[tedbradley]

I understand being for privacy, but on the flip side, information about you can result in a better experience. E.g. in the case of tracking where a person comes from, that can help those two websites improve by coordinating with each other in some way. Or your ads might actually show you something you didn't know you existed that you end up buying. That's probably better than seeing ads you likely have zero interest in. I'll admit it's creepy when an ad is incredibly tuned to your recent internet activity, though.

[SebastianKra]

Textbook marketing speak: “Don't you want more relevant ads?”.

It assumes that “ads” = useful information, but that's rare at best. Most ads focus on stealing your attention and creating a fear of missing out. NordVPN isn't educating you. They just manufacture a need and then hope that you won't invest time in researching a better option.

Why would I give them more leverage to do that?

[fragmede]

Is it that rare? Sure, there's no advertising profile for "hates VPN ads" but eg an adult male doesn't want ads for women's period pain medication and similarly an adult woman doesn't want ads for male testosterone or other male-coded enhancements ads. Then you get into niche interests like fishing or sewing or 3d printing.

[SebastianKra]

You're conflating correctly targeted ads and useful information.

If you sell gambling ads to an addicted gambler, the gambler doesn't get useful information.

Niche interests might get a pass. But then again: if I’m getting an ad for a 3D printing product on a 3D printing review site, its very likely that the advertised product wasn’t actually the best and is just artificially pushed on me.

[tedbradley]

I genuinely would rather see ads for products I might like yet do not know exist instead of purely random ads. I don't understand why a person wouldn't.

[chrismorgan]

I started writing a follow-up half an hour before you posted, since the parent comment has been unusually highly voted. I dropped it again, but now you’ve given me something to respond to.

I say I’m broadly anti-tracking. I think it’s clear by this point to anyone with a skerrick of wisdom that the logical extreme of tracking is bad. But for a long way it seems innocuous. So how far do you go before declaring it unacceptable?

I hold myself to higher standards than I will hold others. For myself, I find it is most reliable not to start. I will occasionally show others this attitude or try mildly to recommend it, but largely that’s up to them.

I hate ads (in which I include billboards, newspaper ads, display ads, search ads, Facebook ads, sponsored posts, and a whole lot more; but not first-party stuff, and if it includes content not directly related to what you’re selling, it will probably be exempt too). I block ads as far as I can. Therefore I will never foist ads on others: t’were hypocrisy to do otherwise.

I like clean URLs and also hate precise tracking. Therefore if I send a newsletter-style email, it will include plain URLs that don’t track. So I can’t measure “campaign success”? C’est la vie. I’ll survive. I don’t want to scale anyway. I want people to respond by email, and respond to them. People are what matter in this life, even if I find computers far easier to deal with.

I dislike tracking where it is not functionally necessary. I confess that I haven’t yet taken this to the logical extreme of not recording server logs at all. I won’t ask clients what they are and where they’re from, but if they tell me, I will still record it for now, I guess. I might go more extreme on this in the future. But when some third party tries to force others to tell things unwittingly… that I don’t like.

[tedbradley]

What would you consider the "extreme of tracking?" Anyway, I feel like we're dealing with Sorites paradox here, which is something my brother always freaks out over whenever there is a continuum of choices in something like a political argument. E.g. "Tax the rich" → "What is rich?!?" When someone says, "Tax the rich," they generally mean people with dozens of millions in net worth growing fast all the way up to the people who have hundreds of billions. I don't understand why that conversation repeatedly comes up with him. He's also into the slippery slope where, if you like the idea of a wealth tax, he cries bloody murder since income tax started out only on the richest salaries in the nation. So he reasons that... everyone will eventually have a wealth tax instead of it just being the people with billions of dollars who have paid like 1% tax per year due to their net worth being tied up in unsold stocks.

So if I'm going to pick your brain, what would a realistic extreme of tracking look like? You have to log in with your state-issued identity to enter the internet, and systems track absolutely everything you do? Sure, that sounds bad. I can admit that. But I don't feel like having a "?=example.com" is anywhere near that, if you get what I mean.

Do you find it moral to block ads? By that point, you are using free services without paying as intended. Or do you mean you buy YT premium and Twitch Turbo and Spotify premium and all those monthly bills that both block ads while sustaining the services you apparently enjoy using?

[fragmede]

> C’est la vie. I’ll survive.

Will you? You made a widget and you're trying to sell it. You've taken out a second mortgage on your house, and used up all your savings. You're down to your last $10,000. If you don't start making sales soon, you're sunk. Where do you spend that $10,000? Facebook? Instagram? Google? TikTok? If you don't know where your leads are coming from, how do you know where to spend your marketing budget?

[chrismorgan]

I can’t imagine myself ending up in your scenario: I’m not interested in unbridled growth, if I sell things I want to be able to at least broadly know my customers, so I’ll know where they are in that situation. Besides which I’m never going to be doing that kind of advertising, cost-per-click and such—I consider it a blight on society wholly devoid of virtue, so I’ll not be a hypocrite and use it for my own gain.

It’s an unconventional pathway, but I have complete faith that it will work out. Not always in the ways I expect or prefer, but it will work out.

(Even humanly speaking, your protagonist sounds incompetent—just throwing money at marketing is very ineffective, you want to target and approach different platforms differently, and if you don’t know which of Facebook, Instagram, Google or TikTok will be the best venue to spend your last coins, I think you deserve to fail.)

More generally, these three snippets from the Bible accurately convey my attitude:

> The LORD will provide. — Genesis 22:14

> I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his children begging for bread. — Psalm 37:25

> We walk by faith, not by sight. — 2 Corinthians 5:7

This genuinely is how I try to live my life. I’ve seen it work in my parents before me and in a few others’ lives, in anecdotes of grand- and great-grandparents and beyond. (It’s even why I, an Australian by birth, now live in India.)