So I won’t have a feature like this enabled if I can help it.
But it does kind of seem well intentioned. There are a lot of advertisement systems that are paid based on how many sales they actually create. The ways to do this are with tracking of some sort, which is a privacy nightmare if you give advertisers any control of it, or doing what products advertising on podcasts do and jacking up prices steeply enough that you can tell people “get a 30% discount with an advertiser code”. Neither of those are great. If the browser provided a valid alternative that could only be used for specifically attributing ad conversions, and they eliminated all that other tracking, they might be able to lower some of the incentive to turn it into an arms race of new techniques. (Probably not, but it’s not the worst aim.)
Now, I can’t stand ads, and have managed to eliminate my exposure to them almost completely to live sports and product placement (and some billboards/signs I guess). (Brandwashed has some of my reasons, knowing the psychology side is more of it.) This won’t change that, or any of the rest of my efforts to limit the ability to spy on my behavior. I will never allow tracking or advertising I can prevent. But I could see a path to it being better for the average consumer who’s not militant about blocking all that.
So I won’t have a feature like this enabled if I can help it.
But it does kind of seem well intentioned. There are a lot of advertisement systems that are paid based on how many sales they actually create. The ways to do this are with tracking of some sort, which is a privacy nightmare if you give advertisers any control of it, or doing what products advertising on podcasts do and jacking up prices steeply enough that you can tell people “get a 30% discount with an advertiser code”. Neither of those are great. If the browser provided a valid alternative that could only be used for specifically attributing ad conversions, and they eliminated all that other tracking, they might be able to lower some of the incentive to turn it into an arms race of new techniques. (Probably not, but it’s not the worst aim.)
Now, I can’t stand ads, and have managed to eliminate my exposure to them almost completely to live sports and product placement (and some billboards/signs I guess). (Brandwashed has some of my reasons, knowing the psychology side is more of it.) This won’t change that, or any of the rest of my efforts to limit the ability to spy on my behavior. I will never allow tracking or advertising I can prevent. But I could see a path to it being better for the average consumer who’s not militant about blocking all that.