Comment by Silhouette
3 years ago
They seem to ignore the fact that ad-tech is a huge industry and a large part of the internet relies on it. Basically the only way to make it go away would be to outlaw it.
Not necessarily. It will also go away - or more usefully, change its behaviour - if its current model becomes less cost effective. Apple restricted what apps could spy on and Facebook complained like a spoiled child but the sky did not fall. The evidence of effectiveness for all these tracking-based "personalised" ads is limited at best anyway. If you're running a search engine where users have literally just told you what kind of thing they're interested in right now or you're hosting videos where you know which video a user is about to watch or you're serving ads to be included within someone else's web page and you can tell what the content of that page is then you already have very useful information to help you choose which ads might be relevant without needing any additional user tracking at all.
Thank you for this. There seems to be layers of delusions throughout this comment section where it seems many people simply cannot imagine a functioning world sans some bit of questionable tech and its derivative marketing strategies that are barely 20-years old.
Context-based advertising, AKA “advertising”, has been around forever, and respected privacy to the extent that Gatorade only needed to know that people at gyms might be thirsty. Still sold a ton of slightly salty sugar water, and didn’t even suggest that they should be allowed to rummage through every customer’s gym bag, follow them home, take notes on their dinner choices and television habits, watch them sleep while taking their pulse, and then slip random notes to them throughout the day reminding them that their electrolytes were dangerously slightly on the lower side of average (code RED).