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Comment by chrisper | Hacker News Reader

You are right. Nothing better than a company using your private messages for targeted ads!

I don't know man. I'm just perfectly ok with them sneak peeking into my conversation trends and extracting key phrases for targeted ads..

I mean, what is the alternative? You can pay subscription fees(noone would), or see generic ads(no company would advertise due to next to zero CR).. Either way, facebook is dead.

What makes companies like Facebook, Google etc unique is that, their ability to appease to both sides of the market.

If they don't, they simply cannot exist. And lack of privacy is a price we have to pay if we want these services in our lives.

Maybe I'm morally corrupt. Idk.

An alternative would be to have contextual ads that were based on the present state of the page, but none of your history. This is how it always was, only a few years ago.

And it is so much better, because when I'm thinking about X anyway my though process is not hijacked in an uncomfortable way by ads about X, and so sometimes I actually look at them instead of using energy to disregard them and gasp have even clicked on one or two.

Is there a single ad network or ad platform that does that, besides DuckDuckGo?

> I mean, what is the alternative? You can pay subscription fees(noone would)

I'd be happy to pay for the marginal cost of a quality, highly scaled, private messaging service for me and for everyone I communicate with.

I don't consider this recent news as any sort of surprise. On the contrary, I have always disapproved of Facebook tricking users into thinking any of the data they hand over is "private".

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