The Value of Privacy

The Value of Privacy.

-- Tom

 

Of course not

 

Why not? That's what it aims to do - kill targeted ads. If it were actually respected it would make advertising far less effective, which would have a negative impact on the entire internet.

 

See, you have answered there.

 

But they're working on making it respected.

 

And the other side is not sitting idle either

 

I'd really like to see less advertising on the internet, targeted or not. As for advertising being targeted, I've yet to see an ad that I would be inclined to click, let alone click on it.

 

If ads disappeared the internet would die over night.

 

the internet was doing fine before the marketing sludge overran it.

 

Actually, at this point he's probably not that far off from reality. Overnight is obviously an exaggeration, but it would definitely harm the internet.

 

there is a lot of abuse.

when you go to some website and there's trackers from 20 different companies...

yeah, it's like a free-for-all buffet for the bloodsuckers.lol

 

The internet would survive just fine without user tracking or targeted ads. The only thing that would suffer is the bottom lines of the data brokers and those who profit from spying on users movements. The internet might change some, but sites worth seeing would still have advertizing support. Sites that are useless garbage would disappear. Advertizers aren't going to pull their money out. They have nowhere else to go that can replace it. About all they could do is spread FUD and whine a lot about lost revenue.

Regarding "Kill off innovation"
If "innovation" is defined as finding and exploiting new ways to mine and profit from users data and activities, that statement might be slightly true. Calling this kind of activity "innovation" is a complete perversion of the word. This kind of "innovation" needs to die. As for any other type of innovation that actually benefits users or the web in general, it will have no negative effects.

 

You forget that tracking is a large part of ad-serving and website profit. Take Facebook for example, every "Like" button is an embedded tracker, and most major websites not only incorporate this tracking into their websites, but, in some cases, force it on users. Pogo.com is a good example of this. It's an immensely popular game site, and if you block Facebook scripts, games won't load. That sort of situation is occurring more and more, tracking is money, ads are money, data is money.

 

I small percentage of users blocking the tracking would have little effect. If do not track became an enforceable default, there wouldn't be much they could do about it.

 

Really? Do you remember the internet 15 years ago? It wasn't even slightly the same place and, yeah, there were still ads back then too.

Advertising flat out runs the internet. Unless you want the only people who can have a website to be the ones who pay out of pocket or try to sell you something in some other way... you needs ads. Web hosting is not free, it wasn't back then and it isn't now.

@noone_special,

The problem is that IE10 is used be around 50% of the internet so they're cutting profits for 50% of the internet.


Maybe it's just because I literally grew up alongside the mainstream internet (ie: AOL 3.0, the first IM clients, all that stuff) but it's really obvious to see how different the internet is today than it was a decade ago.

There are millions of sites that simply wouldn't have ever existed if it weren't for advertising. And those websites couldn't exist today without advertising. DNT doesn't block ads so if it were adopted 100% overnight the internet wouldn't break or anything, it would probably just cost a lot more for webhosting etc.

I'm all for DNT being standardized but having it on by default for 50% of the internet is insane. I just hope that Firefox doesn't do this as well.

Ideally they would all just make you aware of the setting to begin with. On ChromeOS when you first boot up it gives you a 'getting started' page and Ubuntu's installer is similar. Something like that would inform users without breaking everything.

 

I'd really love to see that...

 

I'm a long time 98 user. I've seen how the internet, operating systems, user apps, etc have changed. Yes, the internet has grown. The amount of garbage, disinformation, and nonsense has grown the fastest. Yes, there was ads. The worst ones were flashing GIFs that hurt your eyes. They didn't track your every move.

Advertizing doesn't have to track users to be profitable. It doesn't track users on TV and the number of available channels has grown more than the internet. You're mixing up 2 separate items here. It wouldn't cut profits for the internet by 50%. It would cut the advertizers profit margins. Whether they like it or not, they don't own the web, no matter how much they pretend like they do. They're not going to pull their money out. There's nowhere else for them to put it. Their money might be making the internet bigger, but it isn't making it any better. In this respect, it's much like television. Instead of 3 channels (5 in a large city) we have several hundred, most of which are pure garbage. IMO, the internet might get smaller without tracking, but what is left would be of much better quality. Regardless of what they claim, advertizing would survive just fine by using the same methods they use on all the other media, using ads that target the kind of people who view those sites. They'd actually have to do some research instead of tracking and mining that data from the users.

Myself, I have zero faith in "do not track". They aren't going to voluntarily stop tracking people. I'm more than willing to bet that anything like "do not track" that gets accepted is going to have big loopholes and omissions in it that allow tracking by different means. Myself, I could care less what the default setting on IE10. It won't be part of any system of mine. On a positive note, all this tracking and data mining does give me something to do, tightening up the privacy aspects of my system.

Finding all of the locations that internet apps, plugins, extensions, etc use to store tracking data, then lock them down (read only).
If I get ambitious, I can start updating my Proxomitron filters, especially the javascript filters.
Finish building the list of IPs that I won't allow my system to connect to at all.
Eliminate the short term storage (between reboots) of MRUs and tracking data from the registry.

It has given me a few things to do.

 

Tracking is not necessary for advertising, it just makes it far more effective. A little information goes a very long way. If you cut out tracking you make ads less profitable. If ads are less profitable web hosting costs more money.

If you want to say that an internet where web hosting costs more money would be of higher quality, maybe that's true. I'd rather have an internet where anyone can make a website and have it paid through ads. That doesn't mean giving companies unrestricted access to information.

 

That's the key here. If they'd stop with a "little information" most would have no problems with it. Tracking your every move and knowing everything you see is not a "little information". Wanting to know what site led you to them (referrer) isn't a big deal. Wanting to know the next 20 I go to is.

For me, this is simple physics. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. They've taken tracking and data mining to the extreme. My response is equally extreme and will remain so as long as it's physically possible.

 

I agree that they dig for too much.

 

^^^^^^^^^^ Well said. ^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

the loss of our privacy should not be the price we have to pay to get on the internet.

short presentation by Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla Corp:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/gary_kovacs_tracking_the_trackers.html

 

I don't mind being tracked... provided I get well paid for it. That's what I'd call a w/healthy ecosystem. I'd deploy a system and get a dedicate Internet connection just for it.

On a side note, if ads were all killed, except those we want to allow to support services we use, what would happen is that, most of the crappy websites would cease to exist. Is this such a bad thing? lol

 

Exactly. I wonder how many people would pay membership fees for facebook if it wasn't free?

 

I wouldn't expect all of Facebook to remain free. I'm sure eventually they'll start adding paid services/features. But, if they weren't already free, they would have never took off like they did.