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Mozilla explains their recent foray into advertising - A free and open internet shouldn’t come at the expense of privacy (blog.mozilla.org)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Podcasts, by their very nature, do not use any kind of tracking whatsoever (well, besides IP address regions, anyway).

Absolutely no reason for a browser developer to get in on this besides shameless profiteering.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Maybe I'm cynical but I'm thinking whatever platform the podcast is on probably has that tracking information for sale anyway if the podcast producers want it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

That is probably true for podcasts on exclusive platforms like Spotify, but those are few and far between. Even with those, I don't think Spotify is delivering customized audio files to each user.

It's more like with broadcast TV, where they have general demographic information that they use to attract advertisers.

The general case is a plain ol' RSS feed accessed by any arbitrary client. There's not much data to be tracked there. And there's not a whole lot you can do with an IP address without introducing highly-visible problems. You can infer the general geographic location of your listeners, but that's about it. If you try to do personal tracking via IP address, it's going to be messy. Cell phones don't typically have persistent unique IPs, and even most laptop users are going to be running on a shared external IP (e.g. at a college campus, business, or any ISP that does not provide users with a dedicated IP). And again, they're not customizing audio files per user. It's a mostly static medium.

[–] Carighan 3 points 2 months ago

Erm, podcasts very much get dynamically placed locally-relevant ads based on listener location (probably IP) by now. Which even makes sense, some ads are not legal to run for listeners in other countries, so as long as you conduct business there (say the BBC's podcasts when listened to from Germany) then they got to abide by local advertising laws and hence need to partially present other ads. And would want to, as not all products of theirs are available in all countries equally (as some are local in their content) and hence they have no reason to run cross-selling ads.

You actually see (hear?) this a lot nowadays. Sure, it doesn't work with all platforms and definitely not with all providers, but "tracking" for ad-purposes exists in podcasts. For legal reasons, if nothing else.