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Advertising doesn't require surveillance though.

No, but surveillance is profitable outside of advertising, and advertising provides a perfect cover for surveillance: It's hard to make things that can separate third-party content from surveillance from third-party content for advertising, or for UI JS libraries for that matter

I'm tired of the feigned helplessness. Well gee this is the only way things can be. Internet doesn't work without surveillance! Guess you don't want the internet! /s

Ads and surveillance are not inseparable. We don't need to accept surveillance as the price for a functional internet.

> feigned helplessness

Of whom?

Google and Meta are gigantic surveillance companies. It's their imperative that you keep allowing it. On top of that, most state actors love the idea of more surveillance.

Then you have huge portions of the population that simply don't care or don't know better and aren't going to start directly paying for anything.

I don't think we disagree on anything about that, but it does take some recognition of the problem that advertising isn't just lending political, but also technical cover to surveillance

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