[Frieren]

At this point I think that this kind of tracking should be forbidden by law.

People should not have an option to accept "being spied at all times on their personal behavior". It is creepy, it is dangerous and it is inhuman.

The exceptions should be the ones that currently already exist in GDPR. Financial institutions can use data to track fraud, law enforcement can use data from ongoing criminal cases, etc.

To have an option "to be spied" is a dystopian result of the lawlessness and bad faith on the Internet.

[juliangmp]

This! What benefit does any of this current system provide us anyway?

[Dilettante_]

Devil's Advocate? It pays for the services we use for free.

[Ukv]

I feel that's only really true in the way it is of a JS bitcoin miner. Locally appears to make something free (if ignoring time/energy) that wasn't before, but is overall a detriment to average affordability because it's a net loss of resources (mostly just a zero-sum game, with some small side benefits).

[Dilettante_]

I don't disagree with that at all, and by 'free' I suppose I didn't even mean 'as in free beer', I just meant there was no financial transaction taking place.

Maybe at some point we're really gonna see an upfront-micropayment structure as some people have mused about.

[watwut]

"Free" services that are unable to pay for themselves distort the market. And eventually they price out honest and non tracking competition.

[bcye]

From another noyb article: personalized ads account for < 10% of revenue for newspapers