5 ms·

This is all well and good but as long as advertising is how folks make money on the web, the surveillance state will persist.

• GolfPopper 6mo ago
  At least the solution is obvious, even if the path to an ad-free web is not. And it's a solution that also has the advantage of being a solid public good.
  • anovikov 6mo ago
    The free internet of the workers and peasants? I mean, how will the websites make money?
    • GuinansEyebrows 6mo ago
      maybe we're better off without websites that only exist to make money.
      • colesantiago 6mo ago
        How do website owners pay for server costs if you think they shouldn't make money? Should everyone be in a loss when they run a website?
        • GuinansEyebrows 6mo ago
          i manage to do so using money i make elsewhere. the information i put on the internet is either of benefit to people or a matter of vanity. i don't afford special concern to people who want to use the internet for profit.
          • colesantiago 6mo ago
            So you have never sold anything, or participated with other people or groups that have sold anything online because you believe that they should not use the internet for profit?
            • deleted 6mo ago
              [deleted]
            • GuinansEyebrows 6mo ago
              this rhetoric is not compelling to me.
              • colesantiago 6mo ago
                This is not rhetoric and dodging a yes / no question is not an answer. You didn't deny it. So I am assuming you sold something or participated with other people or groups that have sold something for profit on the internet. > i manage to do so using money i make elsewhere And the place you work at most likely has an internet presence (highly likely) to sell products and services? You don't want your place of work to make money and not pay their server bills if they have an internet presence? You're living in a fantasy land in 2026.
        • qu4z-2 6mo ago
          I think if everyone with a website made a small financial loss on it, the web would be immeasurably better.
          • colesantiago 6mo ago
            How?
      • anovikov 6mo ago
        Well in the end of the day, everything exists to make money. Because if we remove that, only goal becomes direct power - violence and domination - and it's too dystopian.
    • jmorenoamor 6mo ago
      That's their problem to solve
    • wao0uuno 6mo ago
      Why do they have to make money?
      • colesantiago 6mo ago
        So that the website... stays online? Have you bought a domain before or anything online before?
        • wao0uuno 6mo ago
          Yes, I hosted a website for about two years. Paid for it from my own pocket. Had some fun, learned a few things. There is this disgusting belief in modern society that everything one does needs to generate money, otherwise it's not worth doing. Were we always like this?
          • colesantiago 6mo ago
            Yes. This predates websites, it's called commerce. Pick any medium, humans will always find a way to transact with one another, it's been like this for thousands of years. I don't understand why you think websites and the internet should be exempt from this? > > There is this disgusting belief in modern society that everything one does needs to generate money, otherwise it's not worth doing. Were we always like this? Forget websites. How are you going to pay the rent, or put food on the table for your children if you don't want to generate money? Unless you're retired with savings (some on HN are), have an inheritance windfall or are living on government money, then you can do things that don't need an income. Otherwise you need to generate an income.
            • anovikov 6mo ago
              Perhaps they have a point actually: if we assume that a significant proportion of society is retired with savings (and this is the case in the US - ~1% of population can afford a rich lifestyle on passive income alone, and ~5% can afford about a median lifestyle), then serving society may become a calling for those people - they need something to do after all - once everyone will understand that normal "jobs" became mostly harmful to society, or if not harmful, so poorly paid that anyone with even $2M in stocks will not be interested in doing them.
• ASalazarMX 6mo ago
  Mass surveillance has been the only thing where capitalists and communists wholeheartedly agreed to go all in. It has been pushed into law at every opportunity, done in grey areas when possible, and secretly when illegal. It's evident proof that information is power.
• oaweoifjwpo 6mo ago
  They'll still surveil even if you pay for the product. Why wouldn't they? It's an additional income stream.
  • jonahx 6mo ago
    > Why wouldn't they? It's an additional income stream. If customers cared, the additional income from being someone who didn't surveil could outstrip the income stream from surveilling.
    • nazgulsenpai 6mo ago
      I agree with you, and if you frequent tech circles you'd be under impression that the masses prioritize lack of surveillance and privacy. In my experience with IRL acquaintances, although anecdotal, exactly 0% of people I have spoken to where it's come up in conversation care at all about privacy or surveillance in general with the old "nothing to hide" fallacy.
      • jonahx 6mo ago
        That's my experience as well. However, I suspect a lot of it is not really understanding the situation, and not wanting to be bothered learning about it. In other words, I think it's possible those preferences could be changed with the right kind cultural or legal shifts. Even in my lifetime, I look at how massively public attitudes have changed around smoking, wearing seatbelts, and recycling, to take 3 examples. Each of those seemed equally immovable at one time.
      • keybored 6mo ago
        Technologists seem to lack professional integrity. This blasé blame-the-victim attitude is completely normalized but I don’t think it makes sense if you zoom out far enough. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757509 There are many exceptions and initiatives like truly altruistic OSS projects which aim to empower users. But by and large what we have ended up with is a divide between the tech-empowered and in-the-knows (surveillance etc.) contrasted with people who just want to access their photos on their phone and their computer. The everyman being enlightened to all the abstract BS in IT is untenable. But programmers aren’t stepping up to collectively protect all of us.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 6mo ago
  Advertising doesn't require surveillance though.
  • advael 6mo ago
    No, but surveillance is profitable outside of advertising, and advertising provides a perfect cover for surveillance: It's hard to make things that can separate third-party content from surveillance from third-party content for advertising, or for UI JS libraries for that matter
    • 2OEH8eoCRo0 6mo ago
      I'm tired of the feigned helplessness. Well gee this is the only way things can be. Internet doesn't work without surveillance! Guess you don't want the internet! /s Ads and surveillance are not inseparable. We don't need to accept surveillance as the price for a functional internet.
      • pixl97 6mo ago
        > feigned helplessness Of whom? Google and Meta are gigantic surveillance companies. It's their imperative that you keep allowing it. On top of that, most state actors love the idea of more surveillance. Then you have huge portions of the population that simply don't care or don't know better and aren't going to start directly paying for anything.
      • advael 6mo ago
        I don't think we disagree on anything about that, but it does take some recognition of the problem that advertising isn't just lending political, but also technical cover to surveillance
• heresie-dabord 6mo ago
  > advertising is how folks make money on the web, the surveillance state will persist. It is more pernicious. Those in the state who want to surveil will enlist those who want the obscene revenue from pervasive advertising. Working together, their lawyers will claim that "you never had any privacy or freedom anyway, so stop wriggling."
• nitwit005 6mo ago
  Even websites without ads often have tracking and fingerprinting simply for their own marketing efforts and security features.
• seydor 6mo ago
  are apps and phones more private?
  • wao0uuno 6mo ago
    Of course. Apple told me they care about my privacy.
• godelski 6mo ago
  > but as long as advertising is how folks make money on the web Then we make this impossible. This isn't a forum of marketers, this is a forum of engineers and makers. So... how do we make the next version of the internet fully private and prevent it from becoming overly centralized. How do we prevent companies like Google dictating the design with their browser dominance (chromium, not just Chrome)? We definitely have some solutions to some of these problems but also need to work on others. We can probably build something that is fully encrypted and peer to peer (example projects exist!) but maintaining decentralization is still an unsolved problem. There's also issues like how we get people to buy in. Most of the population doesn't understand the nuance but does recognize there is a problem. Hell, even more informed places like HN will bicker on about the problems in certain software yet not acknowledge that there exists no perfect solution[0]. We just end up arguing and nothing gets solved, things just stay the same. That's the absolute worst part! People that want the same things end up becoming divided simply because we're really bad at listening to one another[1]. I'm sure it'll continue to be a cat and mouse game, but it also feels like many have given up. I'm exhausted too. But I'm still angry and annoyed. I'm tired and exhausted of being so tired and exhausted. To constantly be dealing with dark patterns. To constantly have things that should take 30 seconds take 30 minutes because of absolutely unnecessary (and often intentional) roadblocks. I'm tired of everyone trying to move so fast that it makes everything move so slow. I don't know how we got to a place where we're just thickening the jell-o we're trying to run through. How every little shortcut we take just makes the jell-o thicker and we pat ourselves on the back. As we advance as a society the problems we have to solve only become more nuanced and complex, yet for some reason we've come to believe the they are simpler and easier to solve. We may have more powerful tools at hand, but a better tool doesn't make the problem you're trying to solve any less complex, it only can enable solving it or make some parts easier. The complexity is still in the problem and if we abstract it away too much then we only make things worse. IDK but somehow we've come to believe there are no such things as experts, and that we're all experts in everything. This wasn't possible in the past and our world is only more complicated, not less. [0] I mentioned chromium so I'll use Firefox vs Chromium as an example. Every time the comparison is brought up people say how Chromium is "more complete" while ignoring how "complete" is predominantly defined by Google. The reason they have this power is browser dominance. Can you use de-googled Chromium? I'm personally unconvinced. You might be able to use something which takes out all (known) trackers, but not a Chromium that is void of Google's influence nor a Chromium that doesn't perpetuate Google dominance. But does that mean Firefox is "better"? It all depends on how you define that, and that's where the conversation gets lost. There's no truthful answer to this question and it is all extremely complicated and nuanced. There's never going to be a browser that checks all the boxes. We must give some things up in the pursuit of other things. Arguing the way we currently do is absolutely nonsensical. [1] And by that, of course, I mean I'm a perfect listener and "you're" the problem. There's no other way to interpret me, my words are absolutely and unambiguously clear. Of course.