Don't go there, please. At the very least it reveals you don't understand what "defined the police" means, and at worst you're insulting those who are living in constant fear and daily trauma. There are better analogies to use.
Furthermore, I reject the claim that a significant number of people are living in constant fear and daily trauma in any western democracy. Such an extraordinary claim requires solid proof - statistical proof that people are suffering psychological and/or physical trauma.
Now regarding the original claim itself, there's certainly those that take it literally: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol....
And according to Wilfred Reilly it's actually happening: "In Los Angeles, similarly, the police budget was reduced by $150,000,000 “following calls to defund the police after George Floyd’s May 25 death.” By November 12th of the past year, these cuts had already resulted in the dissolution of the department’s entire Animal Cruelty Task Force, and more notably of the Sexual Assault/Special Victims unit “that investigated disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein."
Did you really think that such a clear statement supported by politicians and mass media will not have any effects in the real world?
Note that the topic of this discussion is Internet advertising. I would love to hear your opinion on how comparing the Internet advertising industry to the struggle for racial justice is promoting free thought and open discourse. Actually, I wouldn't, because any such comparison is absurd and is not initiating the conversation in good faith.
> Furthermore, I reject the claim that a significant number of people are living in constant fear and daily trauma in any western democracy
Note that I made no such claim. I would, however, love to hear your experience as a BIPOC in America.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
I use privacy badger as an ad blocker, even though it does not target ads. It somehow block privacy intrusive domains, which happen to be related to ads.
The issue here is excessively intrusive tracking, not the ads themselves.
Otherwise how are Youtube creators, newspapers, Firefox, etc going to operate with out it?
Companies adding multiple megabytes of JS tools is probably another issue entirely as they often involve a variety of crap like 2-3 ad publishers, content recommendation services (chum), 5 different analytics and automation tools from "marketing", regulatory compliance modals/monitoring, e-commerce tools. And all of this is before the regular JS stuff is added (CNN for ex: adds both jQuery, backbone.js, AND React). Those issues are solved by competent web teams and for certain market segments of mega-firms this likely wont go away any time soon, so the ad blocks (really JS blockers) will remain.
Just like "defund the police" is a stupid self-alienating stance to stake, so is expecting web ads to end.
I haven't see the stats on retargeting, but I wouldn't mind that goes (across 3rd-parties).
But I do see some value in demographic and behavioural ad targeting. If I have to see ads then I'd prefer they be targeted at me. I'm not sure what the solution here is but, outside of pseudo-anonymization.
Because at the end of the day all that matters privacy-wise is identity. I could feed an ad engine locally with my attributes without directly revealing identity, as is largely the case today. But even that is a tradeoff.