Our latest blog post is aimed at people who ‘get it’ about online privacy, but who struggle to convince friends and family to take it seriously. We hope it helps!
Our latest blog post is aimed at people who ‘get it’ about online privacy, but who struggle to convince friends and family to take it seriously. We hope it helps!
I don’t know how old you are, so I’ll just have to state my experience here. I’ll liken it to television, because with the way Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, etc., have become some of the most visited sites on the Internet, it’s likely that people are using a lot of these devices like TVs.
Commercials have been part of TV since the beginning. First it was sponsorships (if you watch old shows, you’ll find sponsor segments not dissimilar to modern YouTube), then slowly we transitioned into commercial breaks. Then we started doing both - product placements being the biggest ones, but also some shows that still had sponsors. Game shows and news shows are notable for this. If you wanted to avoid commercials, you either timeshifted (VCR, DVR, etc), or you watched PBS - except that PBS has not only their begathons, but for the last 30 years has had what amount to sponsorships and commercials between programs.
And when you got the opportunity to pay for TV, cable first was educational and ad-free. Now, there’s just as many commercials, and you’re paying for it monthly.
Radio was the same way as TV. Dragnet was sponsored by a cigarette company, Sherlock Holmes by a winemaker. And then there were ad spots. If you listen to terrestrial radio still, you’ll find commercials. I don’t know if any of the satellite providers have started running ads, but I wouldn’t be shocked.
Newspapers before that were ad-filled too. You bought the newspaper knowing that fact. Comic books had (and have!) ads. Magazines are another ad vector.
We’ve been bombarded by ads for so long as a part of media that they blend into the background. And for my own self, yes, the commercials are annoying and I have always pirated or timeshifted to avoid them across all media, but I don’t really feel the same level of hate that I do for the tracking and privacy concerns. People don’t object to advertisements - look at QVC and HSN. What we need to do is shift the conversation away from “ad blocking” over to “privacy protection”.
Traditional advertising whether on a billboard, magazine page, radio, TV are benign afaic, annoying, but benign. Advertising on the internet is an insidious evil because of what is happening behind all those pretty little pictures. Not only are they attempting to sell you product, they are stealing your data to bolster the profits of said company, without giving you due compensation. If my data is so valuable to corporate America, then it’s worth a mint to me and until they cough up the $value$ I determine for my data created with my labor, I’m going to keep as much of my data out of their hands.
I’m old enough to remember the web being primarily text, and turning off automatic image loading being a good way to see fewer ads. I’m old enough to remember popup windows and popup blocking.
I suppose the underlying issue is that if something I don’t like happens on my computer, my first thought is to look for a way to change it, and most people don’t think about computers that way. I’m sad that most people don’t think about computers that way.