That is not a good tradeoff for a massive surveillance state that pesters and obsesses over users, profiling them to a degree literally unimaginable in the time of Orwell.

I don't find the surveillance to be intrusive, so it's acceptable.

There are already several companies that build a credit history out of every major transaction I do. There's at least two companies that have parts of a full credit card transaction history on me. Almost every store I walk into has security cameras monitoring me. The level of surveillance I'm already living under is so high that if I had anxiety about that sort of thing I'd have run for the hills when I turned 21.

The ad surveillance networks are impressive in scope, but about on-par with their peers in finance.

> I don't find the surveillance to be intrusive, so it's acceptable.

Interesting opinion for somebody with nick called 'shadowgovt'. I get your point, but even as that its shouldn't be OK in any meaningful way. It can easily end up as a slippery slope that is extremely hard if not impossible to come back from, and the intrusion to ones privacy goes deeper and deeper till you have absolutely 0.

Nobody alive in this world has absolutely nothing to hide. Maybe ass warts or shape of sub-par penis, some rather unusual preferences or opinions on XYZ, body odor when sweating or locations of body hair, whatever.

We shouldn't have OK categories for intrusions to our most private parts of our lives, period. Terrorists, ad optimization, blahblah whatever, just nope. At least disabled by default and if one is brave enough just go ahead and enable it to get that 5$ discount. I feel very strongly that I don't want my children to live in a world like that, how can we fuckup with such a basic and important item.

I don't think we disagree on anything other than whether "the sites we read on a global telecommunications network" count as "most private parts of our lives." Every page accessed is a two-way conversation between you and a stranger's property. That's pretty shifting philosophical sand to ground an argument on the privacy of those conversations in.

Why does the stranger not have the right to let a third-party know you talked to them?

Yes, people tend to have different experiences in life. Ads to me are extremely disruptive, I cannot focus and read text when there are moving images and flashing colors surrounding it. I consider it an affront to accessibility for the attention-challenged, they are designed to distract and derail my train of thought, shouting "forget what you came here for and look this way"

As an accessibility issue, I'd recommend modifying your user-agent with ad-blockers, etc. A11y is something every site should support, but expecting the world to bend everyone's experience around particular accessibility needs is likely to leave one disappointed.

Of course I do what I can to adapt things on my end, but I will also publically complain that the "ad experience" is not a benevolent one.