[logn]

Does it matter if people ignore ads? These are not broadcast ads like radio or television. They analyze behavior and encourage an architecture that exactly suits the needs of government surveillance.

And I'm not confident users will win the ad blocking war. There are easy ways to permanently defeat ad blockers, but the industry hasn't embraced them yet because the current system works well enough. E.g., ad code can be served from the same server with no identifying CSS classes or ids. Or with WebAssembly the web could turn into black box binaries.

Further, there's fundamentally no way to defeat behavioral tracking, because it can be done when people merely use a website.

[FussyZeus]

That's true but (the way I read it anyway) the author is contending that advertisements themselves would be used to shape public opinion which, while true, I think the effects are dwindling because people are becoming more aware of that.

Additionally, I wouldn't say behavioral tracking is implicitly always nefarious. Speaking as an app developer the analytics we get from users is 100% anonymous and not used for anything more evil than just helping us design and improve software. Usage data like that is gold to us because most people don't leave/send feedback, especially the ones we really want to hear from, i.e. the ones who stopped using it.

I think we need more regulation in the web industry in terms of how we're allowed to collect data, how we must store it, and have serious penalties for those who break those laws.

[logn]

I think the idea is that a small number of corporations will have a complete knowledge of the lives and psychology of their users, be able to influence their behavior even without display ads, and be able to predict all of their behavior. Additionally, the government will piggyback on all of this technology too.

I don't think any of this is inherently nefarious. Hopefully with policy reforms and additional privacy preserving technologies, we will avert the future Moglen warns of.