[bunderbunder]

> While it's bad that having a free web has lead to multiple entities doing everything they can to track as much as they can, it's also a great benefit to society to have free access to so much knowledge.

This feels like a false dilemma to me. Many, if not most, of the corners of the web that are devoted to disseminating knowledge are funded by means that don't involve tracking ads.

It's the entertainment corner of the web - social media, yes, but I include listicle-oriented versions of journalism here, too - that seems to be the primary engine of all this surveillance capitalism.

It's no coincidence that they also have a tendency to actively exploit the parts of human psychology that make us susceptible to addiction. Which means that, while it's true that they don't charge an up-front fee, their products do still come at a price.

[jolmg]

I think you're right. Wikipedia (and other WikiMedia projects), MDN, StackExchange sites, wiki sites like wiki.archlinux.org, wiki.osdev.org, wiki.c2.com, public forums like lambda-the-ultimate.org or news.ycombinator.com would probably still be free. I can't think of any place that I've learned significantly from that provides their content for advertising money. They all seem to be up primarily for altruistic reasons.

EDIT: Thought of one: YouTube. I wonder, though, if the content providers I've learned most from in YouTube would have chosen not to provide if there weren't advertising options. Maybe they activate advertising because it's easy and would have uploaded regardless?

EDIT 2: The real question, though, would be if someone would be willing to make a YouTube alternative and eat the cost of development and maintenance of the site and hosting of those videos for altruistic reasons... It's a lot more costly than hosting a site that serves lightweight text.

[bunderbunder]

Stack Exchange advertises, but, to the best of my knowledge, they don't engage in any tracking-based advertising, so it doesn't really bother me.

I'll even click on those ads if I'm interested (crazy, right?), which is something I scrupulously avoid doing for ads that I suspect are fueled by tracking.

[jolmg]

> Stack Exchange advertises

Yeah, but I get the feeling that it didn't start with the purpose of advertising. Haven't really looked into its history to know for sure, though.

> I'm not really opposed to topical advertising. And I'm not even particularly opposed to targeting. Showing ads for Databricks alongside a Stack Overflow question about Apache Spark is fine by me (just so long as it isn't a popup or an auto-playing video). That's no creepier than advertising car stuff in a car magazine.

I wouldn't be opposed to tracking if that's all it ever amounted to, either. In fact, your example doesn't seem to involve tracking. Deciding what to show based on the content of the page doesn't imply using any knowledge of you from other sources.

EDIT: Anyway, what's worrying of tracking is that it makes the buying and selling of personal information a viable and profitable business. It's not worrying if you think that such a business can only be used for showing ads you're interested in everywhere you go. In fact, that's a benefit to anybody, and that's what makes it a good public justification for it by the companies that do this tracking.

However, that's not the only way people can apply your personal information. For example, businesses can also use it to personalize the prices for the products and services they offer based on indicators they bought of your purchasing power. Insurance companies can use a lot more than indicators of your purchasing power to know how to quote you, probably getting their hands on knowledge that by law they probably shouldn't be able to get their hands on to avoid unfair discrimination. There's regulations of what businesses can ask of employee candidates to avoid unfair discrimination, but they won't need to ask anymore if they can just buy the info online.