[rob_b]

The prevalence of Alexa and other “assistance” devices shows that people willingly allow their privacy to be invaded for the perceived benefit gained from it. Advertising is one of those things where they want to analyze every action, effort, and thought, without any regard for the impact it has on the affected users’ privacy and there will be lines of potential customers waiting to signup after being enticed by the carrot. I think the blame is shared between both sides and I do believe the pendulum will continue to shift as long as technology continues to be embedded in our everyday lives.

[CodeWriter23]

I think it’s more likely most people outside the HackerNewsosphere don’t understand what it is, let alone the value of the “it” they are trading away.

[dageshi]

If it doesn't cost them any actual ongoing money then I think most people simply don't care. Same reason people find advertising annoying, but don't really care on any deeper level, it doesn't cost them anything tangibly.

[quadrangle]

Citation?

Although there's some portion of apathy, the vast majority of people are ignorant or even misinformed. You can't conclude from the actions of an ignorant person that they don't care about the thing they don't know about / don't understand.

[dageshi]

Well, I use supermarket loyalty cards as the primary example, they've existed for years, lots and lots of people carry them, if you point out that companies are using them to track your spending habits (across multiple different industries and product categories) people don't care. They receive a tangible benefit from it (discounts) and don't perceptibly pay anything for it.

[quadrangle]

I don't think that's a fair example. The vast majority of the people have never thought about all the ramifications. It's not a case of well-informed people who understand the issues deciding that they don't care. It's a case (like most) where people don't sense that the issue is important enough to make even understanding it be a priority in their busy lives.

Most people do understand that the loyalty-cards are not necessarily the only way to get discounts or even that they are actually discounted (in the absence of those cards, prices would be set differently overall).

There are certainly stores we may legitimately feel more trusting of than others.

Anyway, lots of people really appreciate a store like Trader Joe's that just has reasonable prices across the board, never does any sort of discount promotions and never tracks anyone — even if the customers never explicitly thought through that aspect of the experience, they still experience it and feel differently than they do with the other tracking-focused stores.

On a side note: I learned recently that sales and such at most grocers are actually driven by the brands themselves. The reason Trader Joe's is free of all that is because they sell relatively little that is of the big-marketing-budget style branded products…

[freeone3000]

With Alexa, there's a clear value proposition. In exchange for this device listening, you can perform various tasks by voice control that would previously be done at a computer or manually.

With advertising, it's a lose-lose proposition. In exchange for being tracked everywhere, we get shown pictures of things we don't want. Who would opt into that?