This is all well and good but as long as advertising is how folks make money on the web, the surveillance state will persist.
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They'll still surveil even if you pay for the product. Why wouldn't they? It's an additional income stream.
> Why wouldn't they? It's an additional income stream.
If customers cared, the additional income from being someone who didn't surveil could outstrip the income stream from surveilling.
I agree with you, and if you frequent tech circles you'd be under impression that the masses prioritize lack of surveillance and privacy. In my experience with IRL acquaintances, although anecdotal, exactly 0% of people I have spoken to where it's come up in conversation care at all about privacy or surveillance in general with the old "nothing to hide" fallacy.
It just takes some more explaining.
Most folks do care, they just don't understand. When you stop with the high level topics like "surveillance" and start in on the practical impacts like:
- They charge you more if they know you want something (ex - dynamic pricing).
- They try to get you addicted (gambling, vapes, social media)
- They feed you lies (curated social bubbles)
- They manipulate elections (targeted campaigns and ads, targeted social policies)
Etc... most people do actually care, they just struggle to relate the words the industry uses with the real impacts.
Folks tend to think of privacy like someone opening the bathroom door on them (and this gets immediate pushback... see all the articles about the Roomba cameras). But the surveillance we're under now is more subtle and insidious, less visceral. Harder for folks to understand without concrete impacts.
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The reason so many tech people care is because lots of them get to watch the sausage being made, and they understand.
> exactly 0% of people I have spoken to where it's come up in conversation care at all about privacy or surveillance in general with the old "nothing to hide" fallacy.
Are they going to the toilet more often this week? Are they booking a flight for a funeral? Do they watch midget porn? Are they interested in science experiments that go boom? Did they just get a promotion at work? Did their car just fail the yearly inspection? Are they going on vacation and leaving the house empty for a week? Does their child have ADHD? Did their catalytic converter just get stolen? Is their phone model no longer receiving security updates? Is their child bullied at school? Did they have an abortion? Are they contemplating bankruptcy? Did they just start using a CPAP machine? Did they vote for an independent candidate? Do they listen to the local mosque's podcast? Do they smoke? Are they closet homosexual? Are they being sued? Did their dog just suffer liver failure? Did they put their teenage daughter's child up for adoption?
These are all things that your phone knows about you, which could lead to negative consequences if exposed - ranging from embarrasment to blackmail, higher prices to actual denial of services, scrutiny to arrest. Everyone has something to hide.
That's my experience as well. However, I suspect a lot of it is not really understanding the situation, and not wanting to be bothered learning about it. In other words, I think it's possible those preferences could be changed with the right kind cultural or legal shifts. Even in my lifetime, I look at how massively public attitudes have changed around smoking, wearing seatbelts, and recycling, to take 3 examples. Each of those seemed equally immovable at one time.
I know its won't solve everything but couldn't we teach digital hygiene at school and its importance. For myself I remember in English at high school being taught how different methods of advertising worked and that stuck with me.
Education is good in general, but because alternatives are not common and sometimes not even allowed, there are very few places left to avoid surveillance. Educated or not. Not to mention our schools use google docs.
Technologists seem to lack professional integrity. This blasé blame-the-victim attitude is completely normalized but I don’t think it makes sense if you zoom out far enough.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757509
There are many exceptions and initiatives like truly altruistic OSS projects which aim to empower users. But by and large what we have ended up with is a divide between the tech-empowered and in-the-knows (surveillance etc.) contrasted with people who just want to access their photos on their phone and their computer.
The everyman being enlightened to all the abstract BS in IT is untenable. But programmers aren’t stepping up to collectively protect all of us.
That's almost never the sole or core differentiator though. And getting customers to all coordinate and care is much more difficult than getting a couple CEOs to just decide to surveil.
The old “vote with the wallet” fallacy
It's also the market for lemons. You can't tell if they surveil you
Advertising doesn't require surveillance though.
No, but surveillance is profitable outside of advertising, and advertising provides a perfect cover for surveillance: It's hard to make things that can separate third-party content from surveillance from third-party content for advertising, or for UI JS libraries for that matter
I'm tired of the feigned helplessness. Well gee this is the only way things can be. Internet doesn't work without surveillance! Guess you don't want the internet! /s
Ads and surveillance are not inseparable. We don't need to accept surveillance as the price for a functional internet.
> feigned helplessness
Of whom?
Google and Meta are gigantic surveillance companies. It's their imperative that you keep allowing it. On top of that, most state actors love the idea of more surveillance.
Then you have huge portions of the population that simply don't care or don't know better and aren't going to start directly paying for anything.
I don't think we disagree on anything about that, but it does take some recognition of the problem that advertising isn't just lending political, but also technical cover to surveillance
> advertising is how folks make money on the web, the surveillance state will persist.
It is more pernicious. Those in the state who want to surveil will enlist those who want the obscene revenue from pervasive advertising. Working together, their lawyers will claim that "you never had any privacy or freedom anyway, so stop wriggling."
Even websites without ads often have tracking and fingerprinting simply for their own marketing efforts and security features.
At least the solution is obvious, even if the path to an ad-free web is not. And it's a solution that also has the advantage of being a solid public good.
The free internet of the workers and peasants? I mean, how will the websites make money?
Why do they have to make money?
So that the website... stays online?
Have you bought a domain before or anything online before?
For a website to stay online, it is not required that the website itself make money, let alone that it do so via ads. For instance if your website is directly selling an actual product, you can make money by selling that product. Or you can make money by having an actual job, and use that money to pay for the website.
And if the place you work at has a website and internet presence which they get traffic for and use for inbound customers?
If they can't pay you because they don't have customers, how will you (in a job) pay for the website to stay online without a job without using your savings?
Yes, I hosted a website for about two years. Paid for it from my own pocket. Had some fun, learned a few things.
There is this disgusting belief in modern society that everything one does needs to generate money, otherwise it's not worth doing. Were we always like this?
> There is this disgusting belief in modern society that everything one does needs to generate money, otherwise it's not worth doing. Were we always like this?
Most of the world has always been this way. The idea of sharing and exploring for the sake of it was a Christian ideal that rose and fell with their influence in the west.
Multiculturalism exploits generosity; competing interests replaced shared goals. If you don't profit from your efforts, someone else will.
It's not speculative: if you make free space available to campers, the postmodern entrepreneur will sell access to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36686672
Yes.
This predates websites, it's called commerce.
Pick any medium, humans will always find a way to transact with one another, it's been like this for thousands of years.
I don't understand why you think websites and the internet should be exempt from this?
> > There is this disgusting belief in modern society that everything one does needs to generate money, otherwise it's not worth doing. Were we always like this?
Forget websites.
How are you going to pay the rent, or put food on the table for your children if you don't want to generate money?
Unless you're retired with savings (some on HN are), have an inheritance windfall or are living on government money, then you can do things that don't need an income.
Otherwise you need to generate an income.
Perhaps they have a point actually: if we assume that a significant proportion of society is retired with savings (and this is the case in the US - ~1% of population can afford a rich lifestyle on passive income alone, and ~5% can afford about a median lifestyle), then serving society may become a calling for those people - they need something to do after all - once everyone will understand that normal "jobs" became mostly harmful to society, or if not harmful, so poorly paid that anyone with even $2M in stocks will not be interested in doing them.
My personal website has been up for over two and a half decades. I've paid for hosting and for the domain name. Never had an ad on the site.
So do you expect everyone else to not earn an income from their website if they so choose?
> Never had an ad on the site.
You know there are other ways of people making money without doing ads right?
> So do you expect everyone else to not earn an income from their website if they so choose?
> You know there are other ways of people making money without doing ads right?
Yes, of course. And as per the conversion, there was no need to mention that obvious fact.
maybe we're better off without websites that only exist to make money.
How do website owners pay for server costs if you think they shouldn't make money?
Should everyone be in a loss when they run a website?
I think if everyone with a website made a small financial loss on it, the web would be immeasurably better.
How?
i manage to do so using money i make elsewhere. the information i put on the internet is either of benefit to people or a matter of vanity. i don't afford special concern to people who want to use the internet for profit.
So you have never sold anything, or participated with other people or groups that have sold anything online because you believe that they should not use the internet for profit?
this rhetoric is not compelling to me.
Well in the end of the day, everything exists to make money. Because if we remove that, only goal becomes direct power - violence and domination - and it's too dystopian.
That's their problem to solve
are apps and phones more private?
Of course. Apple told me they care about my privacy.
Mass surveillance has been the only thing where capitalists and communists wholeheartedly agreed to go all in. It has been pushed into law at every opportunity, done in grey areas when possible, and secretly when illegal.
It's evident proof that information is power.
> but as long as advertising is how folks make money on the web
This isn't a forum of marketers, this is a forum of engineers and makers. So... how do we make the next version of the internet fully private and prevent it from becoming overly centralized. How do we prevent companies like Google dictating the design with their browser dominance (chromium, not just Chrome)?
We definitely have some solutions to some of these problems but also need to work on others. We can probably build something that is fully encrypted and peer to peer (example projects exist!) but maintaining decentralization is still an unsolved problem. There's also issues like how we get people to buy in. Most of the population doesn't understand the nuance but does recognize there is a problem. Hell, even more informed places like HN will bicker on about the problems in certain software yet not acknowledge that there exists no perfect solution[0]. We just end up arguing and nothing gets solved, things just stay the same. That's the absolute worst part! People that want the same things end up becoming divided simply because we're really bad at listening to one another[1].
I'm sure it'll continue to be a cat and mouse game, but it also feels like many have given up. I'm exhausted too. But I'm still angry and annoyed. I'm tired and exhausted of being so tired and exhausted. To constantly be dealing with dark patterns. To constantly have things that should take 30 seconds take 30 minutes because of absolutely unnecessary (and often intentional) roadblocks. I'm tired of everyone trying to move so fast that it makes everything move so slow. I don't know how we got to a place where we're just thickening the jell-o we're trying to run through. How every little shortcut we take just makes the jell-o thicker and we pat ourselves on the back.
As we advance as a society the problems we have to solve only become more nuanced and complex, yet for some reason we've come to believe the they are simpler and easier to solve. We may have more powerful tools at hand, but a better tool doesn't make the problem you're trying to solve any less complex, it only can enable solving it or make some parts easier. The complexity is still in the problem and if we abstract it away too much then we only make things worse. IDK but somehow we've come to believe there are no such things as experts, and that we're all experts in everything. This wasn't possible in the past and our world is only more complicated, not less.
[0] I mentioned chromium so I'll use Firefox vs Chromium as an example. Every time the comparison is brought up people say how Chromium is "more complete" while ignoring how "complete" is predominantly defined by Google. The reason they have this power is browser dominance. Can you use de-googled Chromium? I'm personally unconvinced. You might be able to use something which takes out all (known) trackers, but not a Chromium that is void of Google's influence nor a Chromium that doesn't perpetuate Google dominance. But does that mean Firefox is "better"? It all depends on how you define that, and that's where the conversation gets lost. There's no truthful answer to this question and it is all extremely complicated and nuanced. There's never going to be a browser that checks all the boxes. We must give some things up in the pursuit of other things. Arguing the way we currently do is absolutely nonsensical.
[1] And by that, of course, I mean I'm a perfect listener and "you're" the problem. There's no other way to interpret me, my words are absolutely and unambiguously clear. Of course.
> Then we make this impossible.
It doesn't have to be. Building a thing is a red herring, if building things solved problems, all problems out to be solved by now. The natural inclination of the builder and maker is to create a thing to solve problems.
The reason the marketers tend to win is that they're closer to life and how it tends to actually work. People who think like engineers are in a significant minority. Real life is based on vibes.
So how do you defeat them? You pass laws and then you enforce them. And then you invest in education around the law and society so that the populace understands how the system works and how to participate in it.