People in Europe will soon get this wakeup call. Services that were only marginally profitable are already shutting down because of GDPR.
I'm confident that the EU government and its citizens have little idea of the consequences that will result from their privacy legislation.
Since you clearly haven't put much thought into this comment let's just start listing things that are funded by ads
- News
- content creators on youtube
- music
- twitch
- search
- blogs
- websites with tutorials
- a thousand different things which I have missed
and then facebook, snapchat, instagram, and twitter which of course you are too good for
Best TV and radio channels across the globe are government channels, funded by tax.
- content creators on youtube & twitch
99,99% dispensable trash.
- music
Music funded by ads???
- search
The only point that holds in your list. Could perfectly be funded by ISPs as part of our Internet subscription.
- blogs & websites with tutorials
No need for funding. Cost to setup is zero (provided by ISP) or close to zero (basic hosting or domain name registering).
>99,99% dispensable trash.
Yes, the thousands of tutorials/guides and content that people enjoy watching is trash. Everything that I don't find agreeable is trash.
>No need for funding. Cost to setup is zero (provided by ISP) or close to zero (basic hosting or domain name registering).
Yes, no need to give people money for work they do.
Do you have any respect for the work that goes into the content you read and or watch every day? Or do you think people should just be content volunteering their effort for no reward?
>The only point that holds in your list. Could perfectly be funded by ISPs as part of our Internet subscription.
Yes. Perfectly. Let's just tack on another $50 a month. Or are you actually suggesting that ISPs should just do it out of their good will?
I only watch ad-free videos from content creators I fund on Patreon. I'm sick of Youtube's shitty advertising - it's as bad as TV when I was young, right down to running terrible political attack ads when I'm trying to take my mind off politics.
> - music
I don't think this is funded by ads. It's funded by VC dollars, since just about every streaming site is losing money right now. More to the point, my musical tastes are pretty eclectic so I usually have to buy Vinyl/CDs to get the music I want.
Anyway, I personally never use facebook because it is not something I find interesting. Do I feel pride in that fact? No I don't because I have an equally harmful relationship with reddit and hackernews. I always have to laugh when I see people state as a point of pride how they have deleted their facebook accounts on different social networks. If anything I think reddit and hackernews could be worse because I'm ingesting unfiltered opinions from random strangers.
I hate ads for video content. I pay for Netflix and ad free Hulu. I use Plex for ad free content from CBS and the CW via by subscribing to the channels. It’s more ad blocking then piracy. Plex scrapes the content from the networks’ website real time and transcodes it and streams it.
I pay for Apple Music and before that iTunes.
I would pay for a high quality news source, I use to pay for WSJ.
Good for you that you can afford that. We all know the dream of the internet was information gated behind pay walls only accessible by the well off.
Sorry, did I say something to offend you?
>Maybe if the service is only marginally profitable without acting unethically it should shut down.
Also I love this neo puritan thinking. I'm sure all the users of these services agree with your ideology and you forcing it down their throats is for their own good correct?
And yes, it is for their own good to not have thousands of databases with their data littered across the internet.
I know, this is not a very American way of thinking, but no one can be an expert at everything. Most people are not experts at computers and even less can grasp the outreach and effects of their data being everywhere.
These people need help just as much as the average guy needs assistance with doctors. If they knew enough to tell when a doctor is bullshitting them, they could probably become a doctor, too.
"With their data". Aka whether or not they liked a group pertaining to motorcycles or whether they searched for fishing rods on google. Yeah, we definitely need to shut off what is the most consumer friendly way of monetizing services in history so that a database of inane shit that is only relevant to marketers isn't tracked.
And even with those two examples, you just have to be creative to find ways for them to damage you:
You'll probably have to pay more for your health insurance, if they find out that you enjoy motorcycles.
And if your next potential employer is vegetarian, they might pass on you for fishing, a.k.a. killing things as a hobby.
Someone wanting to rob/extort/kidnap/murder you, might look for you at lonely lakes in the region.
And these are the most generic examples of this supposedly useless information being used against a person.
Someone who happens to have an actual use, is going to be even more creative, since they'll find themselves in some particular situation where it's useful.
And again, there's going to be more information. They can sift through an entire list to find the ones that are useful and they can combine multiple pieces of information, too.
It is a model I prefer simply because it is more inline with the content I'm viewing. I'm more willing to let those ads get whitelisted because they're more likely to be related to the content I'm looking at and less about "what do we think saratogacx really wants today based on all of the data across the web."
I can definitively say you're wrong because I saw a billboard on my way to work today.
Also, in the early internet days tracking was referred to as spyware and security software would uninstall it from your machine.
Edit: or have “legitimate interest” - in either case it’s a very low bar for ethical standards so GDPR shouldn’t be an issue