[ThePhysicist]

I'm still surprised no one has yet figured out a way to store sensitive data about personal interests and preferences on the client-side and let the client itself pull appropriate ads for the user to see. The quality of such a system should be comparable or better to server-side technologies with the right amount of tuning, and much less privacy-invading than existing approaches.

Personally I'd love to support more websites through ads if two conditions could be met:

- A way to ensure that ads don't try to harm me by e.g. leading me to websites serving malware or abusing my computer's resources (e.g. miners)

- A way to keep my privacy and control what data is collected about me (and who has access to that data)

Currently I simply can't turn off the ad-blocker even if I wanted as most sites become completely unusable and outright obnoxious by showing large, blinking or content-hiding ads, videos, popups or fake overlays. That's why most people use ad-blockers (IMHO). If ads are decent, relevant and non-obtrusive I personally would be happy to see them.

Also, go to any large website these days (without ad-blocker enabled) and check how many third-party trackers they load. There are many sites that send my data to more than 50 (!) different ad networks and partners, which is just insane.

[BrendanEich]

Brave, with the Basic Attention Token (BAT), is building exactly the client-side anonymous contribution + ad-matching system you describe. We will take BAT to other apps after proving the model in Brave.

BAT in Brave is opt-in -- each user consents before anything local happens with data or zero-knowledge/blind-token attestations -- and users can get _gratis_ BAT grants right now using the stable desktop browser (this is coming to mobile in about a month). The anonymous contribution system is the basis for the also-opt-in Brave Ads system, which uses local data only, local machine learning agent, and no cookies or user tracking by any server (even ours). Ads match against a catalog fixed daily or less frequently for a large set of users in a region who speak the same language. Attribution and confirmation use Chaumian blind tokens.

Users get 70% of revenue for opt-in, user-private (in tab), high quality ads at user-configurable frequency. We are working with publishers to provide user-opt-in ads for sites too, 70% revenue to the publisher, 15% to the user. User ad trial is under way right now, ping me if you want to be included. System should be available in Brave 1.0 in a couple of months.

[user812]

I'm a big fan of that idea.

Imho the beauty of your BAT system (the way it is envisioned) is it's independency from the current model of monetizing the web, which is ads, gradually evolving towards direct transmission between publisher and consumer.

Ads in the way they work on the web are just a very inefficient system of transferring this value, and they don't serve the original function of marketing anymore. It turned into a big game of psychological warfare.

The system is so inefficient that it finances almost the complete operation of Alphabet/Google.

As a user I don't know how the system works in the background, and when I read the recent news about Brave attacking Google for GDPR violation it was the first time I read about RTB and the technical aspects in the media. People need to know, so they can decide if they want to feed such a system!

Funding Choices seems to be a part of Google's answer to the growing problem of ad-blockers, but it can also bee seen as Google's answer to competition like Brave/BAT.

I read somewhere that under the umbrella of Funding Choices Google is also experimenting with subscriptions like BAT, but without the token.

I don't know how successful Google is with this, but this might be a tough competition for Brave, they will fight tooth and nails, and they control the Android ecosystem.

BAT is attractive for power users as you ride on the wave of privacy-friendliness which Google can't, but I think the real challenge will be the average user that wants a standardized, seamless cross-platform solution that can be used as the main payment gateway for accessing content, which is increasingly via gated Apps.

With Google controlling so much of the market with Android and Chrome, I wonder how they will react to BAT if it ever becomes successful, as they could theoretically quickly scale any competitive project.

I think the biggest advantage of BAT would be if big players could acknowledge it as a de-facto standard for decentralized transfer of micro-payments and privacy friendly ad networks. For this to happen it would be necessary to be somewhat "Open-Source", i.e. not strictly tied to a singly company controlling much of the tokens. I am thinking in line of an open consortium with different players holding a significant part of the BAT tokens each.

[BrendanEich]

Thanks for the comment.

On your last paragraph, we can't standardize the BAT ecosystem until it is proven, and as it consists of more than the ERC20 token -- specifically it includes endpoint software currently developing in Brave, plus an anonymous accounting service alongside the Ethereum blockchain -- it won't be proven via the existence of the token alone.

On a future blockchain with anonymity, high throughput, and low fees (a trilemma?), the BAT ecosystem could be fully decentralized. That blockchain does not exist yet.

So our roadmap divides and conquers (the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo phases), and we will expand beyond one browser when the system is ready, some time next year in my best guess. In particular (as noted in my other comments here), we need a high-integrity and fraud-resistant open source SDK.

Note that the BAT has diffused since inception to over 69,100 holding Ethereum accounts (https://etherscan.io/token/tokenholderchart/0x0d8775f6484306... -- you can see our User Growth Pool and Bittrex's liquidity pool as the top two accounts). The remaining roadmap work items are about token mechanics not token ownership.

[stephengillie]

> The system is so inefficient that it finances almost the complete operation of Alphabet/Google.

Since Youtube is wildly unprofitable, Alphabet/Google has to be funneling in money generated from other sources. Thus, Youtube is funded by ads, just mostly not from the ads on Youtube.

[yuhong]

It was mentioned in a private email that the only reason YouTube exists is that Google's servers happens to have a lot of free disk space in the days before SSDs.

[cortesoft]

Is the limiting factor for youtube really disk space? I would imagine it is bandwidth.

[lbearl]

YouTube was a separate company acquired by Google in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube

[yuhong]

Yep, I mean YouTube existing within Google obviously.

[tomp]

How will you prevent the user from "opting in" but then not displaying the tabs? E.g. an extension could render white boxes in another (mostly transparent) window above the browser, thus acting like an ad-blocker.

[BrendanEich]

Brave's agent is C++ built into the browser, it prevails over extensions (which we will also guard against at the point of installation).

It is a mistake to think of the BAT ecosystem fraud threat (which exists, for sure) as the same as the threat with remote scripts for ad view or click attribution and confirmation as practiced by ad-tech today. Third party scripts run without any integrity guarantees, so get fooled by fraudbots and cheated by other scripts (see "cookie stacking").

The "plane of adequation" defining truth as correspondence between an ad and its observed effect is browser native code, not Nth party scripts loaded into a DOM stew on page, or extensions and their JS scripts, which have privileges above page scripts but below browser native code.

Therefore the fraud threat to the BAT platform is a botted Brave instance including the BAT SDK. This is why we are planning to use secure remote attestation enclave/zone tech to ensure SDK integrity, and sensor M/L to check all the sensors for proof of humanity.

So for fraudbot users to get money out requires a costly simulation (see AML/KYC/etc. point I made in another reply today). Just hiding ad tabs (without faking identity for KYC/etc.) to waste ad spend would require faking the payable ad actions attested by the SDK, including human-like event streams.

Fraud risk never goes to zero with humans in the loop, but with BAT's native agent code, we keep the cost of fraud way above the low cost of fooling today's ad-tech scripts on page.

[ficklepickle]

Thanks for the detailed post. It's awesome that you folks are trying to fix the funding model of the web .

Any chance of putting brave on f-droid? Its the only app on my phone that I manually download/update. Totally worth it though :)

[BrendanEich]

It is on the Android team’s todo list. If you want to help please dm me on Twitter. Thanks.

[platform]

Thank you the details.

Do my ip-address, sites-i-visited, date/time of visit, geo-location ever gets stored in on a server outside (eg outside my phone or my computer I am browsing on)?

[BrendanEich]

None of those get stored or even sent, except of course for IP address.

IP address is not yet masked for update pings (same as for all self-updating browsers, required for security patching) and for similar pings to check for updated ad/tracker blocklists. If you do not opt into any BAT ecosystem features (contributions or ads, which enables contributions), then your IP address is not otherwise used, but it does show up in our logs. See https://brave.com/privacy/ under "Technical Infrastructure".

(We'd like to do the update ping via Tor since we have Tor tabs already, but this is in the future.)

If you opt into BAT features and take free BAT grants from us, then IP address and a wallet identifier are used for antifraud purposes, but not otherwise. This is covered in the privacy policy at https://brave.com/privacy/ under "Payments".

[UpshotKnothole]

Given that the individual take from this would be miniscule, what’s the advantage over an ad blocker? This sounds like a lot of faux-currency nonsense for little reward (client side at least) to fix a problem that already has a working solution. Plus, the existing solution blocks all ads, and tracking scripts, which is a huge win.

[BrendanEich]

The individual take has yet to be demonstrated, but do some math. $80B gross USD (at least; the IAB said $88B) spent on digital in US last year, say across 250M people (with Dr. Augustine Fou of NYU estimating fraud took $16.2B, lots of bots too). That is $320 gross ARPU if spread evenly -- which it is not. (Note we are worldwide and build for Europe and Asia too, not just at the US.)

Many of Brave's users at this early stage are "lead users" (Eric Von Hippel, MIT) and represent off-the-grid prospects because they block assiduously, either in Brave alone or with Brave + uBO or another solid blocker. Lead users are worth much more due to their high usage of search, ecommerce, and paid services. I would not be surprised if our users can make $70/year as we bring the system up in 2019 -- when ad deals will be harder to come by and we'll subsidize revenue from BAT's User Growth Pool -- and climb by 2020 to above .7 * 320 or $224 net user revenue per year.

Let's find out! We aim to find the fair price for human attention after blocking all the fraud, arbitrage, and abuse in the current system, using the BAT ecosystem.

Note that by default, user revenue share flows back monthly and anonymously to each user's top/pinned sites and creators on YouTube, Twitch (and more UGC platforms to come). We expect most users to avoid the bank-like AML/KYC/anti-sanction/anti-fraud checks required to take out their revenue, but legit users are welcome to cash out (our partner Uphold, and more to come, can exchange BAT <=> many fiats and cryptocurrencies/tokens).

If we are right, then most Brave users, with their individual data sets and Brave instances/agents, will in effect replace the corrupt, crowded intermediary space using and abusing remote scripts to target and confirm ads today. After we have the model performing, it's on to other browsers, games, podcast apps, and so on.

[evanvanness]

To support your numbers somewhat: iirc at one point about 5 years ago Bing was giving out ~$120 a year in Amazon gift cards if you were a heavy searcher on Bing

[UpshotKnothole]

People already pay more than that to avoid ads on things like YouTube, Hulu, and other services. Given that people often spend quite a bit of time online, I wouldn’t be shocked if they’d be willing to not pay, but just “miss out” on a fraction of what they’d actively pay to avoid ads... to avoid ads. That of course is all before they consider that the system is designed to avoid them ever cashing out.

I’m guessing the population aware of and interested in ad blocking and the population willing to half ass it in Brave is very slim indeed. I suspect that a majority who have become motivated to use an ad blocker and especially a script blocker have no patience left for any incarnation of advertising, regardless of fractional “rewards” on offer.

[BrendanEich]

We full ass, never half ass :-P. Also, nice try suggesting we get only a subset of users who care about ad blocking -- our main win vs. Chrome is speed, 2-8x faster on top news/media sites on mobile, and correlated lower data and battery costs.

Your negativity aside, the test has not been run to completion where it matters, in the market. I keep noping out of YouTube Red or TV or whatever it's called, because Brave blocks all ads there and (with forthcoming work to enable playback controls in various settings including cars) easily beats the pretty-terrible YouTube mobile app.

The idea of charging for Brave that you lead with occurred to us, but browsers and even non-corrupt ad blockers are free, so it looks like a high hill to climb. Perhaps with the slicker video controls and integration work, but anyway, glad we got past the assertion about "miniscule" revenue to users. In my experience, paying users beats charging them :-D.

[ketzu]

> I'm still surprised no one has yet figured out a way to store sensitive data about personal interests and preferences on the client-side and let the client itself pull appropriate ads for the user to see.

When I was at Middleware2017 I saw a poster/demo about this, MoCA+: https://koreauniv.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/demo-moc...

I guess the problem is the same as with privacy techniques in general. If you ask companies to restrict their access to data, they just tell you no(1), as it might be worth a lot of money or open up new business oportunities they haven't thought about yet.

(1) This is anecdotal from projects of my colleagues in privacy research

[Nasrudith]

I think another issue is the first rule of network security - don't trust the client.

[BrendanEich]

That cuts both ways, so we trust the client (users have to, even if remote sites do not) and do not trust servers to take individual user data in the clear and use it wisely & fairly. This applies to Brave servers too. Flip the model.

[apinstein]

This is the big idea I always pitched at hackathons (like startup weekend). I think it’s a great idea. 100% opt-in ads. My tagline was “a sufficiently relevant ad is indistinguishable from content.” It’s meant to be aspirational. The idea is that if you are looking to buy something, awareness of choices or information about that choice should be so valuable that it’s considered to be a benefit by the user. It’s basicallt an inversion of control approach to ads. The cpc’s and cpm’s would be amazing. :)

[Hnrobert42]

Unless I specifically seek them out, I have no interest in learning about new products or services ever. Thus, an ad would never be relevant enough to be content for me.

[magicalhippo]

Well I do. Sometimes there's a product or a service that can provide value in a way I haven't thought about, or I haven't come around to specifically seek out yet. I don't mind seeing ads for such things.

What I do mind is seeing ads for stuff I don't care about at all, and if the ads get in the way of what I'm doing.

[simias]

I've been considering buying a 3D printer lately. I don't have a lot of experience in the domain and I'm not sure where to start, so clearly I'm actively looking about information regarding 3D printers.

What I'm definitely not looking for is ads. Actually I try to avoid anything that might remotely look like one, from official websites (obviously) to comparisons of 3D printers that look like they could be biased one way or an other. Because obviously every company selling 3D printers is going to tell you that theirs is the best you could ever find. Even if they don't outright lie they'll put the emphasis on their strong points while conveniently forgetting to mention the drawbacks.

I really think ads are useless from a consumer perspective. I can believe that there was a time where the best way to reach potential buyers was buying an ad in the newspaper but with the ultra-connected society we're in it's just a waste. Make a great product, send it to a bunch of influential bloggers in the market share you target to review and if it's good the word of mouth will do the rest.

In a society where you can find reviews and recommendations for basically anything online, why on earth would I ever want to see ads? If you need to convince your potential customers that they need your product by spamming them, maybe your product is not that useful in the first place.

Of course the dark side of this is that of course marketing has caught on, now we have "native advertising" and people getting paid to pretend that they like something.

[yorwba]

I think ads are useless when you want to decide within a product category ("Which 3D printer should I buy?") but they can help you become aware of it in the first place ("There are affordable 3D printers now? Maybe I should get one.")

Unfortunately the majority of the consumer market revolves around a few common products and so most ads are about shifting revenue between functionally identical brands.

But I do occasionally see ads for relatively obscure stuff that might cause such an "I didn't know that existed." experience for other people. (I'm apparently hard to target.) For example https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=viva64.com are essentially ads, but they are still interesting to read, and afterwards you might be in the market for a code analysis tool.

[kromem]

You always see high conversion rates for new ad mediums, and those rates reduce over time as marketers abuse consumer's attention.

One of my favorite examples is Amazon reviews. Once you a time, those were legit and you'd see consumers referencing online reviews for products even if buying the product in a store physically, because it was valuable content.

Now, the reviews are so untrustworthy there are multiple sites that automate going through them to flag BS.

The unfortunate thing is that even after an ad medium becomes ignored by the majority of an audience, there's still an audience that's one to two standard deviations below the norm in suggestability that get preyed upon by advertisers. So it's those people that are the 0.1% clicking on general banner ads and purchasing a product. These are the same people that "call now" for those late night TV marketing commercials.

So the cycle for any ad medium is to get the attention of an audience, abuse it until most people stop paying attention, and then prey on the suggestably handicapped. It's a shitty industry, and quite unfortunate as if everyone could agree to not be awful, the fundamental feedback loop is one intrinsically motivated (find out about crap I'm highly likely to enjoy). But we're talking about a class of organizations (corporations) that can't even self regulate when lives and health are on the line, so that's certainly not going to happen for ads.

[falcor84]

>...people getting paid to pretend that they like something

If I remember my history correctly, this is how the very first radio sponsorships started as.

[MoBattah]

Right - a certain segment of the population is incredibly valuable for exactly this service.

I include myself in your description - love seeing relevant ads. There's a sweet spot there between those with high disposable incomes, high open mindedness and high affinity for novelty.

This population is by far the most attractive consumer for advertisers.

[kromem]

So when a friend talks to you about a product they recently used and loved and think you'd love as well (and I don't mean a friend on MLM payroll), you aren't interested in hearing about that recommendation?

And I'm guessing you skip over any HN posts that are about a new product or service you weren't already aware of?

There's a reason word of mouth is the most influential medium for converting to a sale, and it's because a recommendation from a friend is typically not "polluted" by advertisers lacking scruples - so the "pitches" you hear are about things someone who knows you decently well thinks you'll like, and only for products/tv shows/services that the person actually thinks are good.

It's also part of why recommendations motivated by affiliate rewards or MLM sales are seen with such disdain, as it's behavior from a friend that crosses a love for acceptable behavior.

If we only saw ads online for things that matched our interests AND are very good products, we'd have a different attitude about advertising (but that will never happen, as it requires prisoner's dilemma type agreement across too many parties).

[Hnrobert42]

>If we only saw ads online for things that matched our interests AND are very good products

I see your point, but for me, even this is not true. I don’t need to buy things, yet I am susceptible to advertisements. Ads just convince me to buy things I don’t need. The ads you describe would be even worse. I would prefer instead to never hear about new products or services.

[Y_Y]

But you read HN don't you? Can you tell articles from ads here? What about Paul Graham's submarines?

[freeone3000]

Being tricked by false headlines and articles published as news when secretly advertisement doesn't lead me to opt in to more ads.

[snaky]

It depends on how useful the advertising is. It's not the tracking or privacy the regular user is most concerned about, it's the everyday experience that tells him advertising is still stupid and annoying.

Despite all the billion dollars ML systems with gazillion of factors analyzed on petabytes of data, all we've got is 'hey, you googled for a 10uA accuracy bench multimeter yesterday! now for two weeks we will show you all the $15 multimeters ever existed!'.

Look at this (don't worry, it's short one-page) thread for example of how it might be instead - https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/benchtop-dmm-advise-n... - and what if the message from Tek engineer that closed a deal was actually advertising? He just posted a link to relevant appnote, that's it. What if automatical advertising system showed the same link to the same appnote as an advertising to the same user?

[Hnrobert42]

Yes. I don’t know. I don’t know what those are.

[bryanrasmussen]

Do you ever look at HN without knowing what you're going to see?

[idiomatic1]

This is the idea behind the Brave browser, right?

[mtgx]

The cheap CPC and cpm is why Google and Facebook would never consider doing that. Especially Google I've noticed recently that they try to be as misleading as possible to new advertisers to get them to pay a lot of money for crap as targettng. For instance they call what are effectively as interactions as clicks and refer to the cost as CPC even though in all of Google's other as types CPC refers to click to website. But in Gmail campaigns it means ad interactions which convert to almost an order of magnitude fewer clicks to website but the advertisers pay at best only half the cost of regular clicks.

[rock_hard]

Star Wars of all things provides a interesting vision here. Did you ever notice that for the most part the machines/robots are not networked? That AI seems to exist but is intentionally kept dumb (C3PO).

I think this is a interesting model. To as society come to the conclusion that more connection of devices, smarter AI is not the right solution. That what works best is the right amount of connection and AI

[wlesieutre]

Except that they helpfully leave unsecured network ports all over literally every ship and building so that R2 units can plug in and do whatever they want. We can ignore that part for a “right amount of connection” example.

[nine_k]

See also: Butlerian Jihad.

[rock_hard]

Oh interesting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad

[Kalium]

This is an intriguing idea! Thank you for bringing it forth.

Out of curiosity, how familiar are you with how ad systems work? Generally there's a huge inventory of ads, each with different criteria attached to them and metadata about bids. When a request comes in, ads whose criteria are met are selected out and an instant auction takes place. The resulting ads are then shown.

I cannot think of a way that allows for both honoring the ad criteria and keeping personal interests and preferences solely client-side. You can't even take advantage of any form encryption here, as the results of the filtering would allow the server to infer the private data. This means you'd almost certainly have to get all the data to the client to allow querying locally.

OK, fine, that's workable. Then you just track impressions and so on to figure out when advertisers get charged. A potential drawback is that it's very possible that with impression and click data it could be possible to reconstruct most or all of the data a user might wish to protect. And there's no way to get away from this, either - pretty much all online advertising models rely on tracking one of impressions, clicks, and actions.

As for your two conditions:

> - A way to ensure that ads don't try to harm me by e.g. leading me to websites serving malware or abusing my computer's resources (e.g. miners)

Policing the contents of ads can be quite the task. Ensuring the contents of arbitrary external websites is next to impossible. There are no good ways to do this in a fully automated system at scale when someone else controls the other server and can change what content it serves at their discretion.

The best way I can think of to ensure this is to limit access to this hypothetical advertising platform to entities with the expertise and resources to protect themselves and anyone who comes into contact with their servers. Works for me, but being shut out of access to the biggest and best advertising systems might be a problem for many groups.

> - A way to keep my privacy and control what data is collected about me (and who has access to that data)

You know what? I think I know exactly what you want. You want the newspaper model. Collects no data from you, preserving your privacy. Only accepts advertising from partners that can be trusted, ensuring your safety. Doesn't need to closely track impressions, views, or actions.

[alkonaut]

> Generally there's a huge inventory of ads, each with different criteria attached to them

I think what he is describing is a future where the ONLY criteria ads are selected on is the standard user data set. Basically I open my browser settings, go to its "relevant ads"-section, enter some basic ad targeting info such as my age group, gender, and 2 hobbies.

Then because I entered "fishing" as an interest, I'll see a lot of fishing gear ads. Great!

If I'm NOT willing to enter any targeting info into my browser, or if I enter bogus info (or install a plugin that randomizes the info) then sites will not show me relevant ads.

I don't mind seeing ads for fishing gear if I told the site I'm interested in fishing. That's completely fine. I do mind seeing ads for hotels in San Francisco just hours after I searched a different sites for cheap flights there, or ads for that exact shoe I made an incomplete checkout of in a webhop store last week etc.

[Kalium]

Ah.

In that case, it's going to fail the test of being just as good pretty hard. Being able to target flexibly and based on user actions (or location, or other salient data) is really valuable to advertisers, in a measured-in-units-of-currency sense, and thus to publishers. It means better results from more narrowly targeted ads, and it also means more valuable ads to publishers.

It's perhaps not impossible, but it strikes me as a difficult thing to convince advertisers and publishers alike to take on.

[alkonaut]

> fail the test of being just as good pretty hard

Yeah I don't see the online ad business ever adopting something else because it's "as good", I think that browsers should drive this and ensure sites simply don't get this type of information, so the adoption to something better (for consumers) is driven by necessity.

The adoption of a system like the one I'm describing rests solely on the fact that the current information ads are based on, would dry up for one reason or another. Either because they don't dare use it (regulatory) or because they simply never get the information (technical).

I was under the impression that the past years of rapidly evolving DNT, third party cookie blocking, widespread use of adblockers (even in phones) etc was already rapidly drying up the amount of information available to track users? Perhaps I'm overly optimistic?

[Kalium]

The ad industry has proven very good at finding new ways to track people, defeating each new approach to block tracking. They've proven similarly good at learning to infer things they haven't actually been directly told, which is very helpful for getting around regulatory barriers.

In practice, not everyone keeps up on their patches, meaning they tend to be vulnerable to known tracking methods. Total ad blocking prevalence is not as high as one might guess: https://digiday.com/media/ad-blocking-charts/

Additionally, neither Apple nor Google is incentivized to make it easy to block ads on their devices. The only people I know who have done so are ones who have gone to non-trivial lengths to accomplish this.

Sadly, I think you may be excessively optimistic.

[scotty79]

> Yeah I don't see the online ad business ever adopting something else because it's "as good", I think that browsers should drive this and ensure sites simply don't get this type of information, so the adoption to something better (for consumers) is driven by necessity.

Pretty much AdBlock could do that.

It let's you opt out of serverside-profiled and unprofiled ads, and opt-in into relevant ones profiled on client side.

[tzs]

In the late '90s there was a place that did something like that. That was a time of slow internet connections, with a majority still on dial-up.

They had a product for Windows computers that provided a caching, prefetching web proxy. The deal with it was that if you let it show you adds occasionally (I think it was whenever you launched your browser to your homepage or once a day if you visits to your homepage were less frequent) you could download all of the company's other Windows programs and use them free as long as your browser was configured to go through the proxy. These were programs that normally were sold on floppy or CD-ROM for $20-40 each.

The way the ad delivery worked is that the proxy would download ads, which consisted of an HTML page and some additional data. When you went to your homepage the proxy would serve up one of the ads instead, with a link inserted to take you to your real homepage.

There was a Forth-like language built into the proxy. The additional data for an add could include code written in this language, which would be run when the proxy was choosing an ad to show. The code had access to various things the proxy knew about the local system and user. It did not have any access to the internet. The code would decide how strongly the ad would like to be shown at this time.

The only thing that went back to the internet in regard to ads, as far as I remember, was counts of how many times each ad was shown. (Not that it would have mattered much if more went back. As far as I know the proxy didn't really know much about you other than the physical characteristics of your computer and your internet connection. I don't think they had gotten to the point of trying to infer interests from browsing habits).

This particular approach would probably not be feasible today. They only had a handful of ads available at any one time, with the inventory changing slowly by today's standards. It did not take much resources, even for modem users, to download the entire ad inventory and keep it up to date.

Can you imagine trying to put Google's entire ad inventory on every PC, and keep it up to date, so that the client can choose the ad entirely locally?

[BrendanEich]

Sounds like AllAdvantage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage). An inspiration in part to Brave, but of course it did not blind itself to user data as we do.

The entire Google ad supply does not need to be downloaded, just a relatively brief catalog (which compresses well) of live edge URLs and metadata (keywords, essentially), updated as new deals for a given region with large enough user base come online, and old deals expire.

[bobthepanda]

This type of thing is also generally considered malware today. As a person who used to do IT support for a university, one of the most common malware issues would be Chrome extensions or whatnot switching your homepage to point to a ads-infested search engine instead of Google, and redirecting all search engine websites to the ad-infested one.

[wbl]

I worked on this a while ago at Mozilla. There was a presentation at ACM CCS '16 on what we did. Unfortunately the effort was discontinued, but we definitely solved a lot of the technical issues.

[forapurpose]

Wasn't that how ads were actually implemented on Firefox's homepage several years ago? IIRC, Mozilla developed it in cooperation with IAB as a solution to privacy (the ad-funded web being practically unavoidable), deployed it (maybe only in alpha or beta), and then people went ballistic over advertising in Firefox - without realizing it was a huge privacy gain - and Mozilla pulled it. Here's one article I found quickly; note that ads are based on local browser history.

https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-officially-kicks-off-ads-i...

And it looks like Mozilla is trying it again, though this is from a few months ago. What happened to it?

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/04/30/a-privacy...

[ThePhysicist]

That sounds really cool, is there any documentation (papers, presentations, code) available of that effort?

[wbl]

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2980000/2978407/p1591-green.... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G62JD9fdxNM

[madrox]

This idea keeps coming up. There’s a few reasons it hasn’t happened:

1. To really leverage the personal data, you need to run it through a model and correlate it with ad inventory. Those are two things you don’t tend to want to deliver to an insecure client. Then you need to collect data on how those ads performed to update the model.

2. For all that, it’s still more convenient to manage GDPR opt-in. Don’t underestimate the convenience of centralized management.

[chimeracoder]

> I'm still surprised no one has yet figured out a way to store sensitive data about personal interests and preferences on the client-side and let the client itself pull appropriate ads for the user to see.

Mozilla did this for Firefox, except a step better: the client pulled the same set of ads from the server regardless of the user preferences, but decided (client-side) what to display, so the server could never even infer behavior about the client from the requests.

Unfortunately, people didn't care, and they complained that this was an intrusion of privacy regardless, so they dropped it.

It turns out, there just really isn't market for privacy-focused advertising. People who care about privacy generally dislike advertising in all forms and block it, without regards to whether the advertising actually is an invasion of privacy or not.

[hnaccy]

>so the server could never even infer behavior about the client from the requests.

It reports click through so this isn't true.

[forapurpose]

> people didn't care

> there just really isn't market for privacy-focused advertising

My impression was that people just didn't understand it and Mozilla's communication about it was poor. That doesn't mean that there's not a market.

[Ajedi32]

> I'm still surprised no one has yet figured out a way to store sensitive data about personal interests and preferences on the client-side and let the client itself pull appropriate ads for the user to see.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the idea behind Brave? Blocks ads and (assuming you opt-in) replaces them with less obnoxious ads chosen by the client?

[SmellyGeekBoy]

Or just show ads relevant to the content? What better indicator of what the user is interested in right now?

[nine_k]

An ad which is relevant to 1% viewers still sells, likely enough to keep it published.

But it's irrelevant to 99% of the viewers, and it's impossible to tell them from the 1%: among other things, because the viewers are not keen to share too much data about themselves.

I think we should see ads as the (annoying) cost of commercially-produced free content. I wish a micropayment solution would take off to allow for easy and reliable paid opt-out on multiple sites I might visit. (I already have Youtube Red, and it's great.)

[amaccuish]

> I'm still surprised no one has yet figured out a way to store sensitive data about personal interests and preferences on the client-side

I'm pretty sure iAd works like this no? Also it wouldn't be massive advantage, you'd be serving less relevant ads (so losing out to competitors) and you can still track which ads a device requests.

[ThePhysicist]

Do you have more information on this?

[mahmoudimus]

We're working on something similar to this @ my company. Feel free to ping me directly, I'm happy to elaborate.

[eleniS2]

We are also building such a product. The core idea is: Your browser knows you best. We leverage this to display offers tailored to your browsing behavior that include a valuable user benefit without any of the information ever leaving your browser. You can read more of how we do this in https://myoffrz.com/en/fuer-nutzer/. Plus the code is open sourced here: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-core/tree/master/module.... The product name is MyOffrz and is integrated in the Cliqz Browser/Extension as "Cliqz Offers" and in the Ghostery extension as "Ghostery Rewards Beta" for German users.