All Apple have done is allow users to say no.
They haven't even stopped anyone opting into surveillance if they want to. It just turns out that, when given the choice, people don't like being snooped on.
Snooping is a one off or occassional thing whereas continual obsessive profile building is actually stalking.
I mean it is sort of obvious to anybody not captured and with basic morals but such is the allure of greed that for ages people were cynically and hypocritically pretending otherwise
If nobody’s buying anything from these businesses without invasive advertising & tracking then maybe whatever goods they were selling aren’t actually necessary?
Of course there is nuance and edge cases to this, but in general I wouldn’t be surprised if society and the planet was better off once we stop producing useless garbage.
Online targetted advertising is basically the current established way to find those people who actually would care about your special cheese grater and start to get your business going. If you're looking at alternatives those would be either untargetted online advertising (incredibly inefficient, only people who don't care about cheese graters would see your ads and that's your $5000 down the toilet) or real world advertising like... Door to door salesmen? Or take out fliers in your local newspaper? That's what people used to do
If you feel cheese graters are useless and somehow deserve to remain unbought, then replace it with any other item which does match your bar for utility value.
All of this is to say that targeted advertising for niche, high-quality brands is only viable (at least if you're targeting someone like me) in an environment where search isn't beshitted by SEO, Google doesn't run a trademark protection racket, and reviews aren't 90% noise. Unfortunately, that's not the world we find ourselves in. At this point I'm more likely to just go to the kitchen store and physically examine cheese graters to find one I like than relying on the internet.
We are not looking at this from the point of view of your personal preference where you would rather the product was in a store already, but from the point of view of a legitimate, useful small business which does not have access to a store and which is trying to match their product to consumers.
Contextual advertising.
>If you feel cheese graters are useless and somehow deserve to remain unbought, then replace it with any other item which does match your bar for utility value.
I am doing this for nearly everything I can think of, and my privacy wins every single time.
You may well find that any societal usefulness is offset by your own principles, whether that's privacy or aversion to tech or aversion to capitalism or aversion to marketing or aversion to small businesses or what have you. Can't argue with principles, and I won't try. The topic though is whether there is any societal usefulness or not.
Privacy is incredibly useful to society, as is advertising I suppose, so I'm not quite sure how you can have a conversation about targeted advertising's societal usefulness without also talking about the impact it has to other things that are useful to society, eg privacy, that that advertising depends on.
Traditionally, cookware and kitchenware makers targeted restaurant buyers. If you think you have a great product, go to a restaurant conference. Everyone there has publicly expressed an interest in what you're selling without requiring a global corporate panopticon.
Life would be pretty boring if we all only bought what we need.
1. I see an ad for some really nice pens. COOL! 2. I go to a website that allows me to opt out of tracking but I'd have to opt out of their 300 affiliates one at a time. 3. The privacy policies that state: we do not honor do-not-track signals because we don't know if it was the user or a browser default.
For me: not worth the tradeoff.
Neither feeling is invalid.
Starting? Did these publishers not learn anything from the whole Facebook Video debacle? [1] Also, who at these companies thinks tying their core business to a single, third party is a good idea?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccu...
Good riddance, what a bunch of bottom feeders.
Been reading that facebook is out of fashion for the young uns for several years, way before any privacy changes on part of anyone.
Also, question: how do they know their audience's average age? From invasive tracking?
Older people have more money to spend and are therefore worth more to advertisers.
I used to work at a publisher where 80% of their website traffic came from Facebook. They haven't seen audience growth in years and their audience is skewing older and older, which is bad for their advertising business
Businesses like that are going to get steadily squeezed both by Facebook's declining audience share and Facebook's own efforts to change what people see.