[backprojection]

I find it really depressing that the only business model that seems to work online is ads. Paying for things by ads is so convoluted and distorting.

There should really be a open micro-payments systems. I absolutely don't mind paying $0.10 to read an article, I'm already investing much more, in a dollars/minute sense by reading the article anyway. I guess the trick is to do this in a very automatic and anonymous way.

Notice how there is no way to pay google for using gmail, maps, etc., even if you wanted to (maybe if you sign up as a business?). I'd much rather just pay Google $100 per year, than introduce all the problems associated with monetizing my data.

[ikeboy]

>Notice how there is no way to pay google for using gmail, maps

There is; get your own domain and sign up for https://www.google.com/work/apps/business/. It's $50 a year for a single person, no ads, plus phone/email support.

It's technically business, but I don't think that's required to sign up.

[jedberg]

That's exactly what reddit did with reddit gold. You basically get to pay $4 a month to not see ads (and therefore not get tracked).

[fixermark]

... except that the fact one is a reddit gold member has to be validated, and therefore one is tracked; every login is audited by Reddit itself.

[danneu]

"Tracking" generally refers to third parties identifying you across websites.

Pointing out that Reddit "tracks" you with its authentication system as you browse Reddit just dilutes the term and the gravity of concern when organizations are able to connect your browsing history to you.

Put another way, a "has_gold" boolean field in the users table doesn't seem to be the issue that the EFF is attempting to address here.

[fixermark]

That's sort of the point, though. Is there anything in the "do not track" policies that prevents the data owner (Reddit in this scenario) from just selling its own scraped data on the end-user to an ad network? Ad tracking is functionally equivalent; the tracking scripts just automate and simplify the process.

"Do not track" is a bit of a toothless concept when the very nature of the medium is to make auditable connections to remote servers.

[allendoerfer]

I don't know whether they do it, but they could set a http-only cookie "gold=true" when you purchase a gold account. You could then logout and they would not habe to track you personally to check your gold status.