I just want to take this opportunity to thank "adtech" and everyone working in it for making local storage way more complex than it otherwise needed to be because you couldn't/can't stop yourselves from abusing users.
Meanwhile we see just how effective targeted advertisement can be for both money and political influence.
Though I appreciate your frustration, your aggression is a little off target. :)
Do the users want their click events fed into an advertising engine? Did you ask them? If you made this opt-in, how many would say, yes, please track my clicks in order to advertise to me? Even if its anonymized/aggregated.
A huge amount of advertising is enabled by tracking users against their will, exploiting the fact that many users aren't aware of what's going on, don't know how to stop it, or aren't as invested in their preference as the adtech companies are in their revenue. "A man is always right in his own eyes". If you're smart it's easy to justify this stuff to yourself because you're getting paid, but that doesn't make it right.
You are right in that a huge amount of ads leverage user data at the expense of the user.
The point I’m trying to make is that not all involved in the advertising technology are exploitive. We do zero ad targeting based on user data. You make a search for specific products, we take the response and shuffle the order a bit based on vendor campaigns. That’s it. Nothing is associated or even collected from the user. It’s all system metrics.
The greatest harm that my team does is hurting optimized relevancy, which is inherit to advertising but also something we work hard to alleviate.
That misused proverbs quote is a nice touch. Shows a lot of self awareness.
I don't doubt that you're being truthful here. The problem is that the vast majority of adtech is extremely exploitive, and there is no way for a user to tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys". So all adtech must be treated as hostile.
Ads by definition try to influence the user to do things they would not have don on their own. They cannot ever be user respecting.
I don't work in front-end but whenever I've used localstorage for personal projects it's as simple as getting/setting a javascript object with keys & values.
Do you mean the fact that cookies and LocalStorage (or other APIs able to persist data) are often considered the same thing when using the term "cookies"?
That seems unfortunate. And futile anyway, because the truth is that society as a whole actually wants advertising, in all its forms. We may find individual ads annoying but we still make our purchase decisions based on those ads and use those channels to hawk our own wares.
[1] The truth is that the big ad-driven internet companies have been, on the whole, actually fairly good stewards of this stuff. People don't trust them out of principle (or, just as often, tribalism), but at least so far the dystopia hasn't arrived.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa...
There's no point in additional discourse on the issue. We may as well be arguing about whether cigarettes cure lung disease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
Even for cities that do not outright ban it, outdoor advertisement is heavily regulated in many parts of the world. Compare you typical european and asian big city street. Clearly many people do not like ads even without the tracking.
Here's an ongoing example that should get someone put in jail:
Pharmaceutical companies target ads for addictive drugs at the people that are most likely to become addicted to those drugs.
(For the victim of this that I know personally, it wasn't painkillers. As far as I know, there have been no repercussions for the manufacturer of the drug in question or the ad networks.)
See also: The millions of comments on any thread on HN that discusses SEO, dark patterns, cookie consent, or apps that interfere with advertising revenue streams.
The argument is closer to "encouraging and profiting from illegal drug abuse is not 'responsible corporate stewardship'".
I actually don't really mind ads as long as the volume of them isn't too great. But I greatly mind the tracking that comes along with them.
> at least so far the dystopia hasn't arrived
I disagree. From my point of view, we reached the dystopia stage quite a while ago.
> People want ads
Says who? Sounds like rationalization from someone who works in the industry. I could be wrong.