zlacker

>>pbrw+(OP)
I know in HN there is a big "personalized advertising" is bad sentiment, but I don't get what the problem is.

I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet.

It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here.

Can someone explain to me what the problem is? Honest question. Thanks.

>>kwanbi+07
> I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet.

That's all fine and dandy, I think. The problem starts to become a bit bigger when suddenly everyone in your household starts to see "chlamydia medication" ads everywhere they go online based on some message you sent a month ago to a friend.

> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here.

I'm not sure that's so obvious as you make it seem. There are lots of long running websites that don't survive on personalized ads created based on behavioural profiles created by data harvesters.

>>capabl+O8
It's not just that someone else will know that you have chlamydia, it's that they have your data and you don't know what they will do with it. We don't know what they can do and there could be more serious stuff.

>>gatins+I9
What do you think they can do?

>>kwanbi+ke
Sell it. Health insurance companies are always interested in more details about your health so they can adjust your premium accordingly. Or use it for excuses to deny coverage.

>>mcv+lg
So what you need to do is regulate what they can do with the data, not forbid personalized ads.

By the way, here in Europe we have universal healthcare, maybe is something the US should consider?

>>kwanbi+dl
Is there any good reason not to both legally protect privacy and ban the largest part of the market for the invasively collected data (which seems to me to fall nearly under regulating what can be done with the data)?

>>thfura+vp
Are you willing to pay for all internet websites then?

>>kwanbi+UC
Many websites don't have ads, and I'd be happy if all others disappeared.

>>xigoi+7L
Can you please share the list of websites you use which don't serve ads? Would love to see an internet experience without ads and without stealing the content via adblockers.

>>Restle+0d1
It's not possible to provide an exhaustive list, but for example:

* Hacker News (has promoted content, but without tracking) * Lobste.rs * Wikipedia * Mastodon * Project Euler * Notabug.org * Lingva Translate * Documentation for numerous FOSS projects * Various personal blogs

Honestly, it's hard for me to find websites that I regularly voluntarily use and do contain ads.

>>xigoi+mg1
What do you use for - search, emails, online shopping, news (you mentioned HN but links submitted on HN have ads on them, unless you read only the HN comments)

>>Restle+ji1
I use a mailreader to read email. No ads unless someone is spamming me, but that's pretty rare these days. Online shops don't need ads because they already sell their own stuff. I have my own news subscription. Admittedly many shared news links do have ads. For search I use DuckDuckGo; they don't seem to have ads most of the time, but if they do, at least they don't track.

I'm not going out of my way to avoid sites that use ads, but I also don't feel obliged to enable their business model; that's their business, not mine. I care about controlling my own desktop.

Keep in mind that there is a lot of content out there that's funded by Patreon rather than ads. And I think the quality of Patreon-funded content is generally higher, because people consciously choose to support it, rather than it having to use clickbait and other dark patterns to lure your eyeballs in.