[xkde]

Dumping chemicals in shared rivers/air vs placing ads in a privately owned space that users have the option of visiting. Not comparable.

The fact that more people use Gmail than Protonmail / others is a testament to their willingness to trade their eyeballs on ads for a service they don't have to spend their monetary resources on.

It's also worth asking - what makes you so confident about an absence of malfeasance from the largest, unbreakable corporate entity (ie. the government)?

[Nextgrid]

> users have the option of visiting

Except that advertisers' activities goes beyond just showing ads. They stalk you, collect data and build a profile which will persist forever & be used down the line against you in one way or another (either intentionally by those advertisers or by someone else if the data falls into the wrong hands) long after you've left the website.

[oblio]

> It's also worth asking - what makes you so confident about an absence of malfeasance from the largest, unbreakable corporate entity (ie. the government)?

I'm not confident in that either.

But in a democracy, the government is the people. It's voted by the people, replaced by the people. The government may be corrupted but at least its stated goal and the way it works is to serve the people.

Corporation don't even have that as a goal. They only serve their shareholders.

So on one hand we have one party which has a stated goal to serve the people and another one which has goals that can directly contravene this, and nobody will bat an eye.

Which party is closer to what we want and need?

[edmundsauto]

Given the American federal response to Covid-19, compared to the efforts of corporate America... it's not so clear to me that being chosen by the people is the better option.

[xkde]

> They stalk you, collect data and build a profile

Again, not generally a problem when using paid services.