Adtech is built on a privacy fault line

Re:Adtech is built on a privacy fault line by blacksmith_tb on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:40PM (#36974181)

I wonder if shutting off the firehose means that the adtech companies will try to eke out a living riffing off all the old data they managed to acquire about all of us up to now, so we'll get even less relevant spam, tied to what we were shopping for years ago. Someone needs to build a GPT adblocker that just recognizes "this seems to be trying to sell you something, hiding now..."

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Re:Adtech is built on a privacy fault line by jamiequint on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:06PM (#36974577)

What do you think pays for the free and open internet? Or are you just well off enough that you don't have to care?

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Re:Adtech is built on a privacy fault line by ifdefdebug on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:26PM (#36974872)

I pay a whopping 80 euro per month for my free and open internet to our ISP, one fiber and two mobile devices.

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Re:Adtech is built on a privacy fault line by nceqs3 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:50PM (#36975252)

Straw-man. The grandparent is pointing out that services like Google, Instagram and YouTube would be behind paywalls without ads. There is no free internet without ads.

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Re:Adtech is built on a privacy fault line by sethammons on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:59PM (#36975422)

> There is no free internet without ads.

of course there is. Because there was. It existed. Eventually we got banner ads. It just got worse after that. People ran their own servers, so did companies. They paid to have their own content online for whatever reason they wished. And often you would get cut off, "so and so's website can only serve 200 requests a day, come back tomorrow." My server runs ad free for no other reason than I want it there with some of my content. Ads enabled a bigger internet and "content creators" who work full time growing the internet. The internet was just fine without these professional content creators.

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Re:Adtech is built on a privacy fault line by nceqs3 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:12PM (#36975625)

So only rich people who can afford to run their own servers and have the technical knowledge to put one together should be allowed to share content?

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Re:Adtech is built on a privacy fault line by sethammons on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:45PM (#36976184)

people who didn't run servers shared stuff all the time (email, forums, etc). For it to be hosted, someone had to find it worthwhile and have the funds, yeah.

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Re:Adtech is built on a privacy fault line by JohnFen on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:21PM (#36976799)

You don't need to be rich or have any strong technical knowledge. Setting up and running your own website is cheap and easy, and even if you don't want to do that, there are plenty of others who provide fora to you.

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Re:Adtech is built on a privacy fault line by pdimitar on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:11PM (#36975606)

It's not a straw-man, a question has been asked and answered.

I pay my ISP bill. Everyone else can take their problems with my "free" internet to them.

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Re:Adtech is built on a privacy fault line by JohnFen on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:21PM (#36976782)

> There is no free internet without ads.

Nonsense. Of course there is. It may not include Google, IG, YouTube, etc., true, but that's very far from the entire internet.

And, notably, I pay money to YouTube.

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Re:Adtech is built on a privacy fault line by pc86 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:23PM (#36974820)

The internet isn't free if you have to give up your privacy for invasive ads and tracking in order to read a recipe on a blog.

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Re:Adtech is built on a privacy fault line by bigbillheck on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:27PM (#36975884)

Sounds like they'll have to figure out something else.

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Re:Adtech is built on a privacy fault line by JohnFen on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:19PM (#36976756)

I think it's a stretch to call the larger web "free and open" at this point. But there was a day, before ads, that it certainly was!

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Re:Adtech is built on a privacy fault line by kstrauser on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:11PM (#36974641)

I want less relevant ads. If I continually saw ads for, say, a new Raspberry Pi accessory, I might start considering it even though I don’t need it. No amount of ad bombardment would ever get me to buy feminine hygiene products.

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