Timeline for Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
57 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 4, 2021 at 8:47 | comment | added | FriendlyFire | @einpoklum "We've also reached out to Google to enlist their support" - see, that's where you're going wrong in life. correct. | |
| Feb 25, 2021 at 15:11 | comment | added | DavidG | Is there an update for this issue? I was forced to disable my adblocker to try something out and noticed the same thing, but now it seems to be accompanied by another error? i.sstatic.net/15uYL.png | |
| Sep 24, 2019 at 19:55 | history | bounty ended | Zoe - Save the data dump | ||
| Sep 23, 2019 at 20:38 | comment | added | Peter Badida | @forest Obviously it is and SO/SE people won't even answer to us clearly. Just use Tor+uBlock Matrix and/or disable JS entirely and show a proper response back for this backstabbing by removing every script and frame at least slightly related to an ad from SO/SE websites. :) | |
| Sep 19, 2019 at 15:34 | comment | added | Zoe - Save the data dump | @peterh MS isn't exclusively the problem here, it's the entire ad provider. SE has a choice, and there's another choice aside the two you mentioned: chose an ad provider that doesn't collect data like there's no tomorrow, and/or combine that with optional memberships. There's actually a ton of paths that don't create a privacy risk for SE's users, without sacrificing revenue if they so desperately need it. Whether they want to, however, is a different question. And if things keep going the way they have so far, the answer to that is no. We'll probably never get an answer at this rate. | |
| Sep 19, 2019 at 11:49 | comment | added | peterh | My impression is that m$ actually doesn't want to advertise you, they want the data of your visitors. Can't they collect enough by the Bing? If I understand the case well, you have two choices: 1) allow the data collection of your advertisers 2) you give up the ad income. Hard to choose! You should have not base your life for the m$. | |
| Aug 19, 2019 at 13:31 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| Aug 19, 2019 at 14:32 | |||||
| Aug 17, 2019 at 21:02 | comment | added | Anton Menshov | @Nick we are also worried that this controversial post is pretty much hidden from the users "by the design", which I, personally, do not consider quite fair. | |
| Aug 16, 2019 at 5:27 | comment | added | forest distrusts StackExchange | Nick, is this post correct? Is SE actually OK with fingerprinting users now? | |
| Aug 7, 2019 at 15:28 | history | migrated | from meta.stackoverflow.com (revisions) | ||
| Jul 1, 2019 at 21:41 | comment | added | jmercouris | @FélixGagnon-Grenier sure you can, but anytime a resource is requested, the IP address is known by the server, otherwise how would it deliver the resource? You may argue that one could setup thousands of VPNs, but that would be expensive and complex, and likely detectable. | |
| Jul 1, 2019 at 19:44 | comment | added | Freewalker | Firefox can block this kind of fingerprinting out of the box. blog.mozilla.org/firefox/… | |
| Jun 29, 2019 at 9:46 | comment | added | Alex | It seems you couldn't post an answer earlier, because you were investigation a production SQL issue. This suggests SQL experts at StackOverflow are working on implementing those stronger long-term protections now". Needless too say I have little confidence you are going to release something like this anytime soon. SE sites are no longer white listed in my AdBlockers. | |
| Jun 29, 2019 at 4:15 | comment | added | jhpratt | Downvoting for one reason only: "We are not turning off these ad campaigns". This is unacceptable. I've re-enabled my ad blocker on Stack until you can get your things together. You are willfully violating my privacy. | |
| Jun 28, 2019 at 20:32 | comment | added | jrh | @Clueless for more information on the history of bots and ads, see What Happens Next Will Amaze You (Idlewords talk), "Today we live in a Blade Runner world, with ad robots posing as people, and Deckard-like figures trying to expose them by digging ever deeper into our browsers, implementing Voight-Kampff machines in Javascript to decide who is human. We're the ones caught in the middle... It boils down to this: fake websites serving real ads to fake traffic for real money." | |
| Jun 28, 2019 at 15:20 | comment | added | Andras Deak -- Слава Україні | @Lewis only 6-8 weeks to go. Shog linked a similar abusive ad case from 2016. Users will be safe any minute now. | |
| Jun 28, 2019 at 12:00 | comment | added | berry120 | "Feature-policy" is experimental, and won't work for any versions of IE, Edge or Safari AFAIK. Even if you somehow get it fixed in Chrome (and surely that's a bit of a conflict of interest for Google), do we just say "screw it" to all versions older than the current one, and to any other browsers slower to catch up? The only long term solution is surely to move away from 3rd party providers that, as demonstrated, can't be trusted. | |
| Jun 28, 2019 at 11:52 | comment | added | Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні | ""Microsoft" and "Google" - the Rule of Two strikes again... | |
| Jun 28, 2019 at 11:12 | comment | added | Lightness Races in Orbit | @Clueless Or a sweatshop anywhere else. You could consider removing the suggested racism from your comment. | |
| Jun 28, 2019 at 11:05 | comment | added | user377035 | "We are not turning off these ad campaigns as a knee-jerk reaction" - then this will continue to happen until this is addressed and who knows how long that will take. Shouldn't they be turned off publicly (for our sake) and forked for repro elsewhere? Unless the financial hit while they are disabled is greater than our right to privacy. | |
| Jun 28, 2019 at 7:14 | comment | added | sjamaan | I'm disappointed that Stack Overflow resorts to using the "easy" option of Google's user-hostile ads. Any filtering of JavaScript or whatever other solution is just a band-aid solution, IMO. You guys aren't just some random dude's blog that has no option but to use something like Google. Your site draws many of the world's best developers. Companies should be willing to kill to reach those. You can set the terms, run ads from your own servers. Or perhaps give up on ads altogether and earn money through job postings on Stack Overflow Careers. | |
| Jun 28, 2019 at 6:59 | comment | added | Andreas condemns Israel | @Clonkex I said that it's wrong to let Chromium's bugs prevent users of Gecko, WebKit and other engines have their privacy retained. It's strange how you managed to get a burning house into here. A house is your personal home, that you live in. Browsers can easily be switched between. That metaphor is therefore bad. Chromium is not the only open-source engine. Secondly, it's controlled by Google. Vivaldi has said that it's very hard for them get changes through, unless it directly benefits Google. I cannot remember where they said this; it might have been a Norwegian tech news website. | |
| Jun 28, 2019 at 6:47 | comment | added | Clonkex | @FélixGagnon-Grenier Hence... fingerprinting. If they know who you are, they know you've already clicked on the ad. | |
| Jun 28, 2019 at 6:47 | comment | added | Clonkex | @Andreas Claiming they shouldn't bother trying to help Chrome be more private is just moronic. That's like looking at a burning house and saying, "well, it's already on fire so there's no point trying to put it out". Also, other browsers are based on Chromium because it's open-source and very solid. Building a new browser engine is an unbelievably difficult task, and would result in waaaaaaay more privacy and security issues. Do you want the majority of users to be tracked even more? | |
| Jun 28, 2019 at 3:44 | comment | added | Félix Gagnon-Grenier | @jmercouris That makes no sense. Anybody can create a script that'll click one hundreds of times per seconds on an ad. How come literally any ad provider is not bankrupt? | |
| Jun 28, 2019 at 2:33 | comment | added | user134589 | It seems like Feature-Policy headers would need to be served on an iframe that contains the iframe that contains the ad, not on the main page itself. Otherwise legit uses of those features in snippets will break | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 23:21 | comment | added | Andreas condemns Israel | - and, @DeanWard, there's something wrong when bugs in Chromium start causing problems for WebKit and Gecko... I did mention private monopoly over the internet, didn't I? | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 23:17 | comment | added | Andreas condemns Israel | @DeanWard My point is that you don't really need anti-fingerprinting actions on a website if you're using Chrome anyway. If you're worried about being tracked, you shouldn't be using Chrome, so anti-privacy bugs in Chromium shouldn't keep you from protecting the privacy of non-Chromium users, since non-Chromium users therefore should be the target group of anti-fingerprinting actions. 64% being Chrome users, means that 36% are non-Chrome users. I assume the percentage of Chromium users amongst those 36% total users is low? | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 23:05 | comment | added | Dean Ward StaffMod | @Andreas 64% of all traffic to SE Network was from Chrome browsers this month... it’s by far our most used browser | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 21:08 | comment | added | Andreas condemns Israel | Is it possible for Stack Overflow to scan Javascript included with ads, and block them if they go to such an extent at fingerprinting users? | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 21:05 | comment | added | user4581301 | Sounds like some very interesting Stack Overflow questions could come out of this. Now THAT is meta. | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 21:05 | comment | added | Andreas condemns Israel | "we’ve filed a bug in the Chrome tracker". What nonsense is this? If you care about privacy, net neutrality and democracy, you wouldn't be using Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. Please just fix these issues fast, for Safari and Firefox users. Yes, there are other browsers, like Vivaldi, Opera and Brave that also use Chromium, I'm aware of that, but you shouldn't wait fixing these issues for internet users not contributing to a private monopoly over the internet, just because some other browsers aren't compatible. And... why did they even choose Chromium to begin with, if emphasizing P&N&D...? | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 16:34 | comment | added | R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE | @AndrasDeak: You're completely correct that SO's claim to "running only static, non-animated banner" was a lie. SO has the clout to do things this way, but they choose not to, dealing with the scammy adtech industry instead because it's lucrative. | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 16:31 | comment | added | R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE | @Clueless: Yes. Ad Networks need to trust the website opertors that they're getting the value they expect based on the sites reputation alone. They do not need to run their own malware in our browsers to verify this. The expectation must become that they need to trust or GTFO. This is how it always worked in the era of print ads before adtech hell, and we must demand that it work that way again. | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 16:25 | comment | added | TylerH | @Script47 I read that as it's written literally--in the present tense. In other words, as of the writing of Nick's answer, the relevant team members are aware of the issue (and working to resolve it, as the answer goes on to explain). The fact that they seem to have started working to resolve the issue as soon as the meta post was made would indicate they were not aware of it earlier. | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 14:41 | comment | added | lalo | Additionally to ad blockers i'd suggesting using Privacy Badger eff.org/privacybadger/faq#What-is-Privacy-Badger | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 10:52 | comment | added | Magisch | @Clueless not via boundlessly tracking their users, thats for sure. That just means people are even more justifiable in using adblock everywhere. | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 10:49 | comment | added | jmercouris | Most ads are pay per click, not pay per impression. So no, they don't need to verify that the ad was viewed by an actual human. | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 9:49 | comment | added | Clueless | @gnat Yes, I don't see any easy way around convincing someone somewhere that you are a real human. In a hypothetical privacy utopia where no one's browser emits anywhere close to 33 bits of identifying information to anyone, how do you convince me that my ad is reasonably likely to be viewed by a human instead of going to a VM running headless Selenium in a data center? | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 9:08 | comment | added | gnat | @Clueless so, in order to detect possible fraud, ad networks try to squeeze personal information about (legitimate) users. You know, this whole racket somehow smells fishy | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 8:48 | comment | added | Clueless | To the people confused why ads need to run their own Javascript (even ones that are just static images): The short answer is that Ad Networks do not and cannot trust website operators. They need to run their own JavaScript served from their own servers in order to verify that a real user saw the ad and for how long, and they can't trust the website operator to tell them. And these pieces of JavaScript tend to be more invasive and privacy-destroying than the website's JS because they care, far more than the actual website does, that the "user" is not a bank of iphones in a sweatshop in China. | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 8:39 | comment | added | allo | If you do not (want to) track users anyway, you can run the ad selection code on the server side. You only need it on the client side, to decide what ads to show based on user tracking. | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 8:23 | comment | added | Script47 | 'We are aware of it.' - Do you mean aware of it prior to this post (If so, why was nothing done sooner?) or as a result of this post? | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 8:00 | comment | added | Miguel | How is StackExchange going to prevent trackers like that in the future since rich media ads are heavily dependent on third party javascript? Also Google Ads uses Integral Ad Science (ad company who owns adsafeprotected.com) which uses all sorts of trackers for 'brand safety' so asking Google for support is kind of an oxymoron. | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 3:38 | comment | added | Caius Jard | @GregHewgill but then again wouldn't turning off JS result in a mostly experience-free browsing experience too? :) | |
| Jun 26, 2019 at 23:53 | comment | added | Greg Hewgill | @AndrasDeak: Ad networks are generally implemented by running a bit of JS code on the page that calls some more code (supplied by the ad network), that decides which ad to show. There's probably more layers of code supplied by different vendors. In this case, one of them supplies code that tries to fingerprint the browser. To see what it would look like without running code, turn off JS and enjoy the mostly ad-free browsing experience. :) | |
| Jun 26, 2019 at 23:53 | comment | added | Steve Bennett | "Trying to get the better end of the deal in a devil's bargain is no small feat to attempt" - really nicely put, thanks @Shog9 | |
| Jun 26, 2019 at 23:32 | comment | added | Andras Deak -- Слава Україні | @Shog9 well, good luck for all our sakes. In the answer you linked "This includes but is not limited to running only static, non-animated banner" sounds to me like "image only", but I'm completely ignorant of web dev, perhaps my expectations are way off. I'd naively think that whatever is "static" will not eavesdrop on users. | |
| Jun 26, 2019 at 23:24 | comment | added | Shog9 | Short answer there @Andras is that the ad market is kinda messed up; our old ad director Danny went into some detail on this a few years back (over what it occurs to me was probably an earlier revision of this same script). Trying to get the better end of the deal in a devil's bargain is no small feat to attempt, but we have a bunch of good folks on the team working on this & some ideas to follow up on - wish us luck... | |
| Jun 26, 2019 at 23:11 | comment | added | Andras Deak -- Слава Україні | Just to make a lot of passive grumps explicit and directed: why do your ads even allow javascript to run? Is this just The Way Things Are, or was it a conscious decision? Have they always been like this? Is there any intention to prioritize users before revenue and prevent all this from ever happening by promptly switching to passive ads? | |
| Jun 26, 2019 at 23:07 | comment | added | Taryn Staff | @DanielW. I might have broken them or at least a job I set up broke them for a bit - twitter.com/tarynpivots/status/1143976726390702080 | |
| Jun 26, 2019 at 23:00 | comment | added | jmercouris | I'm not sure Google would be my "go-to" source when it comes to user privacy. | |
| Jun 26, 2019 at 22:38 | comment | added | Daniel W. | Glad you fixed the databases! What happened to them tho? | |
| Jun 26, 2019 at 22:27 | comment | added | shadowtalker | What does "that mess" refer to exactly? The correct solution here is simply to ban javascript from ads. Anything else is inviting advertisers to abuse your users' trust and data. | |
| Jun 26, 2019 at 22:27 | comment | added | einpoklum | "We've also reached out to Google to enlist their support" - see, that's where you're going wrong in life. | |
| Jun 26, 2019 at 22:24 | comment | added | Ganesh Krishnan | Does stack overflow use Google ads? I thought it had its own ad network | |
| Jun 26, 2019 at 22:07 | history | answered | Nick CraverMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
