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posted by martyb on Tuesday December 10 2019, @07:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-are-in-a-maze-of-twisty-little-privacy-settings,-all-different dept.

Advertisers want exemption from web privacy rules that, you know, enforce privacy

Amid the final rulemaking before the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is scheduled to take effect next year, five ad industry groups have asked California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to remove a requirement that businesses honor the privacy choices internet users make through browser settings, extensions, or other controls.

[...] The CCPA, which takes effect in January, 2020, will provide Californians with greater legal privacy protections than anywhere else in the US (though still short of Europe's GDPR), putting pressure on federal lawmakers who are trying to formulate consistent privacy rules for the entire country. Meanwhile, technology and ad companies have been trying to gut the CCPA and would welcome a weaker federal standard that supersedes the California law.

The privacy rules includes a consumer right to know whether information is being collected, to request details about the information categories collected, to know what personal information is collected, to refuse to have information collected, to delete collected information, and bans any degredation of service if the user opts to retain their privacy.

Among its requirements, the law says, "If a business collects personal information from consumers online, the business shall treat user-enabled privacy controls, such as a browser plugin or privacy setting or other mechanism, that communicate or signal the consumer's choice to opt-out of the sale of their personal information as a valid request [under the law]."

In a December 6th letter obtained by MediaPost reporter Wendy Davis and provided to The Register as a courtesy, the five ad industry groups – The American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As), the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), The Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the American Advertising Federation (AAF), and the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) – complain to Becerra that such proposals would harm consumer choice.

[...] The Register asked the IAB for comment and a spokesperson pointed to pages 13 and 14 of its letter, which suggests Becerra adopt rules that allow information collecting businesses to ignore privacy controls "if the business includes a 'Do Not Sell My Personal Information' link and offers another method for consumers to opt-out of personal information sale by the business."

In the past, the US Federal Trade Commission has not looked kindly on ignoring browser-expressed privacy choices. In 2012, Google agreed to pay $22.5m for, among other things, circumventing the privacy controls in Apple's Safari browser.

In a statement emailed to The Register, Mozilla stressed that privacy settings should be easy to use and said it would be irresponsible and wrong to ignore the preferences users express through their browser settings.

"Of course, that is also why organizations like the Interactive Advertising Bureau find requirements like those in CCPA so threatening, because those requirements empower people to limit what data advertisers collect about them – and empower regulators to investigate and enforce if they don't," a Mozilla spokesperson said.

"So, the more hurdles that can be thrown in the way of setting adoptions like recognizing browser or plug-in flags, the longer such data can be traded and sold when mechanisms are limited."

Mozilla said that in the absence of standard mechanisms to express privacy preferences, it has enabled Enhanced Tracking Protection by default to help consumers regain control over those attempting to track their browsing activity online. ®


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:08PM (12 children)

    by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:08PM (#930777) Journal

    I just love how it is that a website will detect my ad-blocker, and then offer a page of instructions on how to disable it! Do they imagine that an ad-blocker accidentally got installed on my browser? Do they not realize that I probably know how to disable it, since I was the user that enabled it, after installing it? Amazing.

    Then there is the cookie-begging. "We use cookies only for good, please enable them." Yeah, right. I click "allow cookies" and then block them mercilessly. I guess all the measures I take are not really legal, since obviously I do not know what I am doing, and these idiots' website all are broken on my browser. Which is a good thingtm!

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:23PM (4 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:23PM (#930785) Journal

    Surprised they don't try to play on users' association that cookies are tasty and loaded with sugar. Mmmmm. Good cookies!

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:57PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:57PM (#930806)

      You just reminded me of the shitfest of cleaning cookies out of windows in the old days. Was it index.dat holding the cookies or something else?

      • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday December 11 2019, @12:07AM

        by RS3 (6367) on Wednesday December 11 2019, @12:07AM (#930867)

        I don't use IE much, but AFAIK, you've always been able to open Internet Options from IE or control panel, click "Privacy" tab, click "Sites" button, and there's a "Remove All" option.

        Otherwise they're just text files in a folder, in Win7 it's: C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies

    • (Score: 2) by Mykl on Wednesday December 11 2019, @01:15AM (1 child)

      by Mykl (1112) on Wednesday December 11 2019, @01:15AM (#930893)

      Umm, that's exactly why they called them cookies in the first place. As a way to make them sound less creepy

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by barbara hudson on Wednesday December 11 2019, @01:48AM

        by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday December 11 2019, @01:48AM (#930907) Journal
        Actually it was a homage to an old text-based program that kept saying "Gimmie cookie!" until you typed in "cookie." People kept trying to get it to stop by typing in all sorts of stuff, because they overthought things.
        --
        SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
  • (Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:27PM (1 child)

    by BsAtHome (889) on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:27PM (#930787)

    I guess all the measures I take are not really legal...

    How could it possibly be illegal /not/ to allow something to happen on your computer(*), which is private property? Since when are there laws, where you are required, by law, that you must accept any and all third party crap?

    That would be, using the above burglary analogy, be like: you have a door that can be opened, therefore, taking stuff out through that door perfectly fine, regardless who takes what, with out without consent.

    (*) Unless you accepted the Windows EULA, in which you acknowledge not to own your private stuff. However, I guess that you are slightly smarter than that.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday December 11 2019, @10:03AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday December 11 2019, @10:03AM (#930999) Journal

      How could it possibly be illegal /not/ to allow something to happen on your computer(*), which is private property?

      The software running on your computer already isn't your private property (look at the software license of whatever software you run).

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:35PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:35PM (#930792)

    Do they not realize that I probably know how to disable it, since I was the user that enabled it, after installing it?

    Only one in a hundred people uses a computer that they actually installed/configured themselves.

    When they give you instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, they aren't talking to people like you. They're talking to grandpa/grandma who's computer has been installed and configured by son/daugther/grandson/grandaughter/nephiew/nerd-of-the-neighborhood/etc, or who's preconfigured machine purchased at wallmart/costco/best-buy/etc had an ad blocker installed by the aformentionned son/daugther.... well, you get the point.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday December 11 2019, @10:06AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday December 11 2019, @10:06AM (#931001) Journal

      Give them a pi hole instead. That way the site's instructions won't work.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:54PM

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:54PM (#930802) Journal
    I probably do the same as everyone else here. Site tells me how to disable an ad blocker, it's easier to just leave them.
    --
    SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Pino P on Tuesday December 10 2019, @10:53PM (1 child)

    by Pino P (4721) on Tuesday December 10 2019, @10:53PM (#930832) Journal

    Not to mention sites that use Admiral Engage, an anti-adblock tool known for confusing a tracking protection feature built into the Firefox browser with an ad blocker. When I visit Daring Fireball [daringfireball.net] and Read the Docs [readthedocs.io] with Firefox tracking protection turned all the way on, I see every single ad. This is because these sites display ads from a server controlled by the site's publisher and don't track individual users' browsing history across different publishers' sites. But because sites using Engage tend to rely on interest-based ad networks and ad exchanges, Engage treats inability to contact interest-based ad servers as blocking ads rather than telling the site to show tracking-free fallback ads to this viewer.

    • (Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday December 11 2019, @05:38PM

      by sjames (2882) on Wednesday December 11 2019, @05:38PM (#931140) Journal

      I suspect it's less confusion and more big fat lie. It sounds so much more reasonable to ask to let ads display to fund a website than "Please drop all defenses so we can dart and tag you like a bear and unleash the unholy hordes of hell upon your defenseless browser. We will, of course, disavow all responsibility for the actions of the unholy horde as we do not in any way vet the ads, viruses, banking trojans, and crypto miners that we will send to you using the privacy busting third party.".