advertising existed before every move you made was tracked, and it was quite profitable. There is zero reason that such invasive bullshit is a requirement.
HN user fauigerzigerk put it best:
I would like to agree with your idea of tracking
as payment, but I really can't, because:
a) Most of the time I don't have a choice. There's
no option to pay them money and even if I pay them
directly, they may still keep collecting tons of
personal information about me on top of it.
b) It's sneaky. I don't really know what
information they have and how they use it. I just
have a couple of completely meaningless words
from their privacy policy.
c) I don't know the price I'm paying.
The last point is the most important one.
The value and the risk associated with a
particular piece of information greatly depends
on what other information it is combined with,
but I can't control that. The company could get
acquired tomorrow by some ad behemoth that knows
a lot of other things about me, so the price I'm
paying could change after the fact. That's not
the way payment works. I have to know the price
I'm agreeing to pay before I enter that contract.
If your point is strong you should have no need to throw your hands up in the air and say "end of discussion" which is what period pretty much means. Your making the call that this discussion is over because you know best.
I had to post this, your 'period' distracted your entire argument for me.
The thing is, in the offline world, you can control much better who's tracking you. And this is why people get upset at CCTV cameras too; while you can see the people around you who are observing you, and choose to modify you're behavior by whether someone's around or who is around, CCTV means that you may be observed, recorded, and tracked at any time without consent.
"If we don't alllow web advertising to be unregulated, all good content will be paywalled."
You mean that kind of irrational fearmongering?
Because there is ample evidence that good content was available through the internet and later the web, before it was permitted to be used as a commercial vehicle and long before the web became laden with cheap advertising.
OK, thanks.