Here’s some good new (via John Gruber) from the fight against ad-tech and the industry’s efforts to track our every move on the Internet. The Guardian is reporting that companies perpetrating these outrages are losing hundreds of millions of dollars due to Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Protection that the company rolled out in 2017. One advertising company, Criteo, reports that its revenue is down 20% despite Apple’s Safari accounting for only 15% of the browser market.
This is an excellent start and I hope that it ends with every company guilty of these invasive techniques being driven out of business. They will have well and truly earned it. Let me state again for those of you who haven’t read my previous writings on this, I have no objection to display ads. They are the price we pay for having access to the content they support. The people who create that content need to earn a living just as we all do and ad-supported content appears to be the best model we’ve found.
What I do object to is being tracked across the Web by these companies and their running what can only be described as malware on my computer without my permission. Often that JavaScript is literal malware but even when it isn’t it’s still software running on my computer doing things I don’t approve of. It’s got to stop and if driving these predators out of business is the result, I’m fine with that.