general, most of which will not be discussed here.
The history of Google and its advertising will be discussed first.
Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while at
Stanford, and took VC funding from KP and other partners. Google was
founded with the search engine (with the PageRank algorithm) as the
first product, but later added products like Gmail. Eric Schmidt was
bought in as CEO in 2001 and recently left but are still on the
board. Google IPOed in 2004, using dual class stock for example.
The first kind of ads that Google did was AdWords, dating back to
2000. AdWords was based on search keywords, and the text ads were
displayed at the top of the search results (labelled as ads) and were
relatively simple. Typically the highest bidder was shown, and the
advertiser paid Google when the user clicked on the ads. AdWords
involved relatively little tracking at least initially and will not
be mentioned much here. At this time Google was also taking a stand
against popup ads.
AdSense was ads shown on webpages themselves, based on JavaScript. It
was invented in 2003. AdSense at least initially was based on
keywords on webpages themselves (which Google fetched from its cache
for example), which advertisers could bid on. Like with AdWords,
Google and websites gets paid when users click on the ads. It also
involved little tracking at least initially.
Google bought DoubleClick in 2008. DoubleClick was invented in 1995.
It made more sophisticated ad tracking via cookies and the like
famous (which was often called “retargeting”), and the problems
will be described here. DoubleClick themselves called its product
“Dynamic Advertising Reporting and Targeting” at one point for
example. Initially DoubleClick was mostly banner ads, and many users
developed so-called banner-blindness from these ads. Cookies were
itself invented in Netscape in 1994, and the IETF group that
developed RFC 2109 and 2965 already know that tracking with
“third-party cookies” were a problem (and it was mentioned in
these RFCs). Those attempts at IETF cookie standards ultimately
failed partly because they were incompatible with current browsers,
and led to RFC 6265 that is closer to how cookies are implemented in
browsers today. It also led to W3C P3P which was famously implemented
in IE6, which also of course failed (partly because it was too
complex) and was removed from Windows 10 but was an attempt to get
the tracking under control.
Google bought Urchin in 2005, turning it into Google Analytics.
Urchin was founded in 1998. Initially its product was to analyze web
server log files, with JavaScript tags being added in Urchin 4
(called “Urchin Traffic Monitor”). The hosted version based
entirely on JavaScript that was created later was initially called
“Urchin on Demand” and was introduced in 2004. Of course, the
original software that was sold receive little attention once Google
bought it and it became Google Analytics and it was discontinued in
2012.
One problem with the ads is tracking. The current economy is a
debt-based economy based on consumption. The more money advertisers
can extract from consumers, the more they are willing to spend on
ads. This results in tracking getting creepier and creepier, and
encourage consolidation of data for example. Most of the ad tracking
is called “retargeting” and it is often based on cookies and
JavaScript, and DoubleClick was one of the first to do it. All ads
encourages consumption by definition, but tracking ads are
particularly bad for these reasons.
For example, DoubleClick has cross-device retargeting introduced in
2015. Of course, it is limited to logged-in users tracking via the
user account at least initially (which any websites can do), but it
illustrated the trend. Google changed the privacy policy to allow
Google accounts to be used for such logged-in user tracking in 2016.
Recently Google signed an agreement with MasterCard to obtain credit
card sales data. Of course, credit cards directly ties an increase in
debt to consumer spending, which in turn can go to Google as ad
dollars.
According to
http://adage.com/article/digital/google-turns-behavioral-targeting-beef-display-ads/135152/,
“In December 2008 Google added DoubleClick cookies to AdSense ads”,
tying the DoubleClick cookie-based tracking (dating long before
Google bought it) to AdSense. I assume that AdSense tracking probably
did not exist before Google bought DoubleClick. Google Analytics
added AdWords and AdSense support in 2009. In 2012, Google changed
its privacy policy to allow data to be consolidated, which was also
very controversial. In 2014, Google Analytics integrated with
DoubleClick, allowing things like remarketing lists to be shared
according to
https://analytics.googleblog.com/2014/05/google-analytics-summit-2014-whats-next.html.
Remarketing lists are basically lists of website visitors that can be
uniquely identified by things like cookies, and it is one of the ways
of targeting ads to users. It can probably be assumed that sharing
remarketing lists basically ties the tracking together. Sharing of
Google Analytics remarketing lists with AdWords was introduced in
2015, along with linking of Google Analytics and AdWords “manager”
accounts, according to
https://adwords.googleblog.com/2015/11/share-google-analytics-data-and.html.
“Google Analytics 365” came in 2016, according to
https://analytics.googleblog.com/2016/03/introducing-google-analytics-360-suite.html.
Remarketing lists for search ads was introduced in 2012 and was tied
to Google Analytics in 2015 (though not all data from Google
Analytics can be used). It allowed different search ads to be
targeted to different visitors based on cookie-based tracking on
websites (with sites using special tags for this purpose). For
example, you can show different search ads to visitors that visit the
site every day.
Of course, users often has little control and benefit over storage of user data and ad retargeting by trackers too, especially when many parties are involved. This was mentioned during the Google/DoubleClick acquisition for example. Of course, some provides more control than others, such as AdChoices for example. AdChoices was an attempt at self-regulation for ad publishers, and used an icon to indicate that data was being collected. You can click the icon to display the privacy policy for the ads or opt-out of ad targeting. It was not the same as blocking ads completely though, and did not solve all of the problems of ads either. There was also an attempt at a Do-Not-Track HTTP header, which was probably too simple (and thus was also very vague in its meaning) and there was no guarantee that a site would comply either obviously since it was just an HTTP header (IE11 enabling it by default was also controversial and Windows 10 no longer does so by default).
Some of the problems with the opt-out methods are similar to the
problems of a national “do not email” registry proposed in the US
CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 for spam messages, and such lists to “opt out”
of spam are widely considered to be unacceptable in general. Even
“opt-out” or “unsubscribe” links in spam is widely considered
untrustworthy for obvious reasons, though legitimate mailing lists
will also have them. That idea came from the similar “do not call”
registry for telephone marketing (to stop annoying marketing phone
calls which were considered more annoying than spam of course), but
email and internet advertising ended up being very different from
telephone calls making these laws difficult to enforce. It is far
easier to send an email than to call someone for example, and email
is also more difficult to trace to the origin especially given that
the Internet is global. FTC has a report at
https://www.ftc.gov/reports/can-spam-act-2003-national-do-not-email-registy-federal-trade-commission-report-congress
describing
these problems (it was a report to Congress that was required by
CAN-SPAM), including the possibility that such a list can be abused
by spammers for example. “Closed-loop opt-in” using confirmation
emails for mailing lists on the other hand is widely accepted, but it
is not mentioned in CAN-SPAM. One example includes the tracking of
“opt-out” using cookies in things like AdChoices, which
themselves can be used for other purposes obviously.
There are some reasons why these problems were not apparent (for
example to Larry/Sergey) when Google bought DoubleClick, or when
remarketing lists was shared, or for that matter when Urchin became
Google Analytics and the data was merged with ad data.
The difficulty of researching things like the tying of remarketing
lists during the writing of this essay shows some of the problems. It
seems that no one cared about the privacy implications when
remarketing lists in AdSense and DoubleClick was shared for example.
In many cases, advertisers managed “remarketing” lists of
“anonymous” visitors that was being tracked by cookies from a
central console without thinking of the privacy problems, treating
visitors almost as numbers. This ties in with the idea of treating
people as “consumers” to be extracted from that are also
fundamentally flawed. Another example of this is AOL that famously
made it difficult to cancel at one point, partly because measuring
“customer loyalty” as numbers to be extracted from consumers was
part of their culture. To make it worse, they once charged consumers
by the time spent on AOL, so the longer they stay the more revenue
they made.
The Google-DoubleClick acquisitions was also controversial, with
EPIC, CDD and US PIRG for example filing complaints with the FTC in
April 2007, a “first supplement” to the complaint in June 2007,
and a “second supplement” in September 2007. There was also a
Senate hearing on Sept 27, 2007 with testimonies from a variety of
sources regarding that issue. One of the concerns back then was
aggregation of tracking data and lack of control by users, though
other issues unrelated to ads like storage of IP addresses by search
engines were also mentioned. Ultimately it took the FTC until the end
of 2007 to approve the deals, after a “second request”.
Before the Google-DoubleClick acquisition, DoubleClick was once
planned to merge with Abacus. FTC blocked the merger because of the
privacy problems and it never happened. Abacus Direct seems to be a
market researching company targeting consumer buying behavior. As a
result, Abacus had a lot of personal info about consumers, and there
were concerns that this data could be merged with DoubleClick data
and may be used to deanonymize them.
In 2012, Jonathan Mayer discovered that Google used some tricks in
JavaScript to allow tracking in Safari. It involved how Google was
able to bypass cookie blocking policy in Safari by using an invisible
form to fool Safari into allowing cookies. FTC fined Google $22.5
million over this behaviour, and more recently there has been
lawsuits about it in the UK. There has been also a class action
lawsuit about this in the US. Google argued the tracking was
unintentional at the time and that it was related to Google+ “Plus”
buttons on DoubleClick ads (for logged-in users I believe). It is
probably worth mentioning here that a lot of these kind of buttons
(like Facebook’s Like buttons, to name another example) do their
own tracking too (they generally worked by using IFRAMEs to the
website involved), and this has been well known for years. For
example, according to
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/541351/facebooks-like-buttons-will-soon-track-your-web-browsing-to-target-ads/
Facebook started using the tracking Like buttons to target ads in
2015. I think the Facebook-WhatsApp acquisition story is also famous
by now BTW, including how they eventually allowed data sharing
between the two (presumably after years of losses). It is worth
mentioning how even the WhatsApp founders now recommend deleting
Facebook (especially after the Cambridge Analytica debacle).
Now, let’s discuss Mozilla. Brendan Eich was the creator of
JavaScript at Netscape when it was invented in 1995 and was the CTO
of Mozilla Corporation from 2005 to 2014. After he stepped down from
Mozilla in 2014 (just after he became CEO and after bad publicity
stemming from his political donations about things like gay
marriage), he was one of the founders of Brave with its Basic
Attention Token etc. Andreas Gal joined Mozilla in 2008 and was the
CTO from 2014 until 2015 when he left Mozilla.
Mozilla signed the Google search deal in 2004, before Google even
IPOed (let alone things like DoubleClick). Mozilla switched to a
Yahoo search deal in late 2014 (by then the search engine was based
on MS’s Bing I think), which was part of Marissa Mayer’s attempt
to fix Yahoo before it was sold to Verizon. Recently Mozilla switched
back to Google as the default search engine.
BrendanEich mentioned in
https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/932747825833680897
that “It's not a simple Newtonian-physics (or fake economics based
on same) problem.” This was about the history of the Google search
deal with Mozilla and the fact that it was signed before Google IPOed
(when it was being funded by VCs). It is worth mentioning here that
Google was founded in 1998 when the now famous dot-com bubble was at
the peak and VC funding was common (allowing many startups to grow
fast which was considered more important than profits). Many other
dot-com startups at the time had problems and ended up failing when
the bubble collapsed around 2001. It is worth mentioning that the
DoubleClick acquisition dates back to 2007 which was just before the
housing bubble famously collapsed leading to another recession, and
that bubble probably started just after the dot-com bubble.
BrendanEich mentioned in
https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/932473969625595904
that “A friend said in 2003 that Sergey declared G would not
acquire display ads & arb. Search vs. Display as that would be
“evil”.”, before Google even IPOed (in 2004). Unfortunately no
other source was given.
It was mentioned on Twitter that Firefox OS enabled tracking
protection by default unlike desktop Firefox. It was mentioned in
https://twitter.com/andreasgal/status/932757853504339968
that “Yup. I was able to sneak that past management”. I then
asked “I wonder if you ever talked to Larry/Sergey.” and Brendan
then answered that Andreas didn’t of course. I wonder what would
have happened if they did.
https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/gdpr_risk_to_the_duopoly/
has some information on the effect of EU GDPR on Google ads. Notice
that AdWords comply if all “personalization” features are removed
for example. This included things like “remarketing”. I suspect
that AdWords when it was first created in 2000 did not have these
features. Other features like “remarketing lists for search ads”
are also listed as not compliant, which was of course probably added
later too. There was also the infamous cookie law that required
notification for placing cookies, which was not that effective but a
major step in the direction given that most ad tracking (including
DoubleClick) were based on cookies. Google’s implementation of GDPR
caused some concerns with publishers
(http://adage.com/article/digital/tensions-flare-google-publishers-gdpr-looms/313592/),
and some publishers blocked EU IP addresses in response to GDPR.
Data breaches are also a problem. The AOL search data breach from
2006 is pretty famous. The data was “anonymized” but the search
terms was often enough to deanonymize users. Ad tracking data is
likely similar, including browsing history and the like. Anonymizing
data is a useful technique to avoid accidental abuse, but some kinds
of data are hard to anonymize in a way that prevent all abuse. For
example, various techniques for anonymizing IP addresses and MAC
addresses has been developed, including hashing and truncation. Of
course, the more data that is consolidated and collected, the higher
the risk and impact of a breach.
Of course, it is worth noting that Google/DoubleClick isn’t the
only one involved in the ad bubble (though DoubleClick was one of the
first to do ad tracking I think). I think Taboola is often considered
even worse than Google for example. The same fundamental problems
with tracking however tends to apply to all of the ad networks. Some
of the worse ones may use browser fingerpointing via things like
JavaScript, which is even worse than the tracking via cookies that is
most commonly used. Browser fingerpointing is generally difficult to
prevent on the browser side, but it is so famous that the WHATWG HTML
spec mentions it and marks the parts of the spec where there is a
risk. For example the list of browser plugins (navigator.plugins in
JavaScript) could be used at one point (in Firefox it used not to be
sorted so it would be unique for each user, which made the
fingerpointing even easier), but fortunately plug-ins are dying off
anyway because of other problems. EFF created Panopticlick which
illustrated some of the fingerpointing that was possible, and other
examples that became famous included Evercookie by Samy Kamkar. To
make things worse, many plugins like Flash had their own cookies as
well (though browsers have been getting better at clearing them). It
is also worth noting that the current tracking ads are not the only
kind of web advertising. There are so-called “first-party” and
“third-party” ads and cookies. Example of first-party ads
includes Twitter and Reddit ads. Example of third-party ads includes
DoubleClick and Taboola ads. First-party ads don’t have the issues
described here.
Recently, Google’s ad blocking and “better ads” (including
so-called Better Ad Alliance) involves annoying ads, but don’t fix
the fundamental issues described here. Apple’s ad blocking targets
retargeting by limiting the life of cookies for example (making them
less effective for tracking), but does not change the display of ads
or make ads less annoying (for example, autoplay video ads are pretty
famous as well, especially with Flash).
Now, fixing the problems might be difficult. Obviously it would
affect not only shareholders but pretty much everyone else if Google
completely got rid of tracking ads. This includes sites depending on
Google ads for revenue as well as Google itself. One example here is
that both Microsoft and Novell used Client Access Licenses (CALs).
CALs (called node licenses by Novell I think) are per user or per
computer licenses common in server software like NetWare and Windows
Server. Of course, when Novell moved to Linux, it was open source
software that didn’t have CALs (Like with Red Hat, the company only
paid for support) meaning that Novell could not expect the same level
of revenue as in the NetWare days (they moved to Linux by buying
SUSE). The story about Sun’s open source projects and Jonathan
Schwartz (the former “ponytail” CEO), and how they eventually had
to sell to Oracle is probably pretty famous as well (some examples of
open source projects from that period included OpenSolaris,
OpenOffice, and OpenJDK). The ad bubble will probably not last
forever though. Bubbles like this one is part of the problem of the
current debt-based economy (the main problem is that it allows almost
infinite amounts of “debt” in US dollars since we got off the
gold standard in 1971, including most commonly government debt),
especially it encourage extracting as much money as possible from
so-called “consumers” (another example is Adobe Creative Cloud
subscriptions and how Adobe’s stock price rose after it was
implemented).
Google in 2015 hired Ruth Porat as CFO to bring financial discipline
to Google. This included cutting unprofitable projects, especially
“Google X” research projects and failed projects like Google
Glass. According to
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-08/google-makes-so-much-money-it-never-had-to-worry-about-financial-discipline,
one of the things they did was “to force the Other Bets to begin
paying for the shared Google services they used”. It is probably
reasonable to suspect that the increase in ad revenue due to
DoubleClick etc is part of why they were able to start so many of
these projects in the first place. One recent example is the recent
changes in pricing of of Google Maps, mentioned in
https://www.inderapotheke.de/blog/farewell-google-maps
For Mozilla, a good example to illustrate the problems with funding
browser development is the Opera browser. It was founded in 1995 in
Norway. First browser was released in 1996. It IPOed in 2004. The
browser used its own engine and it had a lot of unique features, like
relatively good CSS support early on (unlike Netscape 4 at the time
which famously had relatively poor support and was a problem for web
developers for years). At first it was officially a paid browser with
a trial version (like Netscape was before 1998), but later they used
ads (choices included banner ads or text-based Google ads) for
non-paying customers. They eventually signed a search deal with
Google which removed the ads and instead just used Google as the
default search engine (like Mozilla’s). Of course, there wasn’t
much profit margin in a web browser, and so they had to cut costs to
keep stocks and quarterly earnings going up (so planning for the
future was difficult for example). It was strong in the mobile world
before WebKit became dominant there though (before things like iPhone
and Android and when things like WML was common) and may still be
strong in some embedded applications, with products like Opera Mini
that was basically remote rendering of web pages (useful when devices
had less processing power). Opera never had much market share (though
it had plenty of fans back in the day), and in the end Opera had to
switch to Chromium (with the Blink engine) instead of their own
engine and codebase in the desktop browser (though they did release
last updates for the old one that included for example TLS
enhancements). Opera was eventually sold to a Chinese consortium,
which eventually renamed the company Otello. The founders eventually
started the Vivaldi browser, which is also based on Chromium/Blink
but has many differences. In contrast, the Mozilla Foundation was
created as a non-profit organization in around 2003 as the old
Netscape was dying off with AOL’s help (AOL bought Netscape in 1998
BTW). It owns a for-profit Mozilla Corporation for tax reasons
(non-profits are not subject to taxes that for-profits have in the
US). I think the corporation owns the search deals like Yahoo and
Google for example. You can still donate to the Mozilla Foundation
today. Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released in 2004 after the Foundation
was created (and after the branded Netscape 6/7 releases) and quickly
took market share from the dominant IE6 that was stagnating the web
(by being virtually unchanged for a long time without any real
development) and was also well known for security problems like the
Download.Ject attacks. MS was forced to respond with IE6 in Windows
XP SP2 which in addition to security enhancements also added a few
features like pop-up blocking and IE7 which finally bought real
enhancements to the core engine that help web developers (especially
in places like CSS). The old Netscape search deal with Google dates
back to 1999 (obviously Netscape.com was Netscape’s home page at
the time), and the success of the deal probably inspired the later
Google search deal that Mozilla did.
One alternative to the current tracking ads is called Basic Attention
Token. Basic Attention Token is based on the Ethereum cryptocurrency
and blockchain (this is like Bitcoin but it is GPU minable for
example using a different algorithm and it is one of the most popular
GPU minable coins). It was created by the Brave browser, which
supports it directly. It is intended to “directly measure”
attention. “Attention” is measured on the client side (based on
local browser history) and tokens are rewarded for them (called
“basic attention metrics”), eliminating the privacy issues. This
is often called a “zero-knowledge proof”. There are also other
benefits like reducing so-called “click fraud” that hurts
advertisers that is a common problem with current ads and removing
the need for intermediaries that do tracking like DoubleClick and
Taboola (so advertisers also gets more of the money too since they
don’t have to pay them). Many other kinds of tokens and “smart
contracts” has been created on Ethereum, and so-called initial coin
offerings (ICOs) has been the most common use of Ethereum (helping
the price to rise). Of course, there is little to no regulation for
them at the moment which results in many scam ICOs too (they tends to
raise money very quickly, partly since it is so easy to give coins to
them).
There are also systems for paying authors directly like Patreon,
though it is also trivial to use PayPal or cryptocurrencies for this
purpose (though also harder to donate). Patreon allow money to be
“pledged” to specific authors. There are also many kinds of
“paywalls” implemented on websites, many of which has their own
problems like relying on cookies to track how many times people
visited a site (to limit the number before the user have to pay of
course) or making it difficult to post links on Slashdot, Reddit, and
Hacker News that often dislike paywalls for obvious reasons (though
some are better than others).
Of course, the problems described in the essay as well as other
problems of ads (including annoyance and performance cost of ads) led
to more use of ad blockers, which also have their own history. Banner
ad blindness has also been known for years now, and Google’s ads
tends to be simple text-based ads at least initially. One of the
first type of blocking was popup blockers, and Google was taking a
stand against popups in the early days (they were well known to be
annoying). They became common in browsers by the mid-2000s (even IE6
in XP SP2 had them). At one point circa 2002, AOL/Netscape was
disabling the popup blocker from Netscape-branded Mozilla releases
(at one time there was the Mozilla source code/binaries and the
official Netscape-branded builds based on the Mozilla source). Of
course after user backlash they backed off from doing so. This was
long before Google bought DoubleClick for example. Later more
sophisticated ad and cookie blockers like AdBlock Plus and uBlock
Origin came out as add-ons to browsers like Firefox, and one is built
into Brave of course (along with BAT as a replacement for the lost ad
revenue). Many other browsers have also similar tracking protection
including Firefox and IE, but they just disable them by default and
may require that ad blocking lists (such as EasyList) be manually
loaded. Of course, some sites has been attempting to detect ad
blockers and ask users to turn them off (even Ars Technica did it at
one point though it only lasted one day), which is also ineffective
and not a good idea for obvious reasons (including the fact that it
reflects badly on the sites that are doing it). Lawsuits against ad
blockers was also tried in some countries, which was obviously mostly
unsuccessful (like a lawsuit against AdBlock Plus in Germany by
publishers there).
Wednesday, September 5, 2018
Google DoubleClick Mozilla overview (first draft)
Note the change from essay to overview. Question: Is the malware part worth discussing?
There are many problems with web advertising in general, including annoying features like autoplay video ads and pop-ups and also problems like “click fraud” which matter to advertisers. But the ethical issues with them are the most important, including malware (like exploit kits) and also tracking ads that affects privacy. This essay will be focusing on the ethical issues with some of the kinds of ads that Google produces and the history behind them, and why Larry/Sergey didn’t consider them when buying DoubleClick for example. Also discussed is Mozilla and how they are involved (like in the Google/Mozilla search deal), including Brendan Eich who created JavaScript that eventually left Mozilla to found Brave. There is also the difficulty of solving these issues, which will also be discussed. Of course, advertising is not limited to the web and there are often many benefits and risks (like deceptive advertising) to advertising in general, most of which will not be discussed here.
The history of Google and its advertising will be discussed first. Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while at Stanford, and took VC funding from KP and other partners. Google was founded with the search engine (with the PageRank algorithm) as the first product, but later added products like Gmail. Eric Schmidt was bought in as CEO in 2001 and recently left but are still on the board. Google IPOed in 2004, using dual class stock for example.
The first kind of ads that Google did was AdWords, dating back to 2000. AdWords was based on search keywords, and the text ads were displayed at the top of the search results (labelled as ads) and were relatively simple. Typically the highest bidder was shown, and the advertiser paid Google when the user clicked on the ads. AdWords involved relatively little tracking at least initially and will not be mentioned much here. At this time Google was also taking a stand against popup ads.
AdSense was ads shown on webpages themselves, based on JavaScript. It was invented in 2003. AdSense at least initially was based on keywords on webpages themselves (which Google fetched from its cache for example), which advertisers could bid on. Like with AdWords, Google and websites gets paid when users click on the ads. It also involved little tracking at least initially, but the malware problems will be described here.
Google bought DoubleClick in 2008. DoubleClick was invented in 1995. It made more sophisticated ad tracking via cookies and the like famous (which was often called “retargeting”), and the problems will be described here. DoubleClick themselves called its product “Dynamic Advertising Reporting and Targeting” at one point for example. Initially DoubleClick was mostly banner ads, and many users developed so-called banner-blindness from these ads. Cookies were itself invented in Netscape in 1994, and the IETF group that developed RFC 2109 and 2965 already know that tracking with “third-party cookies” were a problem (and it was mentioned in these RFCs). Those attempts at IETF cookie standards ultimately failed partly because they were incompatible with current browsers, and led to RFC 6265 that is closer to how cookies are implemented in browsers today. It also led to W3C P3P which was famously implemented in IE6, which also of course failed (partly because it was too complex) and was removed from Windows 10 but was an attempt to get the tracking under control.
Google bought Urchin in 2005, turning it into Google Analytics. Urchin was founded in 1998. Initially its product was to analyze web server log files, with JavaScript tags being added in Urchin 4 (called “Urchin Traffic Monitor”). The hosted version based entirely on JavaScript that was created later was initially called “Urchin on Demand” and was introduced in 2004. Of course, the original software that was sold receive little attention once Google bought it and it became Google Analytics and it was discontinued in 2012.
One of the problems of ads is malware. Typically websites take the highest bidder of ads and fill as much space as possible with ads, making malware like exploit kits difficult to prevent. To make things worse, companies can only spend a limited amount of money on ads, so sites often have to take the highest bidder to make enough revenue to support them and often websites even use multiple ad networks. Flash was famous for some exploits for example (especially as it got more complex), and these days in general NPAPI and ActiveX etc plug-ins are dying off. Java was even worse for example with zero-days breaking the sandbox being very frequent at one point, and many browsers limit plug-ins to Flash only these days. Of course, there are browser exploits too.
Though the vast majority of exploits in kits are typically already patched, sometimes unpatched zero day exploits get delivered by ads like in the case of https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/zero-day-exploit. There is a market for exploit kits in general, and zero days are particularly valuable (obviously because they are unpatched). The FBI was also famous for using Firefox zero-days to deanonymize Tor users.
One of the most famous of ads that contain malware was at Forbes, where the Angler exploit kit was served via pop-under ads after the site asked users to turn off ad blockers in 2016 (discovered by Brian Baskin). Of course, asking users to turn off ad blockers or otherwise fighting against them is not a good idea in the first place, and it illustrated some of the flaws discussed here. This exploit kits also hit sites like MSN, and it was one of the most popular exploit kit at one point.
Douglas Crockford tried to prevent malicious JavaScript in ads at Yahoo with AdSafe, including cross site scripting attacks. Of course, JavaScript is a Turing complete language making this more difficult, and Flash is even more complex. This is especially an issue when browser exploits are involved. I think AdSafe worked by creating a limited sandbox to prevent things like XSS attacks (using a special object and denying access to many other objects), and defining a subset of JavaScript that can be verified. Flash in ads was also common too though, and obviously this is harder to verify to ensure it is safe (Flash’s complexity is part of why it is gradually being phased out in browsers).
Another problem is tracking. The current economy is a debt-based economy based on consumption. The more money advertisers can extract from consumers, the more they are willing to spend on ads. This results in tracking getting creepier and creepier, and encourage consolidation of data for example. Most of the ad tracking is called “retargeting” and it is often based on cookies and JavaScript, and DoubleClick was one of the first to do it. All ads encourages consumption by definition, but tracking ads are particularly bad for these reasons.
For example, DoubleClick has cross-device retargeting introduced in 2015. Of course, it is limited to logged-in users tracking via the user account at least initially (which any websites can do), but it illustrated the trend. Google changed the privacy policy to allow Google accounts to be used for such logged-in user tracking in 2016. Recently Google signed an agreement with MasterCard to obtain credit card sales data. Of course, credit cards directly ties an increase in debt to consumer spending, which in turn can go to Google as ad dollars.
According to http://adage.com/article/digital/google-turns-behavioral-targeting-beef-display-ads/135152/, “In December 2008 Google added DoubleClick cookies to AdSense ads”, tying the DoubleClick cookie-based tracking (dating long before Google bought it) to AdSense. I assume that AdSense tracking probably did not exist before Google bought DoubleClick. Google Analytics added AdWords and AdSense support in 2009. In 2012, Google changed its privacy policy to allow data to be consolidated, which was also very controversial. In 2014, Google Analytics integrated with DoubleClick, allowing things like remarketing lists to be shared according to https://analytics.googleblog.com/2014/05/google-analytics-summit-2014-whats-next.html. Remarketing lists are basically lists of website visitors that can be uniquely identified by things like cookies, and it is one of the ways of targeting ads to users. It can probably be assumed that sharing remarketing lists basically ties the tracking together. Sharing of Google Analytics remarketing lists with AdWords was introduced in 2015, along with linking of Google Analytics and AdWords “manager” accounts, according to https://adwords.googleblog.com/2015/11/share-google-analytics-data-and.html. “Google Analytics 365” came in 2016, according to https://analytics.googleblog.com/2016/03/introducing-google-analytics-360-suite.html. Remarketing lists for search ads was introduced in 2012 and was tied to Google Analytics in 2015 (though not all data from Google Analytics can be used). It allowed different search ads to be targeted to different visitors based on cookie-based tracking on websites (with sites using special tags for this purpose). For example, you can show different search ads to visitors that visit the site every day.
Of course, users often has little control and benefit over storage of user data and ad retargeting by trackers too, especially when many parties are involved. This was mentioned during the Google/DoubleClick acquisition for example. Of course, some provides more control than others, such as AdChoices for example. AdChoices was an attempt at self-regulation for ad publishers, and used an icon to indicate that data was being collected. You can click the icon to display the privacy policy for the ads or opt-out of ad targeting. It was not the same as blocking ads completely though, and did not solve all of the problems of ads either. There was also an attempt at a Do-Not-Track HTTP header, which was probably too simple (and thus was also very vague in its meaning) and there was no guarantee that a site would comply either obviously since it was just an HTTP header (IE11 enabling it by default was also controversial and Win10 no longer does so by default).
Some of the problems with the opt-out methods are similar to the problems of a national “do not email” registry proposed in the US CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 for spam messages, and such lists to “opt out” of spam are widely considered to be unacceptable in general. Even “opt-out” or “unsubscribe” links in spam is widely considered untrustworthy for obvious reasons, though legitimate mailing lists will also have them. That idea came from the similar “do not call” registry for telephone marketing (to stop annoying marketing phone calls which were considered more annoying than spam of course), but email and internet advertising ended up being very different from telephone calls making these laws difficult to enforce. It is far easier to send an email than to call someone for example, and email is also more difficult to trace to the origin especially given that the Internet is global. FTC has a report at https://www.ftc.gov/reports/can-spam-act-2003-national-do-not-email-registy-federal-trade-commission-report-congress describing these problems (it was a report to Congress that was required by CAN-SPAM), including the possibility that such a list can be abused by spammers for example. “Closed-loop opt-in” using confirmation emails for mailing lists on the other hand is widely accepted, but it is not mentioned in CAN-SPAM. One example includes the tracking of “opt-out” using cookies in things like AdChoices, which themselves can be used for other purposes obviously.
There are some reasons why these problems were not apparent (for example to Larry/Sergey) when Google bought DoubleClick, or when remarketing lists was shared, or for that matter when Urchin became Google Analytics and the data was merged with ad data.
The difficulty of researching things like the tying of remarketing lists during the writing of this essay shows some of the problems. It seems that no one cared about the privacy implications when remarketing lists in AdSense and DoubleClick was shared for example. In many cases, advertisers managed “remarketing” lists of “anonymous” visitors that was being tracked by cookies from a central console without thinking of the privacy problems, treating visitors almost as numbers. This ties in with the idea of treating people as “consumers” to be extracted from that are also fundamentally flawed. Another example of this is AOL that famously made it difficult to cancel at one point, partly because measuring “customer loyalty” as numbers to be extracted from consumers was part of their culture. To make it worse, they once charged consumers by the time spent on AOL, so the longer they stay the more revenue they made.
The Google-DoubleClick acquisitions was also controversial, with EPIC, CDD and US PIRG for example filing complaints with the FTC in April 2007, a “first supplement” to the complaint in June 2007, and a “second supplement” in September 2007. There was also a Senate hearing on Sept 27, 2007 with testimonies from a variety of sources regarding that issue. One of the concerns back then was aggregation of tracking data and lack of control by users, though other issues unrelated to ads like storage of IP addresses by search engines were also mentioned. Ultimately it took the FTC until the end of 2007 to approve the deals, after a “second request”.
Before the Google-DoubleClick acquisition, DoubleClick was once planned to merge with Abacus. FTC blocked the merger because of the privacy problems and it never happened. Abacus Direct seems to be a market researching company targeting consumer buying behavior. As a result, Abacus had a lot of personal info about consumers, and there were concerns that this data could be merged with DoubleClick data and may be used to deanonymize them.
In 2012, Jonathan Mayer discovered that Google used some tricks in JavaScript to allow tracking in Safari. It involved how Google was able to bypass cookie blocking policy in Safari by using an invisible form to fool Safari into allowing cookies. FTC fined Google $22.5 million over this behaviour, and more recently there has been lawsuits about it in the UK. There has been also a class action lawsuit about this in the US. Google argued the tracking was unintentional at the time and that it was related to Google+ “Plus” buttons on DoubleClick ads (for logged-in users I believe). It is probably worth mentioning here that a lot of these kind of buttons (like Facebook’s Like buttons, to name another example) do their own tracking too (they generally worked by using IFRAMEs to the website involved), and this has been well known for years. For example, according to https://www.technologyreview.com/s/541351/facebooks-like-buttons-will-soon-track-your-web-browsing-to-target-ads/ Facebook started using the tracking Like buttons to target ads in 2015. I think the Facebook-WhatsApp acquisition story is also famous by now BTW, including how they eventually allowed data sharing between the two (presumably after years of losses). It is worth mentioning how even the WhatsApp founders now recommend deleting Facebook (especially after the Cambridge Analytica debacle).
On the problem of malware, it probably can be assumed that no one cared as much about security when AdSense added Flash ads for example with exploits not as common as now. One of the first common exploits (dating back to the Morris worm in the late 1980s) was stack-based and sometime heap-based buffer overruns (using null-terminated C string copies that don’t limit the length copied for example), then the exploits got more sophisticated and complex (like use after free, return oriented programming and ASLR information leaks as some examples) especially as mitigation measures like stack canaries, NX and ASLR became common in response. It probably can be assumed that the market for exploit kits and zero day exploits and the like also probably took time to develop (though some of them was made famous by recent NSA leaks for example).
Now, let’s discuss Mozilla. Brendan Eich was the creator of JavaScript at Netscape when it was invented in 1995 and was the CTO of Mozilla Corporation from 2005 to 2014. After he stepped down from Mozilla in 2014 (just after he became CEO and after bad publicity stemming from his political donations about things like gay marriage), he was one of the founders of Brave with its Basic Attention Token etc. Andreas Gal joined Mozilla in 2008 and was the CTO from 2014 until 2015 when he left Mozilla.
Mozilla signed the Google search deal in 2004, before Google even IPOed (let alone things like DoubleClick). Mozilla switched to a Yahoo search deal in late 2014 (by then the search engine was based on MS’s Bing I think), which was part of Marissa Mayer’s attempt to fix Yahoo before it was sold to Verizon. Recently Mozilla switched back to Google as the default search engine.
BrendanEich mentioned in https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/932747825833680897 that “It's not a simple Newtonian-physics (or fake economics based on same) problem.” This was about the history of the Google search deal with Mozilla and the fact that it was signed before Google IPOed (when it was being funded by VCs). It is worth mentioning here that Google was founded in 1998 when the now famous dot-com bubble was at the peak and VC funding was common (allowing many startups to grow fast which was considered more important than profits). Many other dot-com startups at the time had problems and ended up failing when the bubble collapsed around 2001. It is worth mentioning that the DoubleClick acquisition dates back to 2007 which was just before the housing bubble famously collapsed leading to another recession, and that bubble probably started just after the dot-com bubble.
BrendanEich mentioned in https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/932473969625595904 that “A friend said in 2003 that Sergey declared G would not acquire display ads & arb. Search vs. Display as that would be “evil”.”, before Google even IPOed (in 2004). Unfortunately no other source was given.
It was mentioned on Twitter that Firefox OS enabled tracking protection by default unlike desktop Firefox. It was mentioned in https://twitter.com/andreasgal/status/932757853504339968 that “Yup. I was able to sneak that past management”. I then asked “I wonder if you ever talked to Larry/Sergey.” and Brendan then answered that Andreas didn’t of course. I wonder what would have happened if they did.
https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/gdpr_risk_to_the_duopoly/ has some information on the effect of EU GDPR on Google ads. Notice that AdWords comply if all “personalization” features are removed for example. This included things like “remarketing”. I suspect that AdWords when it was first created in 2000 did not have these features. Other features like “remarketing lists for search ads” are also listed as not compliant, which was of course probably added later too. There was also the infamous cookie law that required notification for placing cookies, which was not that effective but a major step in the direction given that most ad tracking (including DoubleClick) were based on cookies. Google’s implementation of GDPR caused some concerns with publishers (http://adage.com/article/digital/tensions-flare-google-publishers-gdpr-looms/313592/), and some publishers blocked EU IP addresses in response to GDPR.
Data breaches are also a problem. The AOL search data breach from 2006 is pretty famous. The data was “anonymized” but the search terms was often enough to deanonymize users. Ad tracking data is likely similar, including browsing history and the like. Anonymizing data is a useful technique to avoid accidental abuse, but some kinds of data are hard to anonymize in a way that prevent all abuse. For example, various techniques for anonymizing IP addresses and MAC addresses has been developed, including hashing and truncation. Of course, the more data that is consolidated and collected, the higher the risk and impact of a breach.
Of course, it is worth noting that Google/DoubleClick isn’t the only one involved in the ad bubble (though DoubleClick was one of the first to do ad tracking I think). I think Taboola is often considered even worse than Google for example. The same fundamental problems with tracking and malware ads and the ad bubble etc. however tends to apply to all of the ad networks. Some of the worse ones may use browser fingerpointing via things like JavaScript, which is even worse than the tracking via cookies that is most commonly used. Browser fingerpointing is generally difficult to prevent on the browser side, but it is so famous that the WHATWG HTML spec mentions it and marks the parts of the spec where there is a risk. For example the list of browser plugins (navigator.plugins in JavaScript) could be used at one point (in Firefox it used not to be sorted so it would be unique for each user, which made the fingerpointing even easier), but fortunately plug-ins are dying off anyway because of other problems. EFF created Panopticlick which illustrated some of the fingerpointing that was possible, and other examples that became famous included Evercookie by Samy Kamkar. To make things worse, many plugins like Flash had their own cookies as well (though browsers have been getting better at clearing them). It is also worth noting that the current tracking ads are not the only kind of web advertising. There are so-called “first-party” and “third-party” ads and cookies. Example of first-party ads includes Twitter and Reddit ads. Example of third-party ads includes DoubleClick and Taboola ads. First-party ads don’t have the issues described here.
Recently, Google’s ad blocking and “better ads” (including so-called Better Ad Alliance) involves annoying ads, but don’t fix the fundamental issues described here. Apple’s ad blocking targets retargeting by limiting the life of cookies for example (making them less effective for tracking), but does not change the display of ads or make ads less annoying (for example, autoplay video ads are pretty famous as well, especially with Flash).
Now, fixing the problems might be difficult. Obviously it would affect not only shareholders but pretty much everyone else if Google completely got rid of tracking ads. This includes sites depending on Google ads for revenue as well as Google itself. One example here is that both Microsoft and Novell used Client Access Licenses (CALs). CALs (called node licenses by Novell I think) are per user or per computer licenses common in server software like NetWare and Windows Server. Of course, when Novell moved to Linux, it was open source software that didn’t have CALs (Like with Red Hat, the company only paid for support) meaning that Novell could not expect the same level of revenue as in the NetWare days (they moved to Linux by buying SUSE). The story about Sun’s open source projects and Jonathan Schwartz (the former “ponytail” CEO), and how they eventually had to sell to Oracle is probably pretty famous as well (some examples of open source projects from that period included OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, and OpenJDK). The ad bubble will probably not last forever though. Bubbles like this one is part of the problem of the current debt-based economy (the main problem is that it allows almost infinite amounts of “debt” in US dollars since we got off the gold standard in 1971, including most commonly government debt), especially it encourage extracting as much money as possible from so-called “consumers” (another example is Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions and how Adobe’s stock price rose after it was implemented).
Google in 2015 hired Ruth Porat as CFO to bring financial discipline to Google. This included cutting unprofitable projects, especially “Google X” research projects and failed projects like Google Glass. According to https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-08/google-makes-so-much-money-it-never-had-to-worry-about-financial-discipline, one of the things they did was “to force the Other Bets to begin paying for the shared Google services they used”. It is probably reasonable to suspect that the increase in ad revenue due to DoubleClick etc is part of why they were able to start so many of these projects in the first place. One recent example is the recent changes in pricing of of Google Maps, mentioned in https://www.inderapotheke.de/blog/farewell-google-maps
For Mozilla, a good example to illustrate the problems with funding browser development is the Opera browser. It was founded in 1995 in Norway. First browser was released in 1996. It IPOed in 2004. The browser used its own engine and it had a lot of unique features, like relatively good CSS support early on (unlike Netscape 4 at the time which famously had relatively poor support and was a problem for web developers for years). At first it was officially a paid browser with a trial version (like Netscape was before 1998), but later they used ads (choices included banner ads or text-based Google ads) for non-paying customers. They eventually signed a search deal with Google which removed the ads and instead just used Google as the default search engine (like Mozilla’s). Of course, there wasn’t much profit margin in a web browser, and so they had to cut costs to keep stocks and quarterly earnings going up (so planning for the future was difficult for example). It was strong in the mobile world before WebKit became dominant there though (before things like iPhone and Android and when things like WML was common) and may still be strong in some embedded applications, with products like Opera Mini that was basically remote rendering of web pages (useful when devices had less processing power). Opera never had much market share (though it had plenty of fans back in the day), and in the end Opera had to switch to Chromium (with the Blink engine) instead of their own engine and codebase in the desktop browser (though they did release last updates for the old one that included for example TLS enhancements). Opera was eventually sold to a Chinese consortium, which eventually renamed the company Otello. The founders eventually started the Vivaldi browser, which is also based on Chromium/Blink but has many differences. In contrast, the Mozilla Foundation was created as a non-profit organization in around 2003 as the old Netscape was dying off with AOL’s help (AOL bought Netscape in 1998 BTW). It owns a for-profit Mozilla Corporation for tax reasons (non-profits are not subject to taxes that for-profits have in the US). I think the corporation owns the search deals like Yahoo and Google for example. You can still donate to the Mozilla Foundation today. Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released in 2004 after the Foundation was created (and after the branded Netscape 6/7 releases) and quickly took market share from the dominant IE6 that was stagnating the web (by being virtually unchanged for a long time without any real development) and was also well known for security problems like the Download.Ject attacks. MS was forced to respond with IE6 in Windows XP SP2 which in addition to security enhancements also added a few features like pop-up blocking and IE7 which finally bought real enhancements to the core engine that help web developers (especially in places like CSS). The old Netscape search deal with Google dates back to 1999 (obviously Netscape.com was Netscape’s home page at the time), and the success of the deal probably inspired the later Google search deal that Mozilla did.
One alternative to the current tracking ads is called Basic Attention Token. Basic Attention Token is based on the Ethereum cryptocurrency and blockchain (this is like Bitcoin but it is GPU minable for example using a different algorithm and it is one of the most popular GPU minable coins). It was created by the Brave browser, which supports it directly. It is intended to “directly measure” attention. “Attention” is measured on the client side (based on local browser history) and tokens are rewarded for them (called “basic attention metrics”), eliminating the privacy issues. This is often called a “zero-knowledge proof”. There are also other benefits like reducing so-called “click fraud” that hurts advertisers that is a common problem with current ads and removing the need for intermediaries that do tracking like DoubleClick and Taboola (so advertisers also gets more of the money too since they don’t have to pay them). Many other kinds of tokens and “smart contracts” has been created on Ethereum, and so-called initial coin offerings (ICOs) has been the most common use of Ethereum (helping the price to rise). Of course, there is little to no regulation for them at the moment which results in many scam ICOs too (they tends to raise money very quickly, partly since it is so easy to give coins to them).
There are also systems for paying authors directly like Patreon, though it is also trivial to use PayPal or cryptocurrencies for this purpose (though also harder to donate). Patreon allow money to be “pledged” to specific authors. There are also many kinds of “paywalls” implemented on websites, many of which has their own problems like relying on cookies to track how many times people visited a site (to limit the number before the user have to pay of course) or making it difficult to post links on Slashdot, Reddit, and Hacker News that often dislike paywalls for obvious reasons (though some are better than others).
Of course, the problems described in the essay as well as other problems of ads (including annoyance and performance cost of ads) led to more use of ad blockers, which also have their own history. Banner ad blindness has also been known for years now, and Google’s ads tends to be simple text-based ads at least initially. One of the first type of blocking was popup blockers, and Google was taking a stand against popups in the early days (they were well known to be annoying). They became common in browsers by the mid-2000s (even IE6 in XP SP2 had them). At one point circa 2002, AOL/Netscape was disabling the popup blocker from Netscape-branded Mozilla releases (at one time there was the Mozilla source code/binaries and the official Netscape-branded builds based on the Mozilla source). Of course after user backlash they backed off from doing so. This was long before Google bought DoubleClick for example. Later more sophisticated ad and cookie blockers like AdBlock Plus and uBlock Origin came out as add-ons to browsers like Firefox, and one is built into Brave of course (along with BAT as a replacement for the lost ad revenue). Many other browsers have also similar tracking protection including Firefox and IE, but they just disable them by default and may require that ad blocking lists (such as EasyList) be manually loaded. Of course, some sites has been attempting to detect ad blockers and ask users to turn them off (even Ars Technica did it at one point though it only lasted one day), which is also ineffective and not a good idea for obvious reasons (including the fact that it reflects badly on the sites that are doing it). Lawsuits against ad blockers was also tried in some countries, which was obviously mostly unsuccessful (like a lawsuit against AdBlock Plus in Germany by publishers there).
There are many problems with the current tracking ads, but the worst ethical issues are malware and tracking. These problems led to people using ad blockers for example. There are alternatives like Basic Attention Token, but even with things like that fixing the problems might be difficult. For example, the effects would probably be serious (for everyone, not just shareholders) if Google got rid of tracking ads. Part of the reason tracking ads became so popular and would be difficult to remove completely from the web was the way the debt-based economy encourages extracting as money as possible from consumers. There are reasons why Larry/Sergey didn’t realize the problems when they bought DoubleClick for example, including that no one cared as much about security back then.
There are many problems with web advertising in general, including annoying features like autoplay video ads and pop-ups and also problems like “click fraud” which matter to advertisers. But the ethical issues with them are the most important, including malware (like exploit kits) and also tracking ads that affects privacy. This essay will be focusing on the ethical issues with some of the kinds of ads that Google produces and the history behind them, and why Larry/Sergey didn’t consider them when buying DoubleClick for example. Also discussed is Mozilla and how they are involved (like in the Google/Mozilla search deal), including Brendan Eich who created JavaScript that eventually left Mozilla to found Brave. There is also the difficulty of solving these issues, which will also be discussed. Of course, advertising is not limited to the web and there are often many benefits and risks (like deceptive advertising) to advertising in general, most of which will not be discussed here.
The history of Google and its advertising will be discussed first. Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while at Stanford, and took VC funding from KP and other partners. Google was founded with the search engine (with the PageRank algorithm) as the first product, but later added products like Gmail. Eric Schmidt was bought in as CEO in 2001 and recently left but are still on the board. Google IPOed in 2004, using dual class stock for example.
The first kind of ads that Google did was AdWords, dating back to 2000. AdWords was based on search keywords, and the text ads were displayed at the top of the search results (labelled as ads) and were relatively simple. Typically the highest bidder was shown, and the advertiser paid Google when the user clicked on the ads. AdWords involved relatively little tracking at least initially and will not be mentioned much here. At this time Google was also taking a stand against popup ads.
AdSense was ads shown on webpages themselves, based on JavaScript. It was invented in 2003. AdSense at least initially was based on keywords on webpages themselves (which Google fetched from its cache for example), which advertisers could bid on. Like with AdWords, Google and websites gets paid when users click on the ads. It also involved little tracking at least initially, but the malware problems will be described here.
Google bought DoubleClick in 2008. DoubleClick was invented in 1995. It made more sophisticated ad tracking via cookies and the like famous (which was often called “retargeting”), and the problems will be described here. DoubleClick themselves called its product “Dynamic Advertising Reporting and Targeting” at one point for example. Initially DoubleClick was mostly banner ads, and many users developed so-called banner-blindness from these ads. Cookies were itself invented in Netscape in 1994, and the IETF group that developed RFC 2109 and 2965 already know that tracking with “third-party cookies” were a problem (and it was mentioned in these RFCs). Those attempts at IETF cookie standards ultimately failed partly because they were incompatible with current browsers, and led to RFC 6265 that is closer to how cookies are implemented in browsers today. It also led to W3C P3P which was famously implemented in IE6, which also of course failed (partly because it was too complex) and was removed from Windows 10 but was an attempt to get the tracking under control.
Google bought Urchin in 2005, turning it into Google Analytics. Urchin was founded in 1998. Initially its product was to analyze web server log files, with JavaScript tags being added in Urchin 4 (called “Urchin Traffic Monitor”). The hosted version based entirely on JavaScript that was created later was initially called “Urchin on Demand” and was introduced in 2004. Of course, the original software that was sold receive little attention once Google bought it and it became Google Analytics and it was discontinued in 2012.
One of the problems of ads is malware. Typically websites take the highest bidder of ads and fill as much space as possible with ads, making malware like exploit kits difficult to prevent. To make things worse, companies can only spend a limited amount of money on ads, so sites often have to take the highest bidder to make enough revenue to support them and often websites even use multiple ad networks. Flash was famous for some exploits for example (especially as it got more complex), and these days in general NPAPI and ActiveX etc plug-ins are dying off. Java was even worse for example with zero-days breaking the sandbox being very frequent at one point, and many browsers limit plug-ins to Flash only these days. Of course, there are browser exploits too.
Though the vast majority of exploits in kits are typically already patched, sometimes unpatched zero day exploits get delivered by ads like in the case of https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/zero-day-exploit. There is a market for exploit kits in general, and zero days are particularly valuable (obviously because they are unpatched). The FBI was also famous for using Firefox zero-days to deanonymize Tor users.
One of the most famous of ads that contain malware was at Forbes, where the Angler exploit kit was served via pop-under ads after the site asked users to turn off ad blockers in 2016 (discovered by Brian Baskin). Of course, asking users to turn off ad blockers or otherwise fighting against them is not a good idea in the first place, and it illustrated some of the flaws discussed here. This exploit kits also hit sites like MSN, and it was one of the most popular exploit kit at one point.
Douglas Crockford tried to prevent malicious JavaScript in ads at Yahoo with AdSafe, including cross site scripting attacks. Of course, JavaScript is a Turing complete language making this more difficult, and Flash is even more complex. This is especially an issue when browser exploits are involved. I think AdSafe worked by creating a limited sandbox to prevent things like XSS attacks (using a special object and denying access to many other objects), and defining a subset of JavaScript that can be verified. Flash in ads was also common too though, and obviously this is harder to verify to ensure it is safe (Flash’s complexity is part of why it is gradually being phased out in browsers).
Another problem is tracking. The current economy is a debt-based economy based on consumption. The more money advertisers can extract from consumers, the more they are willing to spend on ads. This results in tracking getting creepier and creepier, and encourage consolidation of data for example. Most of the ad tracking is called “retargeting” and it is often based on cookies and JavaScript, and DoubleClick was one of the first to do it. All ads encourages consumption by definition, but tracking ads are particularly bad for these reasons.
For example, DoubleClick has cross-device retargeting introduced in 2015. Of course, it is limited to logged-in users tracking via the user account at least initially (which any websites can do), but it illustrated the trend. Google changed the privacy policy to allow Google accounts to be used for such logged-in user tracking in 2016. Recently Google signed an agreement with MasterCard to obtain credit card sales data. Of course, credit cards directly ties an increase in debt to consumer spending, which in turn can go to Google as ad dollars.
According to http://adage.com/article/digital/google-turns-behavioral-targeting-beef-display-ads/135152/, “In December 2008 Google added DoubleClick cookies to AdSense ads”, tying the DoubleClick cookie-based tracking (dating long before Google bought it) to AdSense. I assume that AdSense tracking probably did not exist before Google bought DoubleClick. Google Analytics added AdWords and AdSense support in 2009. In 2012, Google changed its privacy policy to allow data to be consolidated, which was also very controversial. In 2014, Google Analytics integrated with DoubleClick, allowing things like remarketing lists to be shared according to https://analytics.googleblog.com/2014/05/google-analytics-summit-2014-whats-next.html. Remarketing lists are basically lists of website visitors that can be uniquely identified by things like cookies, and it is one of the ways of targeting ads to users. It can probably be assumed that sharing remarketing lists basically ties the tracking together. Sharing of Google Analytics remarketing lists with AdWords was introduced in 2015, along with linking of Google Analytics and AdWords “manager” accounts, according to https://adwords.googleblog.com/2015/11/share-google-analytics-data-and.html. “Google Analytics 365” came in 2016, according to https://analytics.googleblog.com/2016/03/introducing-google-analytics-360-suite.html. Remarketing lists for search ads was introduced in 2012 and was tied to Google Analytics in 2015 (though not all data from Google Analytics can be used). It allowed different search ads to be targeted to different visitors based on cookie-based tracking on websites (with sites using special tags for this purpose). For example, you can show different search ads to visitors that visit the site every day.
Of course, users often has little control and benefit over storage of user data and ad retargeting by trackers too, especially when many parties are involved. This was mentioned during the Google/DoubleClick acquisition for example. Of course, some provides more control than others, such as AdChoices for example. AdChoices was an attempt at self-regulation for ad publishers, and used an icon to indicate that data was being collected. You can click the icon to display the privacy policy for the ads or opt-out of ad targeting. It was not the same as blocking ads completely though, and did not solve all of the problems of ads either. There was also an attempt at a Do-Not-Track HTTP header, which was probably too simple (and thus was also very vague in its meaning) and there was no guarantee that a site would comply either obviously since it was just an HTTP header (IE11 enabling it by default was also controversial and Win10 no longer does so by default).
Some of the problems with the opt-out methods are similar to the problems of a national “do not email” registry proposed in the US CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 for spam messages, and such lists to “opt out” of spam are widely considered to be unacceptable in general. Even “opt-out” or “unsubscribe” links in spam is widely considered untrustworthy for obvious reasons, though legitimate mailing lists will also have them. That idea came from the similar “do not call” registry for telephone marketing (to stop annoying marketing phone calls which were considered more annoying than spam of course), but email and internet advertising ended up being very different from telephone calls making these laws difficult to enforce. It is far easier to send an email than to call someone for example, and email is also more difficult to trace to the origin especially given that the Internet is global. FTC has a report at https://www.ftc.gov/reports/can-spam-act-2003-national-do-not-email-registy-federal-trade-commission-report-congress describing these problems (it was a report to Congress that was required by CAN-SPAM), including the possibility that such a list can be abused by spammers for example. “Closed-loop opt-in” using confirmation emails for mailing lists on the other hand is widely accepted, but it is not mentioned in CAN-SPAM. One example includes the tracking of “opt-out” using cookies in things like AdChoices, which themselves can be used for other purposes obviously.
There are some reasons why these problems were not apparent (for example to Larry/Sergey) when Google bought DoubleClick, or when remarketing lists was shared, or for that matter when Urchin became Google Analytics and the data was merged with ad data.
The difficulty of researching things like the tying of remarketing lists during the writing of this essay shows some of the problems. It seems that no one cared about the privacy implications when remarketing lists in AdSense and DoubleClick was shared for example. In many cases, advertisers managed “remarketing” lists of “anonymous” visitors that was being tracked by cookies from a central console without thinking of the privacy problems, treating visitors almost as numbers. This ties in with the idea of treating people as “consumers” to be extracted from that are also fundamentally flawed. Another example of this is AOL that famously made it difficult to cancel at one point, partly because measuring “customer loyalty” as numbers to be extracted from consumers was part of their culture. To make it worse, they once charged consumers by the time spent on AOL, so the longer they stay the more revenue they made.
The Google-DoubleClick acquisitions was also controversial, with EPIC, CDD and US PIRG for example filing complaints with the FTC in April 2007, a “first supplement” to the complaint in June 2007, and a “second supplement” in September 2007. There was also a Senate hearing on Sept 27, 2007 with testimonies from a variety of sources regarding that issue. One of the concerns back then was aggregation of tracking data and lack of control by users, though other issues unrelated to ads like storage of IP addresses by search engines were also mentioned. Ultimately it took the FTC until the end of 2007 to approve the deals, after a “second request”.
Before the Google-DoubleClick acquisition, DoubleClick was once planned to merge with Abacus. FTC blocked the merger because of the privacy problems and it never happened. Abacus Direct seems to be a market researching company targeting consumer buying behavior. As a result, Abacus had a lot of personal info about consumers, and there were concerns that this data could be merged with DoubleClick data and may be used to deanonymize them.
In 2012, Jonathan Mayer discovered that Google used some tricks in JavaScript to allow tracking in Safari. It involved how Google was able to bypass cookie blocking policy in Safari by using an invisible form to fool Safari into allowing cookies. FTC fined Google $22.5 million over this behaviour, and more recently there has been lawsuits about it in the UK. There has been also a class action lawsuit about this in the US. Google argued the tracking was unintentional at the time and that it was related to Google+ “Plus” buttons on DoubleClick ads (for logged-in users I believe). It is probably worth mentioning here that a lot of these kind of buttons (like Facebook’s Like buttons, to name another example) do their own tracking too (they generally worked by using IFRAMEs to the website involved), and this has been well known for years. For example, according to https://www.technologyreview.com/s/541351/facebooks-like-buttons-will-soon-track-your-web-browsing-to-target-ads/ Facebook started using the tracking Like buttons to target ads in 2015. I think the Facebook-WhatsApp acquisition story is also famous by now BTW, including how they eventually allowed data sharing between the two (presumably after years of losses). It is worth mentioning how even the WhatsApp founders now recommend deleting Facebook (especially after the Cambridge Analytica debacle).
On the problem of malware, it probably can be assumed that no one cared as much about security when AdSense added Flash ads for example with exploits not as common as now. One of the first common exploits (dating back to the Morris worm in the late 1980s) was stack-based and sometime heap-based buffer overruns (using null-terminated C string copies that don’t limit the length copied for example), then the exploits got more sophisticated and complex (like use after free, return oriented programming and ASLR information leaks as some examples) especially as mitigation measures like stack canaries, NX and ASLR became common in response. It probably can be assumed that the market for exploit kits and zero day exploits and the like also probably took time to develop (though some of them was made famous by recent NSA leaks for example).
Now, let’s discuss Mozilla. Brendan Eich was the creator of JavaScript at Netscape when it was invented in 1995 and was the CTO of Mozilla Corporation from 2005 to 2014. After he stepped down from Mozilla in 2014 (just after he became CEO and after bad publicity stemming from his political donations about things like gay marriage), he was one of the founders of Brave with its Basic Attention Token etc. Andreas Gal joined Mozilla in 2008 and was the CTO from 2014 until 2015 when he left Mozilla.
Mozilla signed the Google search deal in 2004, before Google even IPOed (let alone things like DoubleClick). Mozilla switched to a Yahoo search deal in late 2014 (by then the search engine was based on MS’s Bing I think), which was part of Marissa Mayer’s attempt to fix Yahoo before it was sold to Verizon. Recently Mozilla switched back to Google as the default search engine.
BrendanEich mentioned in https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/932747825833680897 that “It's not a simple Newtonian-physics (or fake economics based on same) problem.” This was about the history of the Google search deal with Mozilla and the fact that it was signed before Google IPOed (when it was being funded by VCs). It is worth mentioning here that Google was founded in 1998 when the now famous dot-com bubble was at the peak and VC funding was common (allowing many startups to grow fast which was considered more important than profits). Many other dot-com startups at the time had problems and ended up failing when the bubble collapsed around 2001. It is worth mentioning that the DoubleClick acquisition dates back to 2007 which was just before the housing bubble famously collapsed leading to another recession, and that bubble probably started just after the dot-com bubble.
BrendanEich mentioned in https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/932473969625595904 that “A friend said in 2003 that Sergey declared G would not acquire display ads & arb. Search vs. Display as that would be “evil”.”, before Google even IPOed (in 2004). Unfortunately no other source was given.
It was mentioned on Twitter that Firefox OS enabled tracking protection by default unlike desktop Firefox. It was mentioned in https://twitter.com/andreasgal/status/932757853504339968 that “Yup. I was able to sneak that past management”. I then asked “I wonder if you ever talked to Larry/Sergey.” and Brendan then answered that Andreas didn’t of course. I wonder what would have happened if they did.
https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/gdpr_risk_to_the_duopoly/ has some information on the effect of EU GDPR on Google ads. Notice that AdWords comply if all “personalization” features are removed for example. This included things like “remarketing”. I suspect that AdWords when it was first created in 2000 did not have these features. Other features like “remarketing lists for search ads” are also listed as not compliant, which was of course probably added later too. There was also the infamous cookie law that required notification for placing cookies, which was not that effective but a major step in the direction given that most ad tracking (including DoubleClick) were based on cookies. Google’s implementation of GDPR caused some concerns with publishers (http://adage.com/article/digital/tensions-flare-google-publishers-gdpr-looms/313592/), and some publishers blocked EU IP addresses in response to GDPR.
Data breaches are also a problem. The AOL search data breach from 2006 is pretty famous. The data was “anonymized” but the search terms was often enough to deanonymize users. Ad tracking data is likely similar, including browsing history and the like. Anonymizing data is a useful technique to avoid accidental abuse, but some kinds of data are hard to anonymize in a way that prevent all abuse. For example, various techniques for anonymizing IP addresses and MAC addresses has been developed, including hashing and truncation. Of course, the more data that is consolidated and collected, the higher the risk and impact of a breach.
Of course, it is worth noting that Google/DoubleClick isn’t the only one involved in the ad bubble (though DoubleClick was one of the first to do ad tracking I think). I think Taboola is often considered even worse than Google for example. The same fundamental problems with tracking and malware ads and the ad bubble etc. however tends to apply to all of the ad networks. Some of the worse ones may use browser fingerpointing via things like JavaScript, which is even worse than the tracking via cookies that is most commonly used. Browser fingerpointing is generally difficult to prevent on the browser side, but it is so famous that the WHATWG HTML spec mentions it and marks the parts of the spec where there is a risk. For example the list of browser plugins (navigator.plugins in JavaScript) could be used at one point (in Firefox it used not to be sorted so it would be unique for each user, which made the fingerpointing even easier), but fortunately plug-ins are dying off anyway because of other problems. EFF created Panopticlick which illustrated some of the fingerpointing that was possible, and other examples that became famous included Evercookie by Samy Kamkar. To make things worse, many plugins like Flash had their own cookies as well (though browsers have been getting better at clearing them). It is also worth noting that the current tracking ads are not the only kind of web advertising. There are so-called “first-party” and “third-party” ads and cookies. Example of first-party ads includes Twitter and Reddit ads. Example of third-party ads includes DoubleClick and Taboola ads. First-party ads don’t have the issues described here.
Recently, Google’s ad blocking and “better ads” (including so-called Better Ad Alliance) involves annoying ads, but don’t fix the fundamental issues described here. Apple’s ad blocking targets retargeting by limiting the life of cookies for example (making them less effective for tracking), but does not change the display of ads or make ads less annoying (for example, autoplay video ads are pretty famous as well, especially with Flash).
Now, fixing the problems might be difficult. Obviously it would affect not only shareholders but pretty much everyone else if Google completely got rid of tracking ads. This includes sites depending on Google ads for revenue as well as Google itself. One example here is that both Microsoft and Novell used Client Access Licenses (CALs). CALs (called node licenses by Novell I think) are per user or per computer licenses common in server software like NetWare and Windows Server. Of course, when Novell moved to Linux, it was open source software that didn’t have CALs (Like with Red Hat, the company only paid for support) meaning that Novell could not expect the same level of revenue as in the NetWare days (they moved to Linux by buying SUSE). The story about Sun’s open source projects and Jonathan Schwartz (the former “ponytail” CEO), and how they eventually had to sell to Oracle is probably pretty famous as well (some examples of open source projects from that period included OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, and OpenJDK). The ad bubble will probably not last forever though. Bubbles like this one is part of the problem of the current debt-based economy (the main problem is that it allows almost infinite amounts of “debt” in US dollars since we got off the gold standard in 1971, including most commonly government debt), especially it encourage extracting as much money as possible from so-called “consumers” (another example is Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions and how Adobe’s stock price rose after it was implemented).
Google in 2015 hired Ruth Porat as CFO to bring financial discipline to Google. This included cutting unprofitable projects, especially “Google X” research projects and failed projects like Google Glass. According to https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-08/google-makes-so-much-money-it-never-had-to-worry-about-financial-discipline, one of the things they did was “to force the Other Bets to begin paying for the shared Google services they used”. It is probably reasonable to suspect that the increase in ad revenue due to DoubleClick etc is part of why they were able to start so many of these projects in the first place. One recent example is the recent changes in pricing of of Google Maps, mentioned in https://www.inderapotheke.de/blog/farewell-google-maps
For Mozilla, a good example to illustrate the problems with funding browser development is the Opera browser. It was founded in 1995 in Norway. First browser was released in 1996. It IPOed in 2004. The browser used its own engine and it had a lot of unique features, like relatively good CSS support early on (unlike Netscape 4 at the time which famously had relatively poor support and was a problem for web developers for years). At first it was officially a paid browser with a trial version (like Netscape was before 1998), but later they used ads (choices included banner ads or text-based Google ads) for non-paying customers. They eventually signed a search deal with Google which removed the ads and instead just used Google as the default search engine (like Mozilla’s). Of course, there wasn’t much profit margin in a web browser, and so they had to cut costs to keep stocks and quarterly earnings going up (so planning for the future was difficult for example). It was strong in the mobile world before WebKit became dominant there though (before things like iPhone and Android and when things like WML was common) and may still be strong in some embedded applications, with products like Opera Mini that was basically remote rendering of web pages (useful when devices had less processing power). Opera never had much market share (though it had plenty of fans back in the day), and in the end Opera had to switch to Chromium (with the Blink engine) instead of their own engine and codebase in the desktop browser (though they did release last updates for the old one that included for example TLS enhancements). Opera was eventually sold to a Chinese consortium, which eventually renamed the company Otello. The founders eventually started the Vivaldi browser, which is also based on Chromium/Blink but has many differences. In contrast, the Mozilla Foundation was created as a non-profit organization in around 2003 as the old Netscape was dying off with AOL’s help (AOL bought Netscape in 1998 BTW). It owns a for-profit Mozilla Corporation for tax reasons (non-profits are not subject to taxes that for-profits have in the US). I think the corporation owns the search deals like Yahoo and Google for example. You can still donate to the Mozilla Foundation today. Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released in 2004 after the Foundation was created (and after the branded Netscape 6/7 releases) and quickly took market share from the dominant IE6 that was stagnating the web (by being virtually unchanged for a long time without any real development) and was also well known for security problems like the Download.Ject attacks. MS was forced to respond with IE6 in Windows XP SP2 which in addition to security enhancements also added a few features like pop-up blocking and IE7 which finally bought real enhancements to the core engine that help web developers (especially in places like CSS). The old Netscape search deal with Google dates back to 1999 (obviously Netscape.com was Netscape’s home page at the time), and the success of the deal probably inspired the later Google search deal that Mozilla did.
One alternative to the current tracking ads is called Basic Attention Token. Basic Attention Token is based on the Ethereum cryptocurrency and blockchain (this is like Bitcoin but it is GPU minable for example using a different algorithm and it is one of the most popular GPU minable coins). It was created by the Brave browser, which supports it directly. It is intended to “directly measure” attention. “Attention” is measured on the client side (based on local browser history) and tokens are rewarded for them (called “basic attention metrics”), eliminating the privacy issues. This is often called a “zero-knowledge proof”. There are also other benefits like reducing so-called “click fraud” that hurts advertisers that is a common problem with current ads and removing the need for intermediaries that do tracking like DoubleClick and Taboola (so advertisers also gets more of the money too since they don’t have to pay them). Many other kinds of tokens and “smart contracts” has been created on Ethereum, and so-called initial coin offerings (ICOs) has been the most common use of Ethereum (helping the price to rise). Of course, there is little to no regulation for them at the moment which results in many scam ICOs too (they tends to raise money very quickly, partly since it is so easy to give coins to them).
There are also systems for paying authors directly like Patreon, though it is also trivial to use PayPal or cryptocurrencies for this purpose (though also harder to donate). Patreon allow money to be “pledged” to specific authors. There are also many kinds of “paywalls” implemented on websites, many of which has their own problems like relying on cookies to track how many times people visited a site (to limit the number before the user have to pay of course) or making it difficult to post links on Slashdot, Reddit, and Hacker News that often dislike paywalls for obvious reasons (though some are better than others).
Of course, the problems described in the essay as well as other problems of ads (including annoyance and performance cost of ads) led to more use of ad blockers, which also have their own history. Banner ad blindness has also been known for years now, and Google’s ads tends to be simple text-based ads at least initially. One of the first type of blocking was popup blockers, and Google was taking a stand against popups in the early days (they were well known to be annoying). They became common in browsers by the mid-2000s (even IE6 in XP SP2 had them). At one point circa 2002, AOL/Netscape was disabling the popup blocker from Netscape-branded Mozilla releases (at one time there was the Mozilla source code/binaries and the official Netscape-branded builds based on the Mozilla source). Of course after user backlash they backed off from doing so. This was long before Google bought DoubleClick for example. Later more sophisticated ad and cookie blockers like AdBlock Plus and uBlock Origin came out as add-ons to browsers like Firefox, and one is built into Brave of course (along with BAT as a replacement for the lost ad revenue). Many other browsers have also similar tracking protection including Firefox and IE, but they just disable them by default and may require that ad blocking lists (such as EasyList) be manually loaded. Of course, some sites has been attempting to detect ad blockers and ask users to turn them off (even Ars Technica did it at one point though it only lasted one day), which is also ineffective and not a good idea for obvious reasons (including the fact that it reflects badly on the sites that are doing it). Lawsuits against ad blockers was also tried in some countries, which was obviously mostly unsuccessful (like a lawsuit against AdBlock Plus in Germany by publishers there).
There are many problems with the current tracking ads, but the worst ethical issues are malware and tracking. These problems led to people using ad blockers for example. There are alternatives like Basic Attention Token, but even with things like that fixing the problems might be difficult. For example, the effects would probably be serious (for everyone, not just shareholders) if Google got rid of tracking ads. Part of the reason tracking ads became so popular and would be difficult to remove completely from the web was the way the debt-based economy encourages extracting as money as possible from consumers. There are reasons why Larry/Sergey didn’t realize the problems when they bought DoubleClick for example, including that no one cared as much about security back then.
Friday, April 6, 2018
Google DoubleClick Mozilla essay (final)
There are many problems with web advertising in general, including
annoying features like autoplay video ads and pop-ups and also
problems like “click fraud” which matter to advertisers. But the
ethical issues with them are the most important, including malware
(like exploit kits) and also tracking ads that affects privacy. This
essay will be focusing on the ethical issues with some of the kinds
of ads that Google produces and the history behind them, and why
Larry/Sergey didn’t consider them when buying DoubleClick for
example. Also discussed is Mozilla and how they are involved (like in
the Google/Mozilla search deal), including Brendan Eich who created
JavaScript that eventually left Mozilla to found Brave. There is also
the difficulty of solving these issues, which will also be discussed.
Of course, advertising is not limited to the web and there are often
many benefits and risks (like deceptive advertising) to advertising
in general, most of which will not be discussed here.
The history of Google and its advertising will be discussed first.
Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while at
Stanford, and took VC funding from KP and other partners. Google was
founded with the search engine (with the PageRank algorithm) as the
first product, but later added products like Gmail. Eric Schmidt was
bought in as CEO in 2001 and recently left but are still on the
board. Google IPOed in 2004, using dual class stock for example.
The first kind of ads that Google did was AdWords, dating back to
2000. AdWords was based on search keywords, and the text ads were
displayed at the top of the search results (labelled as ads) and were
relatively simple. Typically the highest bidder was shown, and the
advertiser paid Google when the user clicked on the ads. AdWords
involved relatively little tracking at least initially and will not
be mentioned much here. At this time Google was also taking a stand
against popup ads.
AdSense was ads shown on webpages themselves, based on JavaScript. It
was invented in 2003. AdSense at least initially was based on
keywords on webpages themselves (which Google fetched from its cache
for example), which advertisers could bid on. Like with AdWords,
Google and websites gets paid when users click on the ads. It also
involved little tracking at least initially, but the malware problems
will be described here.
Google bought DoubleClick in 2008. DoubleClick was invented in 1995.
It made more sophisticated ad tracking via cookies and the like
famous (which was often called “retargeting”), and the problems
will be described here. DoubleClick themselves called its product
“Dynamic Advertising Reporting and Targeting” at one point for
example. Initially DoubleClick was mostly banner ads, and many users
developed so-called banner-blindness from these ads. Cookies were
itself invented in Netscape in 1994, and the IETF group that
developed RFC 2109 and 2965 already know that tracking with
“third-party cookies” were a problem (and it was mentioned in
these RFCs). Those attempts at IETF cookie standards ultimately
failed partly because they were incompatible with current browsers,
and led to RFC 6265 that is closer to how cookies are implemented in
browsers today. It also led to W3C P3P which was famously implemented
in IE6, which also of course failed (partly because it was too
complex) and was removed from Windows 10 but was an attempt to get
the tracking under control.
Google bought Urchin in 2005, turning it into Google Analytics.
Urchin was founded in 1998. Initially its product was to analyze web
server log files, with JavaScript tags being added in Urchin 4
(called “Urchin Traffic Monitor”). The hosted version based
entirely on JavaScript that was created later was initially called
“Urchin on Demand” and was introduced in 2004. Of course, the
original software that was sold receive little attention once Google
bought it and it became Google Analytics and it was discontinued in
2012.
One of the problems of ads is malware. Typically websites take the
highest bidder of ads and fill as much space as possible with ads,
making malware like exploit kits difficult to prevent. To make things
worse, companies can only spend a limited amount of money on ads, so
sites often have to take the highest bidder to make enough revenue to
support them and often websites even use multiple ad networks. Flash
was famous for some exploits for example (especially as it got more
complex), and these days in general NPAPI and ActiveX etc plug-ins
are dying off. Java was even worse for example with zero-days
breaking the sandbox being very frequent at one point, and many
browsers limit plug-ins to Flash only these days. Of course, there
are browser exploits too.
Though the vast majority of exploits in kits are typically already
patched, sometimes unpatched zero day exploits get delivered by ads
like in the case of [1]. There is a market for exploit kits in
general, and zero days are particularly valuable (obviously because
they are unpatched). The FBI was also famous for using Firefox
zero-days to deanonymize Tor users.
One of the most famous of ads that contain malware was at Forbes,
where the Angler exploit kit was served via pop-under ads after the
site asked users to turn off ad blockers in 2016 (discovered by Brian
Baskin). Of course, asking users to turn off ad blockers or otherwise
fighting against them is not a good idea in the first place, and it
illustrated some of the flaws discussed here. This exploit kits also
hit sites like MSN, and it was one of the most popular exploit kit at
one point.
Douglas Crockford tried to prevent malicious JavaScript in ads at
Yahoo with AdSafe, including cross site scripting attacks. Of course,
JavaScript is a Turing complete language making this more difficult,
and Flash is even more complex. This is especially an issue when
browser exploits are involved. I think AdSafe worked by creating a
limited sandbox to prevent things like XSS attacks (using a special
object and denying access to many other objects), and defining a
subset of JavaScript that can be verified. Flash in ads was also
common too though, and obviously this is harder to verify to ensure
it is safe (Flash’s complexity is part of why it is gradually being
phased out in browsers).
Another problem is tracking. The current economy is a debt-based
economy based on consumption. The more money advertisers can extract
from consumers, the more they are willing to spend on ads. This
results in tracking getting creepier and creepier, and encourage
consolidation of data for example. Most of the ad tracking is called
“retargeting” and it is often based on cookies and JavaScript,
and DoubleClick was one of the first to do it. All ads encourages
consumption by definition, but tracking ads are particularly bad for
these reasons.
For example, DoubleClick has cross-device retargeting introduced in
2015. Of course, it is limited to logged-in users tracking via the
user account at least initially (which any websites can do), but it
illustrated the trend. Google changed the privacy policy to allow
Google accounts to be used for such logged-in user tracking in 2016.
According to [2], “In December 2008 Google added DoubleClick
cookies to AdSense ads”, tying the DoubleClick cookie-based
tracking (dating long before Google bought it) to AdSense. I assume
that AdSense tracking probably did not exist before Google bought
DoubleClick. Google Analytics added AdWords and AdSense support in
2009. In 2012, Google changed its privacy policy to allow data to be
consolidated, which was also very controversial. In 2014, Google
Analytics integrated with DoubleClick, allowing things like
remarketing lists to be shared [13]. Remarketing lists are basically
lists of website visitors that can be uniquely identified by things
like cookies, and it is one of the ways of targeting ads to users. It
can probably be assumed that sharing remarketing lists basically ties
the tracking together. Sharing of Google Analytics remarketing lists
with AdWords was introduced in 2015, along with linking of Google
Analytics and AdWords “manager” accounts [3]. “Google Analytics
366” came in 2016, according to [5]. Remarketing lists for search
ads was introduced in 2012 and was tied to Google Analytics in 2015
(though not all data from Google Analytics can be used). It allowed
different search ads to be targeted to different visitors based on
cookie-based tracking on websites (with sites using special tags for
this purpose). For example, you can show different search ads to
visitors that visit the site every day.
Of course, users often has little control and benefit over storage of user data and ad retargeting by trackers too, especially when many parties are involved. This was mentioned during the Google/DoubleClick acquisition for example. Of course, some provides more control than others, such as AdChoices for example. AdChoices was an attempt at self-regulation for ad publishers, and used an icon to indicate that data was being collected. You can click the icon to display the privacy policy for the ads or opt-out of ad targeting. It was not the same as blocking ads completely though, and did not solve all of the problems of ads either. There was also an attempt at a Do-Not-Track HTTP header, which was probably too simple (and thus was also very vague in its meaning) and there was no guarantee that a site would comply either obviously since it was just an HTTP header (IE11 enabling it by default was also controversial and Win10 no longer does so by default).
Some of the problems with the opt-out methods are similar to the
problems of a national “do not email” registry proposed in the US
CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 for spam messages, and such lists to “opt out”
of spam are widely considered to be unacceptable in general. Even
“opt-out” or “unsubscribe” links in spam is widely considered
untrustworthy for obvious reasons, though legitimate mailing lists
will also have them. That idea came from the similar “do not call”
registry for telephone marketing (to stop annoying marketing phone
calls which were considered more annoying than spam of course), but
email and internet advertising ended up being very different from
telephone calls making these laws difficult to enforce. It is far
easier to send an email than to call someone for example, and email
is also more difficult to trace to the origin especially given that
the Internet is global. FTC has a report at [4]
describing these problems (it was a report to Congress that was
required by CAN-SPAM), including the possibility that such a list can
be abused by spammers for example. “Closed-loop opt-in” using
confirmation emails for mailing lists on the other hand is widely
accepted, but it is not mentioned in CAN-SPAM. One example includes
the tracking of “opt-out” using cookies in things like AdChoices,
which themselves can be used for other purposes obviously.
There are some reasons why these problems were not apparent (for
example to Larry/Sergey) when Google bought DoubleClick, or when
remarketing lists was shared, or for that matter when Urchin became
Google Analytics and the data was merged with ad data.
The difficulty of researching things like the tying of remarketing
lists during the writing of this essay shows some of the problems. It
seems that no one cared about the privacy implications when
remarketing lists in AdSense and DoubleClick was shared for example.
In many cases, advertisers managed “remarketing” lists of
“anonymous” visitors that was being tracked by cookies from a
central console without thinking of the privacy problems, treating
visitors almost as numbers. This ties in with the idea of treating
people as “consumers” to be extracted from that are also
fundamentally flawed. Another example of this is AOL that famously
made it difficult to cancel at one point, partly because measuring
“customer loyalty” as numbers to be extracted from consumers was
part of their culture. To make it worse, they once charged consumers
by the time spent on AOL, so the longer they stay the more revenue
they made.
On the problem of malware, it probably can be assumed that no one
cared as much about security when AdSense added Flash ads for example
with exploits not as common as now. One of the first common exploits
(dating back to the Morris worm in the late 1980s) was stack-based
and sometime heap-based buffer overruns (using null-terminated C
string copies that don’t limit the length copied for example), then
the exploits got more sophisticated and complex (like use after free,
return oriented programming and ASLR information leaks as some
examples) especially as mitigation measures like stack canaries, NX
and ASLR became common in response. It probably can be assumed that
the market for exploit kits and zero day exploits and the like also
probably took time to develop (though some of them was made famous by
recent NSA leaks for example).
The Google-DoubleClick acquisitions was also controversial, with
EPIC, CDD and US PIRG for example filing complaints with the FTC in
April 2007, a “first supplement” to the complaint in June 2007,
and a “second supplement” in September 2007. There was also a
Senate hearing on Sept 27, 2007 with testimonies from a variety of
sources regarding that issue. One of the concerns back then was
aggregation of tracking data and lack of control by users, though
other issues unrelated to ads like storage of IP addresses by search
engines were also mentioned. Ultimately it took the FTC until the end
of 2007 to approve the deals, after a “second request”.
Before the Google-DoubleClick acquisition, DoubleClick was once
planned to merge with Abacus. FTC blocked the merger because of the
privacy problems and it never happened. Abacus Direct seems to be a
market researching company targeting consumer buying behavior. As a
result, Abacus had a lot of personal info about consumers, and there
were concerns that this data could be merged with DoubleClick data
and may be used to deanonymize them.
In 2012, Jonathan Mayer discovered that Google used some tricks in
JavaScript to allow tracking in Safari. It involved how Google was
able to bypass cookie blocking policy in Safari by using an invisible
form to fool Safari into allowing cookies. FTC fined Google $22.5
million over this behaviour, and more recently there has been
lawsuits about it in the UK. There has been also a class action
lawsuit about this in the US. Google argued the tracking was
unintentional at the time and that it was related to Google+ “Plus”
buttons on DoubleClick ads (for logged-in users I believe). It is
probably worth mentioning here that a lot of these kind of buttons
(like Facebook’s Like buttons, to name another example) do their
own tracking too (they generally worked by using IFRAMEs to the
website involved), and this has been well known for years. For
example, according to [6] Facebook started using the tracking Like
buttons to target ads in 2015. I think the Facebook-WhatsApp
acquisition story is also famous by now BTW, including how they
eventually allowed data sharing between the two (presumably after
years of losses). It is worth mentioning how even the WhatsApp
founders now recommend deleting Facebook (especially after the
Cambridge Analytica debacle).
Now, let’s discuss Mozilla. Brendan Eich was the creator of
JavaScript at Netscape when it was invented in 1995 and was the CTO
of Mozilla Corporation from 2005 to 2014. After he stepped down from
Mozilla in 2014 (just after he became CEO and after bad publicity
stemming from his political donations about things like gay
marriage), he was one of the founders of Brave with its Basic
Attention Token etc. Andreas Gal joined Mozilla in 2008 and was the
CTO from 2014 until 2015 when he left Mozilla.
Mozilla signed the Google search deal in 2004, before Google even
IPOed (let alone things like DoubleClick). Mozilla switched to a
Yahoo search deal in late 2014 (by then the search engine was based
on MS’s Bing I think), which was part of Marissa Mayer’s attempt
to fix Yahoo before it was sold to Verizon. Recently Mozilla switched
back to Google as the default search engine.
BrendanEich mentioned in [7] that “It's not a simple
Newtonian-physics (or fake economics based on same) problem.” This
was about the history of the Google search deal with Mozilla and the
fact that it was signed before Google IPOed (when it was being funded
by VCs). It is worth mentioning here that Google was founded in 1998
when the now famous dot-com bubble was at the peak and VC funding was
common (allowing many startups to grow fast which was considered more
important than profits). Many other dot-com startups at the time had
problems and ended up failing when the bubble collapsed around 2001.
It is worth mentioning that the DoubleClick acquisition dates back to
2007 which was just before the housing bubble famously collapsed
leading to another recession, and that bubble probably started just
after the dot-com bubble.
BrendanEich mentioned in [8] that “A friend said in 2003 that
Sergey declared G would not acquire display ads & arb. Search vs.
Display as that would be “evil”.”, before Google even IPOed (in
2004). Unfortunately no other source was given.
It was mentioned on Twitter that Firefox OS enabled tracking
protection by default unlike desktop Firefox. It was mentioned in [9]
that “Yup. I was able to sneak that past management”. I then
asked “I wonder if you ever talked to Larry/Sergey.” and Brendan
then answered that Andreas didn’t of course. I wonder what would
have happened if they did.
[10] has some information on the effect of EU GDPR on Google ads.
Notice that AdWords comply if all “personalization” features are
removed for example. This included things like “remarketing”. I
suspect that AdWords when it was first created in 2000 did not have
these features. Other features like “remarketing lists for search
ads” are also listed as not compliant, which was of course probably
added later too. There was also the infamous cookie law that required
notification for placing cookies, which was not that effective but a
major step in the direction given that most ad tracking (including
DoubleClick) were based on cookies.
Data breaches are also a problem. The AOL search data breach from
2006 is pretty famous. The data was “anonymized” but the search
terms was often enough to deanonymize users. Ad tracking data is
likely similar, including browsing history and the like. Anonymizing
data is a useful technique to avoid accidental abuse, but some kinds
of data are hard to anonymize in a way that prevent all abuse. For
example, various techniques for anonymizing IP addresses and MAC
addresses has been developed, including hashing and truncation. Of
course, the more data that is consolidated and collected, the higher
the risk and impact of a breach.
Of course, it is worth noting that Google/DoubleClick isn’t the
only one involved in the ad bubble (though DoubleClick was one of the
first to do ad tracking I think). I think Taboola is often considered
even worse than Google for example. The same fundamental problems
with tracking and malware ads and the ad bubble etc. however tends to
apply to all of the ad networks. Some of the worse ones may use
browser fingerpointing via things like JavaScript, which is even
worse than the tracking via cookies that is most commonly used.
Browser fingerpointing is generally difficult to prevent on the
browser side, but it is so famous that the WHATWG HTML spec mentions
it and marks the parts of the spec where there is a risk. For example
the list of browser plugins (navigator.plugins in JavaScript) could
be used at one point (it used not to be sorted so it would be unique
for each user, which made the fingerpointing even easier), but
fortunately plug-ins are dying off anyway. EFF created Panopticlick
which illustrated some of the fingerpointing that was possible, and
other examples that became famous included Evercookie by Samy Kamkar.
To make things worse, many plugins like Flash had their own cookies
as well (though browsers have been getting better at clearing them).
It is also worth noting that the current tracking ads are not the
only kind of web advertising. There are so-called “first-party”
and “third-party” ads and cookies. Example of first-party ads
includes Twitter and Reddit ads. Example of third-party ads includes
DoubleClick and Taboola ads. First-party ads don’t have the issues
described here, but can still be annoying.
Recently, Google’s ad blocking and “better ads” (including
so-called Better Ad Alliance) involves annoying ads, but don’t fix
the fundamental issues described here. Apple’s ad blocking targets
retargeting by limiting the life of cookies for example (making them
less effective for tracking), but does not change the display of ads
or make ads less annoying (for example, autoplay video ads are pretty
famous as well, especially with Flash).
Now, fixing the problems might be difficult. Obviously it would
affect not only shareholders but pretty much everyone else if Google
completely got rid of tracking ads. This includes sites depending on
Google ads for revenue as well as Google itself. One example here is
that both Microsoft and Novell used Client Access Licenses (CALs).
CALs (called node licenses by Novell I think) are per user or per
computer licenses common in server software like NetWare and Windows
Server. Of course, when Novell moved to Linux, it was open source
software that didn’t have CALs (Like with Red Hat, the company only
paid for support) meaning that Novell could not expect the same level
of revenue as in the NetWare days (they moved to Linux by buying
SUSE). The story about Sun’s open source projects and Jonathan
Schwartz (the former “ponytail” CEO), and how they eventually had
to sell to Oracle is probably pretty famous as well (some examples of
open source projects from that period included OpenSolaris,
OpenOffice, and OpenJDK). The ad bubble will probably not last
forever though. Bubbles like this one is part of the problem of the
current debt-based economy (the main problem is that it allows almost
infinite amounts of “debt” in US dollars since we got off the
gold standard in 1971, including most commonly government debt),
especially it encourage extracting as much money as possible from
so-called “consumers” (another example is Adobe Creative Cloud
subscriptions and how Adobe’s stock price rose after it was
implemented).
Google was famous for offering high amounts of storage in Gmail since
the launch in 2004 (in comparison to other webmail services which
offered relatively little storage), not to mention that the size of
the search index also probably grows over time. According to [11] as
of mid-2016, “Google indexes 60 trillion web pages according to
“How Search Works.” It takes over 100 petabytes (equivalent to
100,000 1TB hard drives) to store it all. For comparison Google’s
web index was 1 trillion pages in 2008 and in 2000 it was a meager 1
billion.” This is obviously faster than how hard drive capacity has
been increasing. YouTube also consumes a lot of storage space because
of all the videos obviously. YouTube started in 2005 and was bought
by Google in late 2006, and it made Flash video using H.264 famous on
the web (though it is now being replaced by HTML video and
VP8/VP9/AV1 that is royalty-free as Flash becomes obsolete). (YouTube
also has its own advertising BTW, often ads that plays before the
video starts) This obviously means the amount of revenue Google makes
always have to grow (since storage costs always increase), or
eventually profit margins would decline. While in retrospect search
ads probably never grew forever in the first place, this is
particularly hard during recessions like those in 2007-2008.
According to [12], Internet advertising declined the least in Q1 2009
but still declined. This is still an issue with cloud providers
offering “unlimited” storage to users that gets abused to store
excessive data. A most recent example is Amazon where some users were
touting being able to store more than 1PB, leading them to end
unlimited storage eventually. Another example is that Backblaze
offered “unlimited” storage for data backup but deleted the data
after a specific time of no use for example.
For Mozilla, a good example to illustrate the problems with funding
browser development is the Opera browser. It was founded in 1995 in
Norway. First browser was released in 1996. It IPOed in 2004. The
browser used its own engine and it had a lot of unique features, like
relatively good CSS support early on (unlike Netscape 4 at the time
which famously had relatively poor support and was a problem for web
developers for years). At first it was officially a paid browser with
a trial version (like Netscape was before 1998), but later they used
ads (choices included banner ads or text-based Google ads) for
non-paying customers. They eventually signed a search deal with
Google which removed the ads and instead just used Google as the
default search engine (like Mozilla’s). Of course, there wasn’t
much profit margin in a web browser, and so they had to cut costs to
keep stocks and quarterly earnings going up (so planning for the
future was difficult for example). It was strong in the mobile world
before WebKit became dominant there though (before things like iPhone
and Android and when things like WML was common) and may still be
strong in some embedded applications, with products like Opera Mini
that was basically remote rendering of web pages (useful when devices
had less processing power). Opera never had much market share (though
it had plenty of fans back in the day), and in the end Opera had to
switch to Chromium (with the Blink engine) instead of their own
engine and codebase in the desktop browser (though they did release
last updates for the old one that included for example TLS
enhancements). Opera was eventually sold to a Chinese consortium,
which eventually renamed the company Otello. The founders eventually
started the Vivaldi browser, which is also based on Chromium/Blink
but has many differences. In contrast, the Mozilla Foundation was
created as a non-profit organization as the old Netscape was dying
off with AOL’s help (AOL bought Netscape in 1998 BTW). It owns a
for-profit Mozilla Corporation for tax reasons (non-profits are not
subject to taxes that for-profits have in the US). I think the
corporation owns the search deals like Yahoo and Google for example.
You can still donate to the Mozilla Foundation today. Mozilla Firefox
1.0 was released in 2004 after the Foundation was created (and after
the branded Netscape 6/7 releases) and quickly took market share from
the dominant IE6 that was stagnating the web (by being virtually
unchanged for a long time without any real development) and was also
well known for security problems like the Download.Ject attacks. MS
was forced to respond with IE6 in Windows XP SP2 which in addition to
security enhancements also added a few features like pop-up blocking
and IE7 which finally bought real enhancements to the core engine
that help web developers (especially in places like CSS). The old
Netscape search deal with Google dates back to 1999 (obviously
Netscape.com was Netscape’s home page at the time), and the success
of the deal probably inspired the later Google search deal that
Mozilla did.
One alternative to the current tracking ads is called Basic Attention
Token. Basic Attention Token is based on the Ethereum cryptocurrency
and blockchain (this is like Bitcoin but it is GPU minable for
example using a different algorithm and it is one of the most popular
GPU minable coins). It was created by the Brave browser, which
supports it directly. It is intended to “directly measure”
attention. “Attention” is measured on the client side (based on
local browser history) and tokens are rewarded for them (called
“basic attention metrics”), eliminating the privacy issues. This
is often called a “zero-knowledge proof”. There are also other
benefits like reducing so-called “click fraud” that hurts
advertisers that is a common problem with current ads and removing
the need for intermediaries that do tracking like DoubleClick and
Taboola (so advertisers also gets more of the money too since they
don’t have to pay them). Many other kinds of tokens and “smart
contracts” has been created on Ethereum, and so-called initial coin
offerings (ICOs) has been the most common use of Ethereum (helping
the price to rise). Of course, there is little to no regulation for
them at the moment which results in many scam ICOs too (they tends to
raise money very quickly, partly since it is so easy to give coins to
them).
There are also systems for paying authors directly like Pateron,
though it is also trivial to use PayPal or cryptocurrencies for this
purpose (though also harder to donate). Pateron allow money to be
“pledged” to specific authors. There are also many kinds of
“paywalls” implemented on websites, many of which has their own
problems like relying on cookies to track how many times people
visited a site (to limit the number before the user have to pay of
course) or making it difficult to post links on Slashdot, Reddit, and
Hacker News that often dislike paywalls for obvious reasons (though
some are better than others).
Of course, the problems described in the essay as well as other
problems of ads (including annoyance and performance cost of ads) led
to more use of ad blockers, which also have their own history. Banner
ad blindness has also been known for years now, and Google’s ads
tends to be simple text-based ads at least initially. One of the
first type of blocking was popup blockers, and Google was taking a
stand against popups in the early days (they were well known to be
annoying). They became common in browsers by the mid-2000s (even IE6
in XP SP2 had them). At one point circa 2002, AOL/Netscape was
disabling the popup blocker from Netscape-branded Mozilla releases
(at one time there was the Mozilla source code/binaries and the
official Netscape-branded builds based on the Mozilla source). Of
course after user backlash they backed off from doing so. This was
long before Google bought DoubleClick for example. Later more
sophisticated ad and cookie blockers like AdBlock Plus and uBlock
Origin came out as add-ons to browsers like Firefox, and one is built
into Brave of course (along with BAT as a replacement for the lost ad
revenue). Many other browsers have also similar tracking protection
including Firefox and IE, but they just disable them by default and
may require that ad blocking lists (such as EasyList) be manually
loaded. Of course, some sites has been attempting to detect ad
blockers and ask users to turn them off (even Ars Technica did it at
one point though it only lasted one day), which is also ineffective
and not a good idea for obvious reasons (including the fact that it
reflects badly on the sites that are doing it). Lawsuits against ad
blockers was also tried in some countries, which was obviously mostly
unsuccessful (like a lawsuit against AdBlock Plus in Germany by
publishers there).
There are many problems with the current tracking ads, but the worst
ethical issues are malware and tracking. These problems led to people
using ad blockers for example. There are alternatives like Basic
Attention Token, but even with things like that fixing the problems
might be difficult. For example, the effects would probably be
serious (for everyone, not just shareholders) if Google got rid of
tracking ads. Part of the reason tracking ads became so popular and
would be difficult to remove completely from the web was the way the
debt-based economy encourages extracting as money as possible from
consumers. There are reasons why Larry/Sergey didn’t realize the
problems when they bought DoubleClick for example, including that no
one cared as much about security back then.
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