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by ndnxhs 2627 days ago
Privacy is very important but its just a drop in the ocean compared to environmental disaster. Google tracking you browse the internet seems unimportant compared extinction.
2 comments

Advertising is fueling that extinction; why else would we consume so much, in such a wasteful way?
This is where these two issues beautifully tie together: Saving the environment is important - consuming less is a way to do say - with less paying consumers, adds become less valuable - less incentive to violate privacy.
This raises a question, how much does the cancer that is advertising & analytics consumes in terms of electricity and engineering time that could've been put to better use?
Computers use next to nothing in total. Almost all energy is used on heating/cooling, transport and farming.
It still means we're wasting energy cooling computers that are used for advertising & stalking. Those computers can be put to better use instead.
The bigger problem is advertising drives needless and wasteful consumption.
It certainly accompanies it (can you imagine a world where there was needless and wasteful consumption, but no one bothered to advertise?). I wouldn't be so sure about causation.
If you can't imagine a world with wasteful consumption but no advertising, that kind of tentatively rules out "wasteful consumption causes advertising". What remains is "advertising causes wasteful consumption" and "wasteful consumption and advertising are both caused by a third thing", but given that advertising is literally the art and science of making people buy more stuff, the "advertising causes wasteful consumption" option seems the most probable.