Some of us are old enough to remember the web and other services before they had ads. I remember quite well when the first started showing up, people called them "banners", and it was infuriating.
I never accepted the change in the expectation that everything will now be ad supported. That's a fundamental, massive shift. You can still say no that imposition, it's not actually baked into any of the technology, just a bunch of bloat glued on afterwards.
Good question - though half of the internet has been built by pretending to offer your service for free. So either we keep doing that or we have to admit that our whole industry has been lying to their users.
The mental model for most people for so called free media is broadcast tv.
Yes there are ads. Yes I dislike those ads but they pay for the tv programming and broadcast.
No, broadcast tv does not keep a massive dossier on me or even know I exist.
Almost nobody expected nor understood that they are now "free from having privacy." It's not usual nor expected nor was it ever made clear. It was also done where there was no consent (shadow profiles for people without facebook accounts) and where consent was expressly withdrawn ("I now know what facebook does and would like you to close my account and delete all data and all backups of data relating to me"). Wildly evil stuff going on there, argue about what the law "says" all you like it's foul and should be illegal. It probably is illegal too if you haven't got billions to buy out of the problem. Que the apologists...
There are plenty of other media consumption businesses paid by advertising where you aren't being monitored in a manner the stasi could only dream of. Free printed newspapers supported by advertising have been around my entire life. This was the expectation.
Could facebook and google have grown if they had stated on their front page, every login that they were keeping records of everywhere you went on the internet? They wouldn't have got any traction whatsoever so they lied. Android will keep track of everywhere you go physically and add that to our file on you. Apple are better is just such BS you have to be a huge fanboy to swallow it.
Everyone concerned should be facing criminal charges for that kind of lying. Trying to claim they didn't know they were lying at the time and it was a bait and switch fraud instead.
Why would they allow someone using the service if they didn't get something back?
That's a good question, but once GDPR is in effect, the law is going to require that all consent is genuine, informed, active consent. A consequence of that is that someone must be able to withhold their consent without suffering for it, unless the thing they're consenting to is essential to whatever else they're doing.
If you're thinking this fundamentally undermines the current business model of sites like Facebook, you're probably right, and given the political rhetoric around the GDPR, it's possible that this was the intention of the EU from the start.
Ad revenue is essential to Facebook running. My guess is that FB will continue to work even without this other data just given what they know on the site.
Ad revenue may be essential to Facebook being commercially viable, but it's not required at all to provide the social networking features that users actually want.
My guess is that FB will continue to work even without this other data just given what they know on the site.
But if they have data acquired with users' consent for social networking purposes, they won't be allowed to process that data for purposes such as targeting ads without consent.
I never accepted the change in the expectation that everything will now be ad supported. That's a fundamental, massive shift. You can still say no that imposition, it's not actually baked into any of the technology, just a bunch of bloat glued on afterwards.