The practices should be banned. It's a federal felony to wiretap or open someone else's mail. In almost all states, it's a crime to record conversations without consent from at least one party. Earlier generations passed those laws because they viewed mass surveillance as a fundamentally Soviet activity with no place in a free society.

According to some footnotes in Shoshana Zuboff's book, the FTC was on the path to ban these practices in 2001 but then 9/11 happened.

Calling mass surveillance a "fundamentally Soviet activity" weakens your argument here. Is mass surveillance something that happened in the Soviet Union? Of course. But it also happens in the US and many other nations, liberal democratic or not, worldwide. So why shouldn't we call mass surveillance fundamentally American, or fundamentally capitalist?

Mass surveillance is bad. It is toxic to freedom and democracy. Let's focus on that rather than invoking Red Scare tendencies of old.

> Let's focus on that rather than invoking Red Scare tendencies of old.

He's not "invoking Red Scare tendencies of old" to describe modern mass surveillance. He's giving historical context about what earlier generations thought:

>> Earlier generations passed those laws because they viewed mass surveillance as a fundamentally Soviet activity with no place in a free society.

It's particularly confusing since the "earlier generations" were the people who wrote the unreasonable search and seizure clause in the Bill of Rights, almost 150 years before the Soviet Union even existed. The Supreme Court ruled in Katz v US that warrantless wiretaps were unconstitutional so Congress passed laws creating wiretap warrants [1] for law enforcement. Congress didn't ban wiretaps without a warrant, they passed a law to create such warrants in response to a Supreme Court decision that banned what police had been doing for decades, Soviet style.

[1] https://it.ojp.gov/PrivacyLiberty/authorities/statutes/1284

Not sure how you've taken his comment that way.

He used it contextually for framing, I don't think he was calling mass surveillance a "fundamentally Soviet activity" at all.

You're not being "wiretapped" if the site you visit explicitly included tracking. As an analogy, the sites that you visit are already providing one-party consent (all that is needed with current federal wiretapping laws) by including said intentional tracking.

In the case where non-essential sites are required to disclose what they track to the user, the user is arguably also providing consent on their end even if it's mandatory. Nobody is forcing you to visit non-essential sites.

If you told an American in 1995 that AT&T was selling their call records, or that Visa was selling their transaction records, they would have gone ballistic.

The fact that all this tracking is still hush-hush means that most people would not react kindly if they were aware of the true scope of the tracking, and how widely distributed the data is.

Browser fingerprinting isn't part of "explicitly including tracking".

> Earlier generations passed those laws because they viewed mass surveillance as a fundamentally Soviet activity with no place in a free society

Laughs in cointelpro

Relevant: https://adnauseam.io/

The book "Obfuscation" shown at the bottom of the page is a very interesting one, definitely worth taking a look at.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/obfuscation

How would you (or anyone) rate this vs uBlock Origin? Seems like by it's inherent design, AdNauseam would use greater resources.

Unfortunately, adnaseam does not improve privacy since it has to load the ad scripts.

Addressed by the FAQ¹:

> Isn't it safer just to use an adblocker? Why engage with ad-networks at all?

> While AdNauseam is far safer than using no blocker at all, it is indeed marginally safer for one to simply use a strong adblocker and protect themselves. But it is also safer to stay at home rather than to attend a protest. Using an adblocker does little to change the status quo (especially for those users without the resources to install/configure one, and so remain at risk). AdNauseam, and the obfuscation strategy in general, instead presents a possible avenue for collective resistance; a means of questioning and perhaps eventually, changing the system. But this is not for everyone. If your goal is primarily self-protection, this tool may not be for you...

[1]: https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#isnt-it-safer-ju...

Are there any servers running the software whose maintainers accept donations to continue/augment their operation?

+1 for the best WebExtension ad blocker there is, a fork of №2 µblock Origin

Will not happen. The U.S. military industrial complex views these sorts of algorithms as a vital technology in fighting future wars, and also fears that it's at a disadvantage to China because 4x population means a strategic advantage purely from the size of data sets Chinese ML researchers have access to.

What are ya gonna do? MIC gets what it wants.

The EFF considers data pollution to be fairly useless. They've spoken a bit about it.