Apple ATT (iOS 14.5, April 2021). 15-25% opt-in. 
    -$10B Meta revenue in 2022 (CFO   David Wehner)

It's so rare that I see an ad that is targeted to me at all so what gives? Am I really so unmarketable to? It's not like i don't buy cameras, food, clothes, video games, and all sorts of things. But all i see is retargeted ads for stuff I already bought.

What is really needed is a hard fork of major browsers by a grass roots community to advance HTML standards to include partial template rendering solutions without the reliance on Javascript.

Of course this is a startup forum so the response is just going to be wittled down to observations about economic value. However if users start to change/fight then the economics will too.

What a contrast to modern websites which require all sorts of weird clicking gymnastics to disable similar tracking.

I get that this is Google's business, but perhaps a large amount of their 'business' is actually from the government system (directly or indirectly) - they merely have to pretend to be running an advertising business.

I'm saying that the whole point of advertising was surveillance from the beginning.

It's whether or not warrantless searches are admissible; and they generally arent.

Surveillance implies things about bith intended usage and actual usage, etc. that -- simply put -- do not need to hold when you're tracking something. If the argument is genuinely that cookies have genuinely been used to place us under surveillance rather than mere tracking -- I have nothing inherently against it, but you need to support it with evidence. Simply pointing to the fact that they track some fact or metric that indirectly relates to you is not sufficient evidence of that.

And to be clear, I'm not saying I like tracking or we should be fine with it. I hate it too. But it's also a turnoff seeing people smearing one thing as another, and I don't think it's a great strategy to help win support for your cause.

There are many imaginary arguments about harm in the article, with precisely zero actual examples or cases. Data brokers, buy data, stalk somebody. Can you share at least something? No, it's all just hand waving. Because none of these people can offer any. The fact that the author still thinks Cambridge Analytica meant something says a lot as well. This was a scandal out of nothing.

I, for one, am extremely grateful that, as I was growing up with not much money, I was still able to access more or less the same Internet as people in the US. I don't care about a black-box algorithm looking at my habits to figure out that I love backpacks and microbrand watches, especially if it enables free platforms for me.

Stasi didn't watch you to sell your crap online, you know. They had much worse motives.

If anything, we're now going backward because of the enormous marginal costs of inference. With AI, people aren't on the same page (even a $20 subscription is a lot of money in many countries).

Hell, I was shopping for furniture yesterday, and I swear all the popups even with ad blockers were there to prevent me from buying things. It doesn’t seem to be helpful for the stated goal.