[emmett]

For advertisers this is a non-starter, because it prevents you from knowing the size of your audience. All sites would immediately begin requiring some form of "login" in your scenario in order to enable tracking again.

If you can't track uniques, you can't sell ads, and that's pretty much all there is to it. So there's huge incentive to undermine any scheme to prevent unique user tracking.

The solution is to somehow ban advertising, but that's biting off a bit more than simple user privacy.

[kenko]

"For advertisers this is a non-starter, because it prevents you from knowing the size of your audience. All sites would immediately begin requiring some form of "login" in your scenario in order to enable tracking again."

If this is really a non-starter for advertisers, then mandating it will effectively ban advertising, non?

Remember: your business model is not sacrosanct! Disruption!

[emmett]

I'm not arguing against banning advertising. Actually, I think that would be a fine idea.

Just recognize that unless you do ban advertising, the result of this change will not be what's intended. The intended result is that websites, in general, stop tracking anonymous users. Instead, it will result in every user being explicitly tracked.

The most important issue here is that the political feasibility of reducing tracking of anonymous users is equivalent to the political feasibility of banning advertising.

(I'm slightly overselling here -- in reality, a good amount of advertising of the "sponsorship" form would still work. But the impact would be large enough that most websites would force login as I describe rather than stop tracking people.)

[nine_k]

It will also kill most "free content" websites that live off the ads revenue. Are you ready for paywalls everywhere, even if subscription is 25 � / mo?

[lambda]

Your symbol comes out as a Unicode replacement character for me. What was it supposed to be?

[nine_k]

It was the cent symbol, ¢; somehow it was broken in transmission.

[lambda]

That time it worked. Not sure why it broke the first time.

[anonymfus]

To sell ads you don't need to show exact size of audience, estimation is enough as proven by TV.

[rlanday]

If you’re an Internet company trying to pull advertising dollars away from TV, one of your arguments is that you can do much better tracking. When you run a TV ad, everyone watching the show gets the same ad, and people watching different shows see the same ad a non-optimal number of times.

[emmett]

That's a very good point. This would definitely happen to some degree. But it would still hurt internet advertising a good deal not to be able to track uniques, to show you an ad only once per day, to count how many people have been shown an ad, etc. even if you could know about how many people were on the site.

The result would likely be tracking via login as I describe, rather than true anonymity.