| >Honestly, I'm kind of sick of how bad a rap advertising gets. Work in advertising by any chance? If you read the article, it's not primarily about advertising. It's about privacy and the negative impact to society on losing it. The ad tech firms were certainly pivotal in creating the dystopian surveillance world we live in. They deserve every single bit of bad rap they get for that and, personally speaking, I really hope there's a lot more bad rap heading their way. >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 I don't know if you're deliberately positioning that duplicitously or not. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Whether there are cookie-based breaches or not is, in practical terms, irrelevant. Read the article. With cookies, and without breaches, the Facebooks and Googles of the world allow advertisers to promote smoking to children or payday loans to those with financial troubles. Advertising is a wide spectrum. At one end it's relatively benign: billboards and the like. Some feel even that is unacceptable. At the other is the FB/G hyper-targeted end. In and of itself it is extremely creepy. But the article is about much more than just the weird experience of wondering how they knew to target you for erectile dysfunction treatment. Or divorce lawyers. Ad tech has bootstrapped a global panopticon. That's the problem here. Oh, and next time your insurance premium goes up mysteriously, have a think about your browsing history. |