SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Washington Post is Preparing for Post-Cookie Ad Targeting:
The Washington Post has developed a first-party data ad targeting tool called Zeus Insights that offers detailed contextual targeting capabilities along with user-intent predictions for marketers. The goal: to give marketers a sophisticated ad-targeting tool that isn’t reliant on third-party cookies but still drives results despite stricter data-privacy stipulations laid down by regulators.
The Zeus platform monitors contextual data such as what article a person is reading or watching, what position they have scrolled to on a page, what URL they have used to arrive there and what they’re clicking on. The publisher will then match that data to its existing audience data pools, which it has accumulated over the last four years, to create assumptions on what that news user’s consumption intent will be. The technology uses machine learning to decipher the patterns.
However, The Post’s strategic goal isn’t just to provide ad-targeting options for advertising clients that want to wean themselves off reliance on third-party cookies; it’s also to widen other publishers’ ability to compete with the big tech platforms.
The Post plans to license the Zeus platform to publishers both domestically and internationally, by integrating it with its Arc technology platform, which it has licensed to publishers since 2016 and reaches a combined 750 million unique users globally, according to the publisher. The theory is that in doing so, publishers can compete more effectively with the scale and data-targeting opportunities provided by Facebook and Google.
[...] “In a world where third-party cookies are being killed and cookie pools are decreasing, we expect tools like this to increase in importance,” said Ryan Storrar, svp and head of media activation, EMEA for Essence. “Being able to action cookieless user data is a helpful step in the right direction to embrace privacy in precision marketing.”
(Score: 4, Funny) by Bot on Friday July 19 2019, @09:11AM (8 children)
Zeus meets noscript, blank page is their lovechild, traffic dies.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday July 19 2019, @10:22AM (3 children)
1. To my knowledge, noscript doesn't block first-party scripts by default unless they're specifically blacklisted.
2. If they're collecting the data themselves it won't be long before they'll realize they can throw in some lua hooks into their C/C++ html server and collect the data from there.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Friday July 19 2019, @01:23PM (2 children)
1. Yes, it does. If a page looks funny or elements are missing, the first thing I often do is unblock the first party domain. If that doesn't fix it, I add the third-nth parties in descending order of apparent respectability; e.g. anything with "cdn" in the name goes first, and anything with "facebook" in it... well, if not already blacklisted, then has a wait a dozen refreshes to get its turn, if I don't give up on the info I was interested in completely.
Although, I'm getting better with uMatrix, and might switch completely over before too long.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 19 2019, @03:01PM
If the page says "Something prevented this page from loading" the first thing I do is DISABLE first party JavaScript, and that usually fixes it.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday July 19 2019, @03:26PM
Good to know. Last I tried was during the Firefox webextension period when uMatrix wasn't work right so I guess it was just an odd buggy default that they sorted out eventually. Looking it up it seems someone noticed it too at the time: https://superuser.com/questions/1272825/how-can-i-stop-noscript-from-whitelisting-sites-like-facebook [superuser.com]
Check out Nano Adblocker and Nano Defender too. Combined with uMatrix they have countermeasures to a few anti-adblockers techniques. Very handy if you're going to change uMatrix default and disable 1st-party scripts as well (like I did).
compiling...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 19 2019, @02:57PM (3 children)
I gave up on NoScript back when NoScript betrayed our trust.
uMatrix all the way. Never looked back. uMatrix has much finer grain control than NoScript ever did. (I can't speak about what NoScript might look like today, because I'll never use it.)
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday July 21 2019, @08:52AM (1 child)
Noscript has google friendly defaults indeed (also let google did cross domain stuff), but when did it betray?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 22 2019, @01:20PM
NoScript blocks ads. But then it had its own ads, and manipulated AdBlock to not block NoScript ads. A mini arms race broke out. Then the headlines hit.
https://techjaws.com/the-noscript-controversy/ [techjaws.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoScript#Controversies [wikipedia.org]
All ads are bad, except for mine, which all ad blockers must allow.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @11:52AM
Enlighten the uninformed what NoScript did please? I use it a lot myself but wasn't aware of treachery.