Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
view the rest of the comments
My right is to use
This as long Website abuses with these measures, to steal my data, bandwith and browsing speed, annoying me. I'm a user not a tradable matter
If sites want me to pay for their content, they'll need to find a privacy respecting way to get money from me. But their preferred compensation method usually involves even more privacy intrusion and spam than just blocking their ads.
I was excited when Brave launched their original crusade to try to block privacy-violating ads and replace them with profit-sharing, privacy respecting ads (i.e. local only, no data shared with third parties), but AFAIK the profit-sharing never happened (and as such I never used Brave). I'd be happy to pay a few cents or whatever to view website content, provided it goes through an intermediary so it's not related to me in any way. I don't want an account at each of these sites, but I'm happy to replace their lost ad-revenue anonymously, provided that buys me a privacy-respecting experience.
That the point, maintaining a website, a service or information, costs money and it is legitimate that they rent their space to advertising companies to earn money. But it is a big difference from placing ads related to the content of the page and quite another from using targeted ads that are based on your data and histories, many times even coming from companies with a poor reputation or directly from scammers, because they don't bother to control the origin (eg YouTube)
It is legitimate for an informative page or newspaper to limit access to subscribers, but a user does not have to create an account just because they want to find out about an important fact in a newspaper that they have never visited and never plan to do so again. It would therefore be much more ethical to log this user's IP allowing a certain number of accesses and only put up a paywall if they log continuous access. Because there is a right to information.
It is not a fight against the legitimate interests of the pages, but the abuse that the pages do with their interests, overriding the rights, privacy and security of the users.
I disagree. I see no problem with media companies locking their content behind a paywall, because that's their IP and they can do what they want with it. The reason they don't is because that would destroy their income since people will just go elsewhere for that information.
I have no problem paying for information, I have a problem with spreading my personal information all over the Internet. I honestly don't think these sites care too much about my personal information, but they need to get it to process recurring payments and whatnot. That just opens me up to security issues, so I choose to not make accounts.
So that's why I want some form of anonymous payment system where I can pay for access without divulging my personal info. I'd just load the browser with $X/month, and the browser would pay $Y/month for all of the users that use the browser to access that site that month. That keeps transaction costs low and preserves my personal info. The browser could also potentially provide anonymous demographic info since that's useful for curating content.
Unfortunately, no such payment network exists, or at least no such system is popular.
Adding that not all people can't affort to pay a monthly fee, maybe to one or two newspaper, but it's absurd tto create dozends of paid accounts to be informed. Worst in the case of research papers in some sites. That means that people have to pay a fee to dozends of sites or they remain ignorant abot important succeses in the world and maybe important informations for their studies. I'm from Spain and it's absurd for me to pay to Washington Post, NY Times and others for an ocasional consult an monthly fee. I'm an old retirée and need making money sudokus to reach the end of the month, paying already a lot of money, simply for the access to Internet. Fine for you when you can pay for every newspaper you visit for an information, but I have no regrets skipping the paywalls for an occasional piece of information.
That's totally fair.
That said, the current choices are:
That's a crappy set of options, so it's no wonder people opt for ad blockers since both alternatives involve sharing personal information (which is likely to be exposed in a breach).
Instead of that, I want these choices:
Advertisers still get relevant advertising, but they don't get the personal information, just data about which ads were accessed due to which categories. Users could choose which sites to pay for directly, and which to pay for via ads, the only change is that privacy is preserved.
I think that ads which are related to the content of the page you visit is the best solution, there are no adicional informacion needed, nor these from the browser or other sources, you visit a page with information related to computers and find ads and banners from computer brands. That is. It is absurd to see there food ads, because you visited before the catalogue of an supermarket which filled you with trackers. The only problem is surveillance advertising, which must be declared illegal, without these surveillance and tracking, ads ar not the problem and no more need of an half a dozen blockers and scripts to avoid this crap.