[troutwine]

> Honestly, I'm kind of sick of how bad a rap advertising gets. Now sure, companies knowing a lot about your personal life is creepy on an intuitive level, but the fact of the matter is that cookie tracking data has NEVER been associated with any leak or data breach that resulted in personal harm. The thing people SHOULD be worried about is stuff like the Experian leak, where credit companies collect your non-anonymized personal data.

I mean, why not both? I simply cannot think of someone who dislikes tracking-as-advertisement and is pro central clearinghouses for more targeted personal information.

> Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually socially positive!

Only with the unstated premise that tracking _will_ happen and it's better if that tracking is done in a decentralized fashion. Sure, I can agree that there shouldn't be a monopoly at the focus on online tracking-as-advertising, but there's an additional argument that the space _should not exist in itself_. These arguments have been rehashed endlessly online and especially on HN so they probably don't bear repeating here, but the either or choice you represent is disingenuous.

EDIT: fixed a typo

[Barraketh]

The premise is slightly different. I'm mostly differentiating between cookie tracking and social networks (and some other large online platforms). The large online platforms don't need to track you - you give them your data willingly. Facebook knows a lot about you not because it's tracking you, but because you keep posting things to it. Cookie tracking is an alternative way to build up an effective advertising profile that is decentralized and anonymized, which I think has some value.

[fuckyouriotshit]

> The large online platforms don't need to track you - you give them your data willingly.

Most people don't know the extent to which companies track them across the internet and their devices. It really would be better described as "stalking" given that there is a clear intent by most online platforms to be as stealthy as possible when it comes to their data collection activities.

> Facebook knows a lot about you not because it's tracking you, but because you keep posting things to it.

That's not at all true. People who have explicitly chosen to _not_ have a Facebook account still have their data sucked into the maws of Facebook's data collection systems. [1]

> Cookie tracking is an alternative way to build up an effective advertising profile that is decentralized and anonymized

Cookies cannot possibly be used to build up any sort of decentralized "advertising profile" across the internet - either you allow third-party cookies for tracking and the advertisers become the centralized data collectors or you don't and the cookies don't really provide any information that a website couldn't already collect (and which, critically, wouldn't be useful to produce an advertising profile for anything other than a single website).

> [..] which I think has some value.

Value for whom? It seems that you're very interested in talking about the value of data for those who collect it and are completely disregarding the value or cost to the people who are being tracked.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5921092