Comment by brenden2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brenden2 | Hacker News Reader

This sort of stuff is going to fall on deaf ears. So long as there's tons of money to be made, things won't change. Many of the elected officials are also shareholders in these tech companies, and they (like everyone else) want their stocks to go up so they can have a juicy deluxe retirement.

IMO the only way to level the playing field is for everyone to go to war with these companies by installing adblockers, pi-hole, and whatever else. Don't use websites that don't respect privacy.

I don't think the government is going to save us, not unless something changes drastically. Taxing or regulating ad companies would be a good start, but it probably won't happen because tech makes up such a significant portion of the S&P500 these days.

GDPR and CCPA are just the beginning. Regulation will absolutely play a role in the fight for internet privacy. I sympathize with the libertarian instinct, but the only way to acheive what you want is to raise awareness of the problem and build a new consensus of how things should work. Once you've done that there's not much difference between everyone agreeing to use duck duck go and agreeing to laws that make Google's tracking impossible.

The ad blocking arms race is not one a few hackers will win against a multi-trillion dollar industry. The easiest way to organize people to fight back is through the democratic process, but it is still a ton of work.

I wouldn't underestimate the power of grassroots movements. Telling your friends and family to install uBlock Origin and use Firefox instead of Chrome can work, because it worked before to usurp IE during the IE glory days.

Using firefox doesn't address the fundamental problems of current internet business models and permissive web standards.

Chrome doesn't lock you in to google services. It shapes web standards to advance google's interests and protect it from standards that would interfere with its revenue stream. As Firefox must implement the Chrome spec, it's just along for the ride.

Google has previously tried to neuter uBlock Origin, and they will probably do it again. Using Firefox is a good way to remove the power Google has over the web.

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