Agreed, this can't be worse than what it's replacing. Still, the author has some interesting points I hadn't considered before.
I guess from the advertiser's perspective this standard could be a concern, because the loss of cookie-based tracking might make it harder for them to develop alternative attribution tracking methods that don't have the same data quality problems.
> Agreed, this can't be worse than what it's replacing.
The mistake is assuming this replaces anything instead of becoming just one more piece of the tracking puzzle.
Even if it did "replace" cookies or whatever, it's strictly worse than "before" because it's giving advertising a front seat in the browser. My browser should be doing precisely nothing to help you attribute your ad impressions or whatever. But now Mozilla et al have to waste their time maintaining and augmenting this opaque piece of mathematical faff.
This is a debate I've seen many times now on HN. I sympathize with what you're saying, but the flip side is that many users seem to prefer a free ad-supported funding model over a paid, ad-free model. If a site is going to be serving me ads anyway, then all else being equal I'd rather them make as much money off each impression as possible to incentivize them to keep providing me with free services. The privacy and resource cost of a user's browser sending anonymized attribution statistics is very minimal.
Correct. The whole point of this proposal (and other related ones like FloC/the topics API) is to get rid of the former while preserving the effectiveness of the latter.
Nobody asked for free content. It was pushed on us so they could track us. Before the Internet, you normally paid for what you consumed (at least, more than now. And before that even more).
Maybe? Depends on what the ads are for. Obviously I'm not going to buy something I don't actually want just to support the site I'm on, but I have no particular objection to buying something I discovered through an ad if it's something I would buy anyway if I discovered it organically.
It’s adding an additional feature that provides information to advertisers that they currently use cookies as one part of, with different considerations.
I guess from the advertiser's perspective this standard could be a concern, because the loss of cookie-based tracking might make it harder for them to develop alternative attribution tracking methods that don't have the same data quality problems.