Re:GitHub – pi-hole/pi-hole: A black hole for Internet adver...
by Mountain_Skies on Saturday January 14, 2023 @06:22AM
(#34379365)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution offered trial subscriptions that claimed to bring back the "newspaper reading experience". While the layout was nicer, the ads far fewer in number, and it gave access to long form reporting before it was released to non-subscribers, almost none of the trackers were gone. Newspapers are some of the worst about using third party trackers to make money and even a subscription to the online version of the paper doesn't keep you from being tracked. The double dipping might work short-term but ultimately it seems self defeating as the demographics of those most likely to pay for a subscription likely overlaps quite a bit with those who don't want to be spied on. If there's a potential revenue stream, some manager somewhere in the company is going to try to access it and leverage it for their own benefit, regardless of the larger long-term impact on the company as a whole.
Perhaps this will put to rest the idea that internet-based tracking and advertising are necessary for products and services to be "free" and paying for these products and services is a way to "remove the ads". Even paying a high premium to a company that privacy washes^1 its products will not stop the data collection and advertising.
Some companies can survive without violating internet privacy for profit. Anyone born before 1993 knows this. Certainly a company like LG could survive. However "tech" companies cannot.^2 Conducting commercial surveillance on internet users is too easy, it's money on the table. There is still inadequate regulation to slow it down, let alone stop it. Companies that connect their products to the internet can cash in on "tech" company style surveillance. Welcome to the "Internet of Things".
Being able to control DNS in the home is essential, IMHO.
1.
https://www.context.news/surveillance/opinion/user-beware-pr...
https://dt.gl/privacy-washing-do-as-i-say-not-as-i-do/
https://dataethics.eu/privacy-washing/
https://medium.com/discernible/communicators-steer-clear-of-...
https://getsession.org/blog/privacy-washing
2.
The now classic "tech" company meme is that the internet, what other folks would call the web, would not exist without advertising. Yet it did exist before advertising was permitted, so that cannot be true. It still worked and no one using it wanted to see advertising. The person who put the first ad on the internet was globally lambasted.^3 Citing this historical fact does not imply anyone wants to go back in time to the early internet. It just means that the "tech" company meme that the internet does not work without advertising, without "tech" company intermediaries conducting extensive surveillance on every internet user to support this advertising, is pure BS. "Tech" companies try to use FUD something like, "If anyone changes anything that interferes with advertising, then the internet and therefore life itself will suck." Yeah, right.
As if "tech" companies are the sources of vision for the future. They want a future that continues to let them profit obscenely from unregulated data collection and advertising.
3.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080919130455/http://www.l-ware...