A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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That’s the neat part, you can’t, because the companies that run ad networks (e.g. Google and Meta) intentionally make the consumer behaviours market as opaque as possible. As the market maker, they have an economic incentive to withold information from their customers, because any mistakes from market participants due to information assymetries directly translate to profit surplus for the market maker.
We have long since moved on from simple pay per click/view pricing models to pay per “impression,” the definition of which is not clear even to the companies that purchase the ads.
And in a somewhat ironic twist, one of the motivations for such extensive surveillance is the desire to quantify such ROIs. Statistics and analytics such as click through and conversion rates all require tracking user behaviour across vast networks.
I guess what I’m thinking is this scenario: if a person never had a gmail account or used any google products ever, google still makes bank off that person by using third-party cookies & scripts, cross-site tracking, fingerprinting, Ad ID / Device ID sync, et al. How can you not call that data theft when you don’t use their products?
Now I’m sure somewhere in the google products TOS, it states you will bend over and spread your cheeks, but for the person that doesn’t use said company’s products, this seems a bit different.