Comment by redprince | Hacker News Reader

Comment by redprince | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

That there is no such mechanism can be explained pretty well with this extreme scenario:

- Browsers would come with the no tracking signal enabled by default (why wouldn't they?) so that tracking would become opt-in.

- Nobody chooses to be tracked.

- The whole industry built on tracking users collapses, namely advertisement

- Web sites who based their business model on advertisement go under

Because of this I bet that the industry is lobbying extremely hard for solutions that are maximally useless and inconvenient for the user. Unless the user "chooses" to be tracked of course.

In that vein, another proposal for stemming the flood of cookie consent banners comes from the German government and outlines a multi vendor strategy with very little technical guidance for centralized consent management systems:

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Consent-management-German-gover...

> - Browsers would come with the no tracking signal enabled by default (why wouldn't they?) so that tracking would become opt-in.

> - Nobody chooses to be tracked.

> - The whole industry built on tracking users collapses, namely advertisement

> - Web sites who based their business model on advertisement go under

This seems like the perfect outcome to me, but I doubt we'll be this lucky

Maybe I'm soft, but I always ad block and yet I don't think millions of people losing their jobs, and the resultant economic depression causing millions of other people to go hungry/homeless is a perfect outcome.

it's like when we "found out" leaded gasoline is bad for every living being on the planet. the whole automotive industry and its associates really didn't want to change, but at the end of the day life goes on. maybe one day we'll be able to have an internet that is not financed by mass surveillance enabled psychological abuse.

Well those people could go do something constructive for humanity :) You're acting as if there won't be anything to replace it.

Well yes but the websites will find suppliers of untracked (context sensitive e.g. car ads on a website about cars) ads, which will become more valuable since they no longer have to compete with tracked ads.

Companies like Google and Meta would lose their huge moat because they're the only ones with the kind of pervasive tracking network that make tracked ads viable. They no longer have a big advantage over smaller ad players. And them losing their huge market position isn't a bad thing IMO.

I don't think ads would disappear, they would just become untracked. Neither would websites. They will find a way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com