Adblock sold to "unknown buyer"

[Lifeisabeach]

Amazing. We have advertisers making a living by showing ads and "tracking" me. Then you have developers of ad-blockers that make a living by first blocking ads, then extorting revenue from advertisers to not block ads. Oh, and they also make money by blocking advertisers from "tracking" me while doing the same in their place. This is just crazy. I do believe I'll be looking into Privacy Badger in place of Ghostery (EDIT: bah... incompatible with Safari). I refuse to be someone else's product.

 

[chas_m]

I've never been a proponent of targeted advertising. I presume that you're referring to my defence of Google products which is not the same.

But Google is the progenitor of targeted advertising -- it is the whole of their business model, and where 96 percent of their income comes from. I don't think you can really separate any given Google product from that, so I find your position a bit dissonant. Google would simply not exist without targeted advertising -- it is their raison d'etre -- and I find myself in the somewhat-amusing position of having to defend their business model (though I don't support continued tracking) as being preferable to completely unrelated ads served randomly that have nothing to do with anything I'm interested in.

I'm not pro-targeted ads because they are based on things like search histories or tracking, both of which I'm against and which also aren't very accurate in actually determining my interests (like you, I do a lot of searches to help people with questions here that I wouldn't normally do otherwise, so search engines might get a very distorted picture of my actual interests). But if I'm on a website devoted to, let's say, Japanese printmaking -- I'd much prefer the ads be catering to that audience than if I got endless "make $$ at home" crap. I'm sure you see what I'm saying here.

 

[vansmith]

But Google is the progenitor of targeted advertising -- it is the whole of their business model, and where 96 percent of their income comes from. I don't think you can really separate any given Google product from that, so I find your position a bit dissonant.

A fair critique but then I'll flip this back to you - Apple has "pioneered" the exceptional profit margin in computing and it would be worth considering that you can't separate the release of any Apple product from that imperative (and I only mention this as you have a tendency to imply that Apple isn't always in it for the money).

It is also possible to support particular elements of one thing and not others. I like Google's products and don't particularly like targeted advertising so I avoid those aspects of their business as best I can (if I were shown ads randomly while browsing with Chrome, I'd jump ship or if I couldn't use GMail over IMAP, I'd probably look elsewhere). The same goes for other companies - you simply remove yourself from having to engage, as best you can, with those things that you don't like. Take Apple as another example. Extra storage for iCloud above and beyond the paltry 5GB that comes with the free plan is annoyingly low so I avoid engaging with that part of Apple's offerings.