However, IMHO the answer here is to find a different model for funding online software/services. Letting advertising firms run the internet does not really seem to be taking software in a user/consumer-friendly direction.
To some degree that is how ads worked in print: In a magazine about horseback riding you will find ads about riding equipment, as readers are into that while reading.
And yet whenever I buy anything online I'm inundated with ads for said item. In fact I almost wish there were an officially sanctioned/ standardised way of updating your status as a tracked user on various products you might be interested in or have in fact now purchased with no need to buy another soon. As it is I still see ads for baby formula on YouTube despite having had no need to purchase it for over 16 years (and I honestly would expect Google should know that about me, though when I ask Google Assist how old my children are it refuses to tell me...)
Google don't need to follow local law and regulations.
Google don't need to employ people to verify content or take legal responsibility.
Google can track users and thus categorize users in much more fine details than television and news papers ever could. A magazine about horseback riding might have a vague idea about who their readers are, but google can find out that a pregnant teenage girl has yet to tell her parents.
News was hit or miss. They did a lot of serious investigative reporting, but newspapers where simply a better medium for personalized in depth coverage.
Case in point: Here's Jay Leno interviewing Elon Musk about SpaceX Starship for network television [1] vs YouTuber Tim Dodd [2]. Leno's program is okay for people who don't follow space. For my niche Dodd is vastly better, but he can't draw a wide enough audience to make money on non-targeted ads like Leno can.
And the thing is, everyone has their niches. There is no large population of people out there who are average in every way and need the network television version of everything. The average person doesn't exist.
Now, you can quibble about how much targeting increase revenue but the funny thing about total advertising is it’s fairly consistent through time. Tracking failed to significantly increase worldwide advertising spend, it only redirects it.
Dodd simply couldn't have a network television show with this kind of content. It wouldn't come close to making sense. If he did a network television show it would have to be a lot different, almost certainly in a direction that would make it less interesting for me personally.
My argument has nothing to do with global ad spend, that's a red herring. The key is how those ad dollars get distributed. Targeted advertising makes niche content viable in a way that non-targeted advertising can't match.
The only difference is relative pricing, but again the global population and global advertising spend doesn’t depend on tracking so if it was banned little would actually change.
> The only difference is relative pricing
... the relative pricing difference is the whole difference I'm talking about. Without targeted advertising niche content makes less money, general audience content makes more. So you agree with me that this is true. Then you say that this is a small change. I say it has enormous effects on the content that gets produced. Honestly, this is transparently obvious.
Just look at how much YouTube content is sponsored via an Ad inside the video. That isn’t tied to your personal history.
If I manufacture say jigsaw puzzles and I can’t target individuals then I want to link to show up on a YouTuber with puzzle related content. But with tracking I shouldn’t care about the videos content as much and should be happy to show up on cat videos as long as tracking supports the association. That same logic would seemingly extend to any activity with associated products which is basically everything.
On the other hand soda manufactures are presumably less picky and could advertise on both.
We could continue to make up just-so stories about the effects of targeting on niche content. But I doubt we would convince each other. Is there any research on this topic?
These banners start with "your privacy is important to us", but they omit the next part of the phrase, but we'd like you to allow our partners to invade it.
The banners are there because the process is so abusive they need your consent to make 90% more.
The banners are there because if you take away 90% of their revenue, they cease to exist. Imagine your salary reduced by 90% tomorrow unless you beg your boss daily for your full pay.
>If you think a human never sees your information, you're sadly ill informed
Are you under the impression ads are manually targeted? The only time someone at Google has ever laid eyes on your profile would be if somehow your profile bugged out and caused something to crash. And even if they did look at a single user's data, it would be meaningless without having the name attached. And even if the name was attached, it'd still be meaningless, because there's 300 million people in the US alone.
You have to strawman the absolutely perfect situation for it to even remotely matter.
I accept these conditions
It's just so irresponsible to take extremes like this, ignoring the amount of information and entertainment available on the internet.
Do you know how many people get access to my search data? One. But your news article is worth 100x. How many get access to my streaming preferences? One. But your news article needs to violate my privacy 100x more.
Your arguments are sound in an imaginary world where six seconds of attention is worth being followed around for years. No.
Imagine that I went to a hospital and asked to get a copy of all the patients records. The contract I sign will say that no record should ever be viewed by a human, and if any human did read a record, patients would be identified by patient ID like 563758. In return patients would get services worth ~50 cent.
How many patients would consider this a fair trade?
In addition, drugs would get targeted advertisement, and the funds for advertisements would be raised through the profits of said drugs (ie, patients would be paying for it, by an average of $1 more per patient). Still, patients would get free services that costs the advertisement network ~50 cent per patient.
Well unless you don't consider free access to video streaming (YouTube) or free access to news a benefit.
My honest opinion on all this has always been that the majority of people, if properly explained to that 'tracking' is never even viewed by a human, and even if it was, your identified as user 563758, would consider this a fair trade.
People largely think you can remove the tracking and access all the same content for free. But when the ads pay 90% less, it becomes much more difficult for the free content to survive.