On 10/3/2016 2:09 AM, Alec Muffett wrote:
On 3 October 2016 at 01:40, <ban...@openmailbox.org> wrote:
While outreach and cooperation with some companies may work, do you not
consider that a sizable number of sites will always block anonymous traffic
simply because they can not monetize it with targeted ads?
Ah! That delightful old argument.
I've heard it a lot, and I am afraid that it is all of groundless,
incorrect and demonstrably silly. :-)
In three bullets:
1) If less than 0.1% of the people who use your site do so "anonymously",
the amount of ad-revenue associated with them is negligible. There are
bigger leaks to plug.
Possibly partly true, but I consider other reasons that sites
(essentially) block users, sometimes lumped with Tor users.
"You can't use our site unless you allow cookies" WTH - Really? Why is
that? Could it be that certain tracking - not just on that domain -
won't work unless cookies are allowed?
"You're using ad blocking software. Our site won't work correctly, if
at all." [see #3 below]
On many sites, Tor is lumped together with ad and script blocking
browsers - unprofitable and often largely untrackable. We're no longer
talking about a tiny % of users.
2) In my experience the "blocking" that companies do to Tor (and similar)
is 100% grounded in the threats from spam, scraping, testing phished
credentials, and other forms of bad behaviour.
Are you saying that TBB is the only browser used for malicious purposes?
:) That other browsers can't be or aren't adapted by skilled users for
similar malicious or unwanted behavior?
I don't really buy that. For one thing, it's too slow. Even using a
plain browser with a proxy - which I rarely do - I'm seldom blocked.
Disregarding financial sites. But Tor is blocked all the time on these
same sites. They don't say you're blocked, you just can't get in or use
the site - even with scripts allowed. I can use many federal govt sites
just fine with TBB, but I can't do a Google search? Talk about scraping!
3) I would bet a substantial amount of beer that anonymous proxy networks
are negligible threats to advertising revenue in comparison to "People on
the Clearnet who use AdBlock+".
I can't speak for everyone, but if ads were - still - presented as just
ads, and trackers weren't trying to record everything you do across the
entire internet, sell that data, provide it to the govt - on request,
for a fee, then I wouldn't mind allowing small ads. WAY back in the
day, I'd click on some ads of free sites that I wanted to support. That
was way before things got to present practices. Now, there's no way I'll
let them record every move. My medical issues, political interests,
legal matters...
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