Regulations would be nice. A technological solution that fundamentally obfuscates an individual so that they can buy their groceries without being big-brothered would nicer.
This representation by percentages is a bit disingenuous. Yes, numbers-wise you may be correct, but if you consider the companies' enormous resources and amount of influence and impact, Google et al make up the 90+%.
I didn't realize Apple had a behavioral advertising division. Can you share more about Apple's tracking, maybe some links or whitepapers?
I recently saw the Minority Report targeted advertising scene[0] as an aspirational video in an internal document outlining business goals.
> It is the data collectors - Google - Apple - Facebook. They are the irresponsible parties at fault.
Like you say, targeted ads (revenue generative purposes) are not the problem. They are in fact neutral-to-beneficial. It's government surveillance that is the problem.
To say that FAG are the problem is wrong. FAG are motivated by revenue, and operate in first-world (corrupt, but only economically corrupt [for our purpose]) regimes. They will absolutely protect their data from misuse. When they misstep, they get backlash and take corrective action. When the make mistakes, they actually learn from them. Not because of the slow but heavy hand of government, but because of highly reactive market pressure.
So we don't have to worry about them, they are not irresponsible. Google and Apple, eg, does not sell your data to the bad guy, not directly. They sell access to demographics that they only know and they have strong internal controls. Google is f'ing crazy the way they protect data, and I mean from internal abuse. Even in the face of GDPR, does your startup do anything to protect PII from internal abuse? No. Yes, FB has sold direct access to "you" but they have learned and will continue to learn and be subject to public/market pressure.
Who we have to worry about are the people that are not on our radar as first-world elite HN readers: governments. Snowden was revelatory that even our own [US] government is dangerous, to a degree that dwarfs anything FAG does.
To be clear: It is not the ad industry we have an issue with here. It is the data collectors - Google - Apple - Facebook. They are the irresponsible parties at fault.