Don Marti has a rule of thumb: when Meta, Google, and Apple all line up behind a new "privacy" feature, someone should ask who actually benefits. In a post about the browser ad-measurement standard called Attribution Level 1, he argues the answer is Big Tech. The system, which Mozilla is helping design, would let every web browser quietly record the ads you see and match them against the things you buy.
Marti grants the engineers their "mathematical achievement." His objection is economic: the standard hands a built-in "advantage for search, social, and app store advertising," the channels that "intercept demand after it has already been created elsewhere" and take credit for sales that ads on smaller sites actually produced.
He figures the average American already has about $1,200 a year spent on ads aimed at them, and asks where you'd want that money to go. His fix: the W3C should "archive this thing."
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