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One grey area that I approve of is referral links, if they're obviously presented as such. For example if you read a tutorial on how to build a weather station
by joshvm 7y ago
One grey area that I approve of is referral links, if they're obviously presented as such.
For example if you read a tutorial on how to build a weather station and the author provides referral links to a component on Amazon, I'm happy to use those links.
Referral systems are open to abuse though, like the myriad of ultra specific comparison websites with tenuous "expert" reviews.
- rurp 7y agoI agree with this. An ad that is relevant and doesn't track, harass, or deceive users is reasonable in my opinion. There's no reason that most ads couldn't fit this model, but due to greed and laziness they mostly don't.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago@rurp- A lot of those referral links do have logging (seeing who visited / hoe many people have) and tracking (general location, some demographics). Is that okay to you?
- joshvm 7y agoIn my case, I guess I am? Obviously the site owner will get some logging results, and maybe they will try to optimise for that. I'm fine with a site owner knowing their demographic. That's potentially useful for other things, eg should you invest in localisation? Otherwise unless you have a vpn, your IP is going to be visible anyway. It probably depends on the referral site. For example, do Amazon have any reason to sell my data to anyone else? It's most valuable to them and they already have a decade+ of purchase and browsing history. I still think this a preferable situation to targeted ads which try to guess what I want.