Right now we basically get the products of the internet for free. If you kill advertising as monetization you don't have those free services anymore. And if you have to pay for everything then you'll leave even more of a trail on what you did. It just might not be accessible to corporations, but it'll still exist.
lol most people pay money for windows (even against their will if they want to buy a laptop for example) and still get ads and telemetry cranked to the max. What's up with that?
>Android
Another bad example. In a less shitty world where the majority share of the global mobile OS duopoly isn't owned by a glorified surveillance company, the support of a device would be covered by, and only by the sale price of the device. Which wouldn't be such a huge cost if Android better had engineered HAL and better standards so every device could update from the same repo tree.
>if you have to pay for everything then you'll leave even more of a trail on what you did.
This is my problem with Kagi[0](frequently posted here). This is more of the fault of the current global payment infrastructure than any ordinary tech company's. But if you think that the current ad infested browsing experience makes you any more private I have bad news for you. Namely fingerprintJS[1].
You might be asking what are my solution's to these problems. And my answer is that I have no idea. The only thing I know is that I'm seriously jaded with the current {mono,duo}poly ridden state of tech.
[0]: https://kagi.com/ (currently throwing internal server error lol)
The thing is you always pay, just the currency changes. In one case you pay with your data and in another with money out of your pocket. At least with the appearance of Kagi, now people also have the second option on the table. For web search it did not exist previously and having more options is always good thing from a consumer perspective.
Newspapers, for example, survived for centuries on a mixture of subscriptions and advertising before they could snoop on their readers to decide which ads to show.
TV and radio advertising right now works as a funding model without syphoning personal data.
You don't need the persons purchasing history, sex, marital status, age, ethnicity, interests, political orientation, a list of visited sites and all data you can get your hands on, to choose a language.
If you want an alternative to that, yes then of course you have to pay for it.
PS: I definitely pay for Windows, MacOS, iPad OS and Android. Developers of those systems get paid from proceeds of hardware sales.
Then how come I get ads in my native language despite almost never watching or searching for content in my native language? Obviously ads in my native language are more useful, because I might actually partake in those services. Walmart advertising to me would never matter, because I will never be able to get to a Walmart.
Not good, not good at all. The idea is to find a common ground, not to push potentially innovative businesses and people to the rest of the planet.
Instead of locking your front door you should find common ground with the local thiefs so they only steal half your stuff, smash the old TV not the new one, only beat you half way dead and only kill one of your children. Anything less would just be undermining the fantastic innovation potential in your local home invasion and robbery sector.
If you are in an area with any population density you are sat within a few miles of more people that have committed or are currently committing those acts, with no regret at all, than there are CEO's of companies that do data acquisition for targeted ads.
No one is banning ads, targeted ads or data collection.
But, the argument is simple: In all these cases businesses do something illegal and therefore either need to be stopped, or stop existing.
People who use this tech are criminals, and everyone knows it. Everyone has known it, even in the US. Look at how many people use ad blockers and anti tracking scripts. It is time to stop allowing literal criminals at tech companies to repeatedly break the law and face no consequences whatsoever.
It has been going on for years, and it needs to be fought just like any of the other horrible things.
Innovation is not always a good thing - Think of it as a vector and not a scalar. Increasing the magnitude of innovation would be bad if the direction of innovation is harmful.
Maybe so, but you do not get to decide which innovation is good and which is bad. People do. And most of us do not give a flying monkey about data companies collect about us. What's the worst they will do: better ads?!
We do care about privacy from governments though, but that is never legislated, is there?
I didn't decide, the European Parliament decided. And they made the decision to protect our (collective and individual) human rights.
>We do care about privacy from governments though, but that is never legislated, is there?
Privacy from governments is exactly what this case is about.
The US government can - in secret, with practically non-existent oversight, and absolutely no means of redress - simply take personal data sent from the EU to the US. Because of this, the US is not deemed to have "equivalent protection" to the GDPR and thus transfer of personal data from the EU to the US is banned (unless it's made technically impossible for the US entity to comply with an order from the US government to access it).
You mean EU politicians decided. And it was an abusive decision which hurts more than helps. I want the right to use my data as I see fit, including exchange it for "free" services and products.
> The US government can
I do not live in the US, it's MY government I worry about, not some far distant boogeyman.
Did someone ban it? Last I checked you can still give away your data.
>You mean EU politicians decided.
Well parliaments tend to have politicians as members, yes. That's generally how representative democracy works.
>I want the right to use my data as I see fit, including exchange it for "free" services and products.
You can use your own personal data however you want to, the GDPR has absolutely no limits on that. And if you want to give your express consent for others to use your personal data in any way they see fit, you can also do that. Consent is a legal basis for processing personal data, after all.
They just can't use my personal data - or the personal data of anyone else who has withheld consent - like that.
Oh but I can't, when the companies decide not to offer those services to the EU due to the onerous requirements of GDPR. Because the GDPR was not some harmless default being changed but a horribly written regulation that affected the way software must be written, from data retention and storage to logs and analytics.
All for a bunch of politicians pretending to represent us while I am willing to bet that the vast majority of Internet EU users is busy hunting for the "Allow All" button on every damn cookie popup on every website today. There was no need in the market for this.
Yes, you can
> when the companies decide not to offer those services
They never offered "you can freely sell your personal data to us". What they offered was "we siphon your personal data, for free, whether you want it or not, and sell it to the highest bidder".
> I am willing to bet that the vast majority of Internet EU users is busy hunting for the "Allow All" button
Ah yes. It's the politicians who are at fault, and not the companies who put up these banners in clear violation of the law.
In that framing, it is often the case that US-led "capitalism-at-any-cost" over-indexes on scaling the magnitude of the vector while leaving the direction free to be influenced by other entities. The EU approach is to disregard the magnitude while keeping tighter bounds on the direction.
I'd like to think that bodes well for the UK, since we historically have trodden the middle ground between both camps - but I'm sure we'll find some way of fucking it up and gaining neither magnitude nor direction.
If your "Tech" can't work without siphoning up and selling people's personal data to the highest bidder, Good.