This episode of Security Now covered Google’s plan to deprecate third party cookies and the reaction from advertising organizations and websites.
The articles and the opinions of the show hosts are that it may have negative or unintended consequences as rather than relying on Google’s proposed ad selection scheme being run on the client side (hiding information from the advertiser), instead they are demanding first party information from the sites regarding their user’s identification.
The article predicts that rather than privacy increasing, a majority of websites may demand user registration so they can collect personal details and force user consent to provide that data to advertisers.
What’s your opinion of website advertising, privacy, and data collection?
- Would you refuse to visit websites that force registration even if the account is free?
- What’s all the fuss about, you don’t care?
- Is advertising a necessary evil in fair trade for content?
- Would this limit your visiting of websites to only a narrow few you are willing to trade personal details for?
- Is this a bad thing for the internet experience as whole, or just another progression of technology?
- Is this no different from using any other technology platform that’s free (If it’s free, you’re the product)?
- Should website owners just accept a lower revenue model and adapt their business, rather than seeking higher / unfair revenues from privacy invasive practices of the past?
I think it boils down to the difference in how we consume these things. You typically go directly to a streaming service with the intent to browse and consume its content, but few people directly consume news sites. More often you’ll either end up on a particular site from a web search or from a link from an existing content aggregator like facebook, reddit, or lemmy. Since you don’t seek out a particular news platform for regular consumption you feel less inclined to pay an ongoing subscription.
That does raise an interesting idea to me though. What if instead of a normal month to month subscription a news service offered a pre-paid per article account. So, say 25 cents an article say and you can purchase 40 articles for $10, then each article you view deducts from your account. When you get low on remaining articles it can prompt you to top up your account or you can have it auto-renew. Personally I think I’d be far more inclined to something like that because the cost would scale based on how much I actually used the service rather than being an ongoing monthly cost for something I use very sporadically.
This is great problem solving and a creative idea. I would support this concept for sure. I mentioned in another reply how I keep resisting paying a local news agency a subscription, mostly because of what you said. Frequency.