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Vivaldi Browser CEO wants to fix web advertising

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Vivaldi Browser CEO wants to fix web advertising

Vivaldi is one of our favorite browsers, and for good reason. It’s filled to the brim not just with customization options and features that help enhance your web browsing experience, but it also has a built-in tracking blocker that works to limit advertisers from following you around the web everywhere you go. While that sort of thing’s a standard feature on many browsers today, in Vivaldi’s case, there’s more to it. Vivaldi’s CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, whom we sat down with after MWC 2023, doesn’t believe in the attention- and tracking-based advertising world we live in today, and is advocating for a radical renaissance that shifts us to a broad and content-based approach, like we’re familiar with from print and TV.

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To start with a little excursion, Jon explains to us that the internet wasn’t always the attention-based advertising machine that we know it to be today. This trend supposedly really only started when Facebook went public in 2012 and started to focus on the interests of shareholders. The company was then forced to keep users on the platform as long as possible and monetize their interactions, leading to the redesign of the Facebook feed to be less focused on people you know, and more focused on supposedly interesting content.

This approach meant that publishers could suddenly compete against each other on the same platform, leading to an influx of click-optimized headlines and less money to be distributed among websites overall. Facebook’s success with this model also quickly drove other platforms to copy the approach, like Twitter, which has for a long time tried to push its algorithmic-based feed onto users, rather than the beloved chronological timeline.

In turn, this led to the advent of poor-quality, high-quantity ads that advertisers effectively have less control over than programmatic ads in newspapers and such. They have no idea on which websites they will end up, and it’s likely that no one is truly happy with the way the system is set up right now. Publishers moving to paywalls further proves that the current ad system is broken, Jon says. 10 to 15 years ago, almost all content was freely available on the web, with ads that you weren’t necessarily afraid of. This has changed today, and paywalls are a symptom that shows that targeted ads are worse, less efficient, and bring less revenue than the older approach.


Vivaldi wants to offer an escape from the targeting-based internet

Vivaldi doesn’t believe in this attention-based model, Jon explains. The browser wants to actively offer alternatives to such efforts that attempt to lock you in to a service as long as possible. The browser offers a built-in RSS feed reader that you can curate yourself and that is strictly chronological by nature, and other services like Vivaldi Mail and Calendar can either be used with Vivaldi accounts, or you can hook into them with your own existing IMAP services.

Vivaldi also doesn’t believe in collecting user data, and is actively helping its users block trackers. The browser has a built-in ad blocker, even if Jon isn’t too happy about it — he would have preferred to stick with a tracking blocker, which would be an incentive for websites and social media to create privacy-minding ads instead, but Vivaldi users were asking for the inclusion. This is also one of the things that Jon says sets Vivaldi apart from the competition. He says the browser can be thought of as a product built by and for friends, and thus, compromises have to be made.

vivialdi-android-tracking-blocker

In contrast to ad blocker AdBlock Plus, or Vivaldi’s competing browser, Brave, the company doesn’t want to take matters into its own hands, though. AdBlock Plus has an “acceptable ads” program built into its extension by default, which allows partner websites to add unobtrusive ads on their websites, with all the usual tracking enabled. Brave, on the other hand, blocks all advertising and tracking by default, but you can optionally opt in to receive ads in your desktop or phone notifications. This earns you tokens in Brave’s cryptocurrency, which you can either use for your own gain or distribute to the websites you’ve visited as an alternative payment for blocking their ads.

Both of these approaches are opt-in for content creators, though, meaning that if publishers don’t agree with the terms set by these custom systems created by companies that effectively block their main revenue stream, they don’t get a dime anymore.

Vivaldi is bringing the fight for a better internet straight to the regulators

What Jon wants to do instead is advocate to regulators (he doesn’t want to call what he does lobbying), and when we met, he was en-route to Brussels to talk to EU representatives. He envisions a world where tracking-based advertising is banned, with publishers instead going back to the way advertising worked before the internet, as you know them from newspapers, magazines, or TV. Rather than having ads be based on users’ interests, they would be more programmatic and based on broader target audiences, or the content they’re paired with.

The benefit with this approach is that there isn’t necessarily less money in it for publishers than in tracking-based advertising. Jon says that advertisers have advertising budgets, and when they can’t use this money for tracking-based ads because these are banned, they would instead use them for content-targeted ads. If you ask us, this is similar to how advertising works on television already, with a rough target audience in mind for certain programming. And if you’re aware of Super Bowl ad prices, you can clearly see that there is enough money in this form of advertising (though of course, the Super Bowl is one of the most viewed TV events annually, so that might not be the best example).

Google’s Privacy Sandbox isn’t a viable alternative

On the surface, Google may have something similar in mind with its upcoming Privacy Sandbox that tracks users locally only, and then organizes them by shared interests, making them less trackable as individuals. But as Jon told our sister site XDA, who also spoke to him during MWC 2023, this still doesn’t remove the tracking issue — it just relocates it from servers to the browser.

Vivaldi can’t single-handedly change the way the internet is set up today, but the company can do its part. Its user-centric, privacy-minding approach to a web browser can provide you with an idea of what the internet could be like without tracking, and that’s more than what can be said for many competitors.

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German Group Sues Facebook Owner Meta Over Death Threats

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A German environmental group says it’s suing Facebook’s parent company Meta over persistent death threats posted on the social network against its …

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TikTok’s Best Defense Against a Ban: 150 Million US Users

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TikTok's Best Defense Against a Ban: 150 Million US Users
  • TikTok officially has 150 million monthly active users in the US, the company says.
  • The app’s popularity with younger voters makes a ban politically sensitive, experts say.
  • TikTok’s user numbers could ultimately be its best defense. It’s now a routine for 45% of the US.

TikTok officially has 150 million monthly active users in the US, the company confirmed this week. That means any effort to ban it could face stiff resistance after the app has become part of the routine of 45% of the country.

The user figures come as TikTok CEO Shou Chew is set to testify in front of Congress on Thursday. They also come as the Biden Administration has demanded TikTok’s Chinese owners divest their US business or risk getting banned entirely from the US. 

TikTok’s user numbers show just how much the social media app has taken hold. It’s still not to the threshold of Facebook, which logs 266 million monthly active users in the US, but it’s not far behind. (Facebook parent Meta doesn’t break out Instagram’s monthly active users in the US.)

As TikTok’s CEO Chew put it: “That’s almost half the US coming to TikTok to connect, to create, to share, to learn, or just to have some fun.” That number also includes about 5 million businesses that use TikTok as a way to reach customers, he said in a TikTok video on Tuesday.

TikTok’s popularity is likely why the Biden administration is pushing for a sale, instead of an outright ban, industry watchers previously told Insider

TikTok is particularly popular with younger generations in the US, said Mark Shmulik, an analyst with Bernstein. “And you can hypothesize that they may skew and vote Democrat a little bit more,” he said, which explains the hesitation on a ban from Biden’s camp.

As a result, TikTok has become a tool politicians are turning to to reach younger voters, said Darrell West, a senior fellow for the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings. That means any action the government takes on it has ramifications for the next election in 2024. 

“If Biden ends up banning TikTok, he’s kind of shooting himself in the foot in the sense that Democrats really need a big turnout from young people,” West said. “And if there’s no TikTok it actually becomes harder for the party to reach that audience.”

Ultimately, TikTok has amassed a huge user base in the US, and the more users it continues to add, the higher the stakes are for what the government decides to do. 

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at ‪415-322-3101‬. (PR pitches by email only, please.) 

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Trump Hasn’t Been Arrested But But AI Images Are Fooling People

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Trump Hasn't Been Arrested But But AI Images Are Fooling People

Photo: Shane Bevel/NCAA Photos (Getty Images)

The former U.S. president Donald Trump still walks free as of the time of writing. But certain AI-generated photos on Twitter tell a different story. These deepfakes depict a world where one of the most powerful white men in America can be treated like any other citizen, meaning actually be held accountable for his actions. Except they’re not real. Some people believed they were, and that’s alarming for anyone who cares about media literacy.

This weekend, Trump told his supporters that he was expecting to be arrested on Tuesday over allegations of hush money paid to the former porn star Stormy Daniels. To be clear: The case against him exists. The Manhattan district attorney’s office has previously asked Trump to testify to a grand jury. Both legal minds and journalists are still speculating over whether or not he’ll be charged at all. So this whole saga is still far from a done deal. That hasn’t stopped Eliot Higgins, a citizen journalist, from using Midjourney to make these AI generated images of Trump being tackled and chased by the police.

While the original tweet has over three million views, these images have been shared across Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook, often without context or taking them at face value. Twitter hasn’t labeled these images as fake, so some people are having trouble with identifying them as machine generated (One tweet that pointed to this problem garnered over a thousand likes). Facebook is similarly chaotic. Some users chose to disclose the photos’ AI origins, and some didn’t. Many TikToks aren’t disclaiming that the images are AI-generated.

This is a huge problem when right-wing grifters like Ian Miles Cheong are using them to galvanize Trump supporters to action. New York City is already preparing for the former president’s supporters to riot in the streets over a possible arrest. These fake images of their “imperiled” leader just add more tinder to the fire. Kotaku reached out to ask Higgins for a comment, but did not receive one by the time of publication.

Look, it doesn’t matter if you’re savvy enough to tell whether or not these images are real. Outside of our social media bubbles, large swaths of the country are vulnerable to misinformation and fake news. These images have already made their way to Facebook, a platform with millions of vulnerable users. As long as Americans want a Trump arrest to be real, such images will continue to go viral.



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