The issue with online privacy isn’t that ads exist or that the entities we engage with are able to provide us services based on easily ascertained information.

The issue with online privacy isn’t that ads exist or that the entities we engage with are able to provide us services based on easily ascertained information. These recent anti-DDG articles seem to have a privacy-weakening agenda. Each tries to portray online tracking as just the casual use of uninvasive metrics to provide better services. This is not at all comparable to what ad networks do including thr large ad companies such as Google or Facebook/Meta. Those are companies that build such extensive profiling as to be harmful, a level of detail that we don’t even let our own government keep. The way the information is gathered is mostly opaque, utilises both online and offline sources and is certainly identifiable to the individual. We then see the consequences of this from straightforward harms: such as AA members having their real names revealed to each other. To larger harms such as how period tracking information is now being accessed post row vs wade being over turned.