Anyway, the devil is in the implementation details here, but this doesn't strike me as a common case.
The answer here isn't really obvious, but I'd suspect that in many cases this is not a very attractive demographic to advertise to.
On the wealthy side, you don't need to be that rich to pay not to get ads.
This demographic is inherently attractive simply because they can spend money.
So now, to justify removing someone from your pool of advertisees, they don't just need to pay what could be made by advertising to them; they need to pay for what could be made to advertise to them and (unwittingly) several poorer people.
I also click them often. $$$$
So a fancy way to say that if you have 10 dollars?
Thank you for the laugh.
While this may be true on an individual level, it’s wildly not true in aggregate.
The first dollar is hardest to get. Once someone has shown a propensity to spend on pretty much anything, they become much more valuable as an advertising target.
That's like thinking that a girl is likely to sleep with everybody because she has a boyfriend. "She's already sleeping with one guy, so why shouldn't she sleep with everybody?".
Of course your current customers are excellent targets for your own upsells and your other products. But not much else.
“If you don’t pay for a product, you are the product”
It’s
“If you don’t pay for a product, you are a less valuable product than if you’d pay for the product”
I'm not paying crave anymore.
That technically is also competition. And if the market offers garbage for money, but the illegal market is free and better, go with the illegal choice.
You'll be treated like a criminal either way with DRM. So... Yeah.
Even if you take away the money a vpn costs, you still can have a decent vps with decent storage.
If you only need storage, even better. Found an offer for a "Storage VPS" with low hardware specs and 2TB of HDDs for 10€/monthly
It gets trotted on a lot here because the overarching narrative on HN is that regulation is an answer to everything when it's easier to just... not use the thing if you don't like it. Rather than creating a mountain of regulations that only big business can comply with, I think it's better to choose what you do with your money as a consumer.
In most places, your options for a taxi service are Uber or go fuck yourself. That's how they're able to get away with their price gouging, privacy recklessness, and share-cropped labor.
Free market dynamics only work if you are in a free market. We're not, there's one player, and they won the market by literally just cheating and breaking the law. Sorry, sorry, "disrupting".
For streaming, I'm not sure since I don't watch much, and YT+adblocker is sufficient for me. Again, not giving them money is enough of a signal if you don't find the product good.
What if I don't have enough money to buy something and I want it anyway!
> It uses LiveRamp's clean room technology, which lets companies aggregate their data in a privacy-safe environment, without sharing or seeing each other's raw or personally identifiable customer information.
It's apparently not that they directly sell your PII at least.
And if you are paying… you’re still the product as well.
Although if they did somehow deploy their constellation as a legible ad, I wouldn't even complain. "Drink Coke" spelled out with a hundred satellites would be hilarious.
- Public websites are chock full of ads
- Downloading a file often means hopping through several redirects (each of which is an ad) and sometimes even having to "complete an offer" to get the final link
- Private websites have some affiliate deal with VPN providers. "We did the research, this one is the best, if you subscribe through this link you will get some perks on our website".
Of all the kinds of ads out there, that last one is the least objectionable to me. They don't force it on you, it doesn't clog up the important parts of the site, and they supposedly do some research to pick the best provider to affiliate with. I "never" click on ads but this one worked on me.
There just needs to be a blanket-law where your data is considered every-bit as intellectual property as a piece of copyrighted media and for there to be consent established to sell or give your data to a third-party there needs to be an active exchange of payment, credit or services that is opt-in only, not opt-out from an intentionally obfuscated EULA update email.
Require active opt-in and consent along with a clear set of goods/services/payment, and active simple on-demand revocation with strict timelines, and you could have companies actually properly incentivizing users to sell them their own personal data instead of it just being harvested.
Unfortunately too many libertarian nutjobs out here think that the market here will magically fix all issues.
I'll see your libertarian market nutjobs and raise you reflexive "regulation will fix it" liberals (I don't really know the right term here, but I guess it's the one that fits most closely with US politics for the last 60+ years). Neither group has much room in its worldview for the simple fact that some people are just jerks and will abuse any system.
Regulation can be done well, but doing so in a way that doesn't just hand the entire segment to the current incumbents is hard and regulatory capture isn't just something market worshipers conjured out of thin air.
HBO was the first offering that didn't have ads during the show.
No, it was quality of reception, especially for people who were farther from (or had inconvenient terrain between them and) broadcast stations; literally the only thing on early capable was exactly the normal broadcast feed from the covered stations, which naturally included all the normal ads.
Premium add-on channels that charged on top of cable, of which I think HBO was the first, had being ad free among their selling points, but that was never part of the basic cable deal.
I'd wager that just by the virtue of being commenters on HN, we're already outliers.
If you frame it as a negative thing with no downsides for agreeing with you, of course people will agree. But that's not the reality.
That's your quote as I read it in case some editing happens. There's no caveat in your original post that you are claiming now. You've moved the goal posts. As you originally stated, I agree with all of the follow up comments to it that you are now trying to expand on your original comment. Maybe that's what you always meant but just left out of the original. It happens. But now you're being obstinate about it in a way that doesn't look good.
What's the solution then?
"Would you pay extra for a guarantee your personal data is kept private?"
"Would you pay extra for a guarantee your data isn't sold for marketing purposes?"
One might argue "private" implies more than can truly be promised, for example no US company can promise to ignore subpoenas and actually follow through.
I'd say it mirrors for patriotism: "do you support $OUR_COUNTRY" will get more "yes" responses than almost any more specific question about support for anything tangible. Precisely because it's sort of meaningless and unobjectionable... (well except in the US, where I'm sure it's correlated with whether or not one's favored party is in power)
This is how we have a free-market to begin with. You need enforcement and structures in place so people will actually trust any of this crap. Instead, we have the nutjob early 90's cyber libertarians thinking this will all be magically fixed with just magical freedom and the invisible hand fixing everything.
People on this website are too small a fraction of society to ever move the needle. My point is that it doesn't matter what people on this website want with respect to privacy, in our capitalist democratic society it will never happen unless most people want it.
The reality right now is that most people don't want it.
This narrative is incredibly toxic and honestly a very antisocial viewpoint of people as if they are all just stupid sheep who deserve to be exploited.
There's zero reason why its unfair for a person to both object to advertising because of the annoyance (because it is annoying) AND for a person to not want to be digitally surveilled endlessly without their consent.
I don't disagree with you there.
> This narrative is incredibly toxic and honestly a very antisocial viewpoint of people as if they are all just stupid sheep who deserve to be exploited.
The people get what they vote for, whether or not its what they deserve. The only way to move the needle on this is to educate people. Telling people they're "stupid sheep" for not wanting the thing you think they should want is not typically a winning strategy, in my experience.
> There's zero reason why its unfair for a person to both object to advertising because of the annoyance (because it is annoying) AND for a person to not want to be digitally surveilled endlessly without their consent.
I'm simply saying I think most people care more about the first thing.
It isn't out-of-keeping in this kind of company for a person to start discussions about personal data privacy. In fact: We chat about this stuff here all the time.
But in reality: The number of discussions I've had about personal data privacy and monetization face-to-face with people that I did not meet through a computer network, or bring up myself is exactly 1.
It's thus my observation that most people in the world care about this issue approximately...never.
(The reason they don't care may be that they don't know enough to even begin to question whether the people behind their air fryer, genealogical DNA service, garage door opener, and food delivery system may have ulterior motives.
But guesses about root causation are, at best, both tangential and broadly inconsequential. We can guess and figure and re-figure and even prove theories until the cows come home.
And it doesn't matter.
They didn't care yesterday, they still don't care today while I write this, and they will continue to not care tomorrow.)
In an ideal world, you'd instead have drivers assigned to either particular neighborhoods or particular restaurants, allowing for order-stacking and predictable routes. Bonus for set-time daily deliveries (get your order in before 6 or have to wait until 9). Bigger bonus for set neighborhood drop-off points (like those consolidated mailboxes, but warming compartments). Anything more bespoke would cost extra.
Unfortunately, the balance of inefficient operations, decreasing competition, and "line go up" is that prices have to increase.
At the same time you have processes like increasing suburbanization and development of even more car-centric infrastructure, which makes houses and restaurants even further from each other, and makes cheaper delivery vehicles like motorbikes infeasible.
To give an industry that's a counterexample to the "they add ads and don't make things cheaper", look at groceries. It's a terrible, single-digit percentage margin business but they sell everything from placement in catalogue to whether the product is in a convenient spot on the shelf. That's a clear case where ads make it _cheaper_ for consumers.
I don't follow... it certainly improves the grocer's margins, but how does that do anything at all for the consumer?
I don't think you were unclear, that's what I understood you to be saying.
Surely, the grocer just pockets the extra ad money? Never in my life have I seen a for-profit corporation voluntarily charge a lower price than the market will bear because they increased their margin by other means.
The ads are also inherently shitty to the producers: they all have to spend money on the grocer's ads now, because if they don't, their competitors will. If you look at it that way, the ads are almost extortion.
They have also advertised for the Starbucks in thr Target stores long before when you go to pickup something.
Surely that is the answer.
Any company that has unique or rare data is compelled to do things with it. Those that don’t either can’t figure out how or explicitly reject the reward function of contemporary capitalism. We should really expect those deviations to be the exception.
They’re going to sell to marketers for ads I don’t watch?