This mirrors my feelings. I remember the pre-tracking days, and would give up anything gained to go back. The convenience value has been very low. Just because there is now a multi-billion-dollar industry based on the abject betrayal of our privacy doesn’t mean the sociopaths who built it have any right whatsoever to continue getting away with it.
So you don’t use mapping apps for directions? You don’t shop online? You don’t stream entertainment? You can go back, at least for future data collection. Give up these low-value conveniences. would give up anything gained to go back. The convenience value has been very low.
Like you I'm very frustrated by how little choice we are being given in the matter, but you have to admit that SOME (perhaps very few) applications that collect our data have been amazingly useful. Mostly they have been made by Google; Search and Maps. Could they have made these and distributed them for "free" without tracking? Probably not. What I would like is to be able to opt out, and instead pay for the app. I wonder, though, how expensive would Maps really be if we all had to pay for it instead of being tracked and advertised to? I think I have a lot more to say on the subject, but I'll keep it short for now.
I actually think Google could still afford Maps. Look at OpenStreetMap, for instance: https://www.openstreetmap.org/ They could definitely afford search by targeting terms alone. DuckDuckGo does it.
DuckDuckGo is alright, but I haven't used it much so I can't speak for its quality. OpenStreetMap seems decent enough, at least for just finding your way, but what about all the other things Google Maps is great at? - Traffic estimation (could NOT be done without tracking) - Searching for non-specifics such as "restaurant" - Street View; this one is particularly extravagant, in that they needed to drive across the whole world. It's not the MOST useful feature on Maps, but it IS useful on many occasions, and you need a lot of money to do it. Yeah, I lived before Google Maps, and it was alright. I could usually find a place to eat or drink, and I could find my way by asking people. But undeniably, I have found a lot more "obscure" and good (thanks, reviews) places, especially while travelling, with Google Maps. It's saved me a lot of time stuck in traffic, and it's often quite good at knowing when a road or train line is closed. Tens of hours of my life have been saved, I'm sure. My point isn't simply about whether it's possible to do these things without tracking; the question is also if it's feasible to do on a modest budget.
True, tracking isn’t necessary for us to get those services. I think the mistake is to believe that we can stop the tracking and the only consequence will be no more tracking, that the “multi-billion-dollar industry” will quietly vanish rather than adopting new techniques which might be more objectionable than the tracking, which I think most people don’t find sufficiently objectionable to take basic precautions.
We don't need to stop it, we just need to be able to audit it and bid against it. The thing that makes online advertising successful is that nobody who buys the ads can get any sort of proof that it works, therefore it's what the market will bear. Meanwhile, the price your privacy is sold for is appallingly low. A company I worked for bought ads on Reddit. If I recall correctly we paid $20 for 100,000 people to see that ad 10 times a day for two weeks. That put Reddit's CPM (cost per mille or thousand impressions) at 70 cents. The minimum bid right now is something like 50 cents per mille... or in other words, every ad Reddit shows you earns Reddit one twentieth of a cent. How many ads does Reddit show you in a day? Seems like something that could be catalogued and categorized. Assume Reddit shows me 80 ads a day. If I pay Reddit four cents, Reddit is revenue neutral with advertising. If I pay Reddit five cents they're at a 25% profit over selling me ads. Facebook is no different; they charge extravagantly for targeting but that extravagant fee per user is a pittance. Take a counter-example. Yelp charges me ten.fricking.dollars to drive traffic to my site. Per user. Principally because nobody ever clicks. Ever. Take that ten bucks and divide it by everyone my name is shown to for every useless search Yelp does and let those Yelp users buy themselves out of ads. The number will work out to be pennies per month. None of the internet companies want to do this, of course, because it will drive home the point that (A) they're charging whatever they fucking well feel like for (B) wildly ineffective sales methods that (C) are a privacy nightmare. A proper restraint-of-trade legal case - why can Procter & Gamble buy my data but I can't pay to keep it to myself? - would force the Internet into the same standards as television and radio. Which would probably drop their prices eighty percent. And which would allow those people who want to save twelve cents a day to give Facebook however much personal info they want while the rest of us could pay twelve cents for Facebook to never sell any of our information. The mistake is to believe that the compelling reason for privacy violations is value, rather than the lack thereof.
I’m not sure what these companies could do instead if tracking were illegal, and punishment severe enough to stop it. Any ideas? I know they have tried tracking users based on fonts installed etc, but any means could be included in a broad anti-tracking law. If the new techniques were worse, then they should be dealt with. I don’t find the possibility reason enough not to stop this current practice.
Targeted advertising is big business. Search terms alone don’t work if you want to target a location or demographic. If buying and selling user data becomes illegal, the value of illegally-obtained user data will rise. There will be more incentive to geolocate IP addresses and parse user agent strings. The vendor is going to say, we’re just trying to sell diapers and most people don’t want diapers. Why should we advertise indiscriminately when we have data showing targeted campaigns are welcomed by new parents? People posting baby photos on Facebook should expect the world to notice that they have a baby.
This is not factually correct. Targeted advertising is 4% more profitable than non-targeted advertising. Worse, the number has dropped precipitously: ten years ago they made publishers twice as much money as non-targeted advertising. If the vendor sells diapers, the vendor knows that people get creeped out when they don't understand where their advertising comes from. This is why every "major life change" gate point is inundated in flyers. Move house? Get diaper coupons. Visit an obstetrician? They'll give you a little bag full of coupons. Attend a parentmap function? have some diaper coupons. And why all the junk mail you get addressed to "occupant" is full of stuff that people would rather not be targeted for. People don't like to be targeted. 87% say there are more ads in general than 2-3 years ago 79% feel like they're being tracked by retargeted ads The drop in targeted ad revenue is likely a reflection of the awareness and distaste people have for targeted ads. Advertisers have long since learned that alienating your customers is bad business; outfits like Google and Facebook have not.Targeted advertising is big business.
The vendor is going to say, we’re just trying to sell diapers and most people don’t want diapers.
91% of people say ads are more intrusive today than 2-3 years ago
Have you ever bought a targeted ad? It costs money for corporations to collect and maintain databases of user information. They go to the trouble because they can profit by responding to customer demand for personal user data. Google and Facebook are mainly in the advertising business.
And that business is profitable through monopoly power. If customers could pay what advertisers pay for Google and Facebook not to track them, the entire model would collapse. Google Adwords averages about $115 CPM. Google has analytics on all of this. Google could charge me 11.5 cents for every ad they're not showing me - at which point I would look at the pathetic amount of money Brave throws at you for opting into the BAT platform and either accept that my searches are worth a dollar a day or recognize that my privacy is worth more than that. The power of the transaction is in the opacity.