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This is fundamentally incorrect. It is so incorrect that I wrote a whole thread back in *2016* about how difficult it is for first parties/origins/publishers to control what 3rd party ad tech loads into their page. Chronotope/722567640192040962
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One of *the biggest problems* of the modern internet & ad tech environment is that 1st parties load ads that can load *anything* on the page. & it has become standard that first parties load bidding scripts that also can load many new scripts, each of which load their own scripts
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Third party script & ad suppliers are *untrustworthy* in part because they have *proven* themselves untrustworthy. They don't act in a trustworthy way, they don't self regulate and they constantly wriggle out of regulatory requirements.
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And anyone who wants to control these third party scripts are very limited in their options. If they try and leverage one of those few options (like sandboxing iframes) they tend to get lower CPMs b/c they are getting punished for not letting a jungle of scripts run on their page
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Arbitrary, non-transparent, uncontrolled third parties running under the cover (and often without the active agreement) of the first party and avoiding accountability with consumers is arguably one of the CORE problems that need to be resolved to fix ad tech.
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And this little piece of thought leadership is being used to reputation-wash a proposal fundamentally bankrupt at almost every level. There are a few good ideas in there, but it is misleading on privacy, offensive on UX, and impossible to make sound from a tech perspective.
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It is just... can you imagine going to a webpage & looking at the 20-60 vendors involved in an ad call & being 'yeah, everything would be solved if only the average user saw all these and could make individual decisions about each of them, that's a fair way to manage privacy'
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Every time this approach comes up (like it also does in the TCF methodology for GDPR compliance) it rings a million alarm bells and brings back up how data control continues to be such a core issue of economic inequality. What an incredible burden these approaches put on users...
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Navigating individual per-ad tech vendor data choices and the time and information needed to decide about them just create an even larger gap in class-based inequality & deepen the problems of discrimination already present in ad tech... the very problems privacy should solve!
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Users should be able to say 'I do not consent' first, end tracking, and decide details later. Moving the burden on to the users to manage their data footprint and calling that a "pro-privacy" proposal is a sick joke.
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I have been working on ad tech on behalf of publishers on and off since 2011 & I once spend 16 hours presenting on ad tech to a group of mostly engineers and I know that I couldn't tell you in reasonable plain English detail what half those vendors propose to do with your data.
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*spent