There are other cases where no such inference is possible, for example, if the person writing things down is a tax inspector investigating benefits fraud. In that case objections on privacy grounds would be ignored.
http://gawker.com/5671582/how-facebooks-targeted-ads-reveale...
I only skimmed parts of the paper but I also question the premise. It seems the attack is entirely dependent on you being 100% sure your ad is so carefully targeted it'll only show to a single person. If there's any doubt at all that it might match even two people, the attack doesn't work. Seems rather hard to pull off in anything other than lab conditions.
Then just don't access any ad-sponsored content. You are the one deciding to use it, just make that call.
I hate ads like anyone else, but I know that ads pay for the services and content I access. As much as I'd love for them to go away, I don't want it because I know the impact it would have on the availability of content and services.
I’m trying hard not to. My wallet is always open when there’s an option to not have my privacy violated.
The issue? Most services don’t allow me to pay, and the ones that do still try to track me after I’ve paid.
The result? My adblocker is happily giving them the middle finger and I can’t wait for adtech to die in a fire.
You do realize that with adtech dying those sites and services will go out of business, right? Or you didn't think that through?
Your comment makes it seem like these businesses are invented recently.
I'm tired of these excuses of business dying.The online ad tech industry brought it themselves.
Also I care more about people than a corporation that exploits people; which is opposite of American culture.
When will this happen? Does it happen before or after Hollywood stops making films because piracy, and the entire recording industry falls over and bursts into a fire?
MySpace used to have animated DoubleClick style untargeted ads. It sucked. Facebook crushed them partly because it's a much cleaner experience and Facebook ads are so much higher quality.
The problem with all the people claiming this sort of move is great is it doesn't ring true, they sound almost in physical pain over "tracking" (a scary word for very primitive and broad-brush techniques, by and large).
But where are the people who have actually suffered concrete, quantifiable harm? Some real, unarguable case where someone suffered because of ad targeting? If there were a real harm here, given the enormous scale of the internet, there should be millions of such stories but the only one I can think of was years ago, about a supermarket that discovered that women who buy X, Y and Z things together are very likely to be pregnant. They caused a minor family drama by sending a teenager adverts for baby stuff when her parents didn't know. Arguably this is a hole the teenager dug for themselves, but even so, it wasn't even internet based stuff from what I recall.
And as far as harm goes, that's about it. I've never been harmed by ads. I've never met anyone else who has been either.
But I remember a LOT of people complaining back in the bad old days about the barrel-scraping punch the monkey inventory that typified the web experience.