This is the exact same logic as opting to not go through the hassle of registering to and casting your vote in your national elections (unless that physically isn't an option where you live) -- yes, your government isn't going to make a decision one way or another based on your vote alone. But will you affect the sociopolitical trends by whatever fraction of societal opinion you represent?

It may be you don't believe in democracy at all, and that's fair, but consumer action is the only way you can affect business decisions, by joining the decision-cohort you agree with more. Joining the opposite cohort because it's less work represents that you're okay with things continuing in that direction.

That said, I agree with the work it takes to navigate cookie banners being excessive (hence dark pattern), which is why my default browser config = ublock + consent-o-matic [1]

[1]: https://consentomatic.au.dk/

Sadly, there will be no signals at all, until it's too late. ICE has used online advertisement tracking to find their targets. They won't tell you anything about this, until they're already at your door with handcuffs. https://www.404media.co/cbp-tapped-into-the-online-advertisi...

You could use exactly the same argument for not bothering about doing things that pollute, generate landfill, or generally make things worse for society.

Its highly unlikely your vote will swing an election.

If you want easy things to do use cookie blocking extensions.

While I have no idea of the actual outcome, I’ll muddle through the extra step + thinking to opt-out where possible.

My own personal bend is that I do not want to be sold anything and I want anonymity where possible. We’re constantly being advertised to. Anything small action that I can take to deter that, or make the ads less personalized/interesting/distracting to me, is worth it. Even if I also will never knowingly click an ad.

It’s probably largely a control thing psychologically. With cookie banners specifically, I also don’t want to concede to dark patterns which make accepting easier than rejecting.

> I do use an ad blocker, and never click on ads. I feel like that action has a bigger return on investment than no clicking the cookie banner.

Right, but this is not solely about cookies or blocking ads. You also leave behind data which helps create a profile. AI is mass-creating profiles of everyone. Not everyone will have the same pattern, but information space is finite and they get more and more data about you over time. You may think this is not relevant for your use cases, but can you make this as prediction in the future?

Your ad blocker probably has a setting for cookie blocking too

Potential real-world consequences, while they do exist, are simply too subtle to realize. Some actual examples of cookies being used against people:

- CBP has admitted to buying location/advertising data from brokers to use in helping locate people to arrest

- Phishing and identity theft can be made easier due to cookies... security researchers have even demonstrated 2FA bypass techniques based on it

- Price discrimination - Consumer Reports found that flight prices can fluctuate based on your cookies. Sometimes they would even raise the price if you kept searching for routes, as an indication that you were in a hurry, thus likely willing to pay extra.

- Healthcare discrimination - Companies have been found to raise healthcare prices or deny coverage due to cookie data aggregated via brokers where external sites tracked a person's health conditions based on what pages they visited (examples: fertility, cancer and mental health support groups)

- AI models or automated systems using cookie data to predict housing stability, creditworthiness, and employment risk without ever seeing your resume or credit report directly

- ProPublica found that Facebook was allowing advertisers to target their housing ads based on specific age/race groups stored in cookies

- Some recruiting firms have used cookies to infer personality traits and political leanings. Your employment application could be rejected or deprioritized based on that

- Based on the previous examples, I think it is not a far-fetched idea that websites and services could deny you access altogether based on data revealed by a combination of things like your browser fingerprint + brokered cookie data, such as political affiliation, estimated income, race/gender, health situation, etc. Imagine for example, not being able to order pizza because you badmouthed their favorite president online.

It's also harder to change your mind later and go delete a bunch of specific cookies to opt out when you could have just said no from the beginning.

> Sadly, this still doesn't do anything to show me that I should opt out.

Then don't. No need to be sad about it.

> I, as an individual, am not going to have any effect on a business if I opt out or not. No business decision is going to be made because I opt out.

I do it more from a point of view of principal. I don't want following around the Internet by all and sundry who care to, any more than I want to be followed down a dar alley, for followed into Tesco by someone yelling “hey, Dave, I saw you went to the pub last night, my shop has some cheap spirits” or “hey, Dave, I saw you but a network switch the other week, do you want another one?”.

I also resist anything wrapped in many layers of dark patterns, and that describes almost all current ad tech.

> You might argue that it will matter if enough of us do it. Sure, that is true... but again, it won't matter if I do it or not. If N number of people opting out is enough to ruin the business model, then N-1 is surely enough as well. There is a 0% chance that I am the one who finally causes the system to collapse.

If your stats knowledge and reasoning accept that, then I've got an infinite compression scheme for you. It can compress anything including compressed anythings!

You are jumping between two factors of large numbers haphazardly from sentence fragment to sentence fragment, and the logic isn't following you. At some point N-1 might make a difference, and you could be that -1.

> I do use an ad blocker, and never click on ads.

To use your argument on tracking: but many people don't, so why do you bother? What makes you think you could be the +1/-1 here but not there? And by blocking ads you are blocking a fair portion of the tracking, in fact that is why I block ads much more than the ads themselves. I don't run sponsorblock for the other side of the same reason: that doesn't affect tracking at all.

> If having more information about me allows the website to charge more to show me an ad, and I never click any ads, then I am hopefully helping decrease the return advertisers get by using personal information.

And when the database eventually leaks, many others will have the extra information about you.

And again: by blocking the ads using most ad blockers (obs not all work the same ways) you are blocking at least some tracking.

--------

But again, if you don't want to block tracking, don't. No need to be sad that we've not convinced you with our arguments as to why we try to block it. I know other devs who take your attitude (that is simply isn't worth their effort), and many others who take mine or similar (when it isn't worth the effort, the information or product behind the mountain of “legitimate interest” checkboxes isn't worth the effort either so I'll just move on). Our threat and principal models can be different from ours without either of us being bothered by the other's choices here.

The business model of the websites I visit is not my problem. I block ads and trackers at multiple levels, very aggressively, and could not care less if some websites disappeared because of it. Perhaps then we will be left with a more sane and useful subset of the Internet.

I don't understand that thought process.

Why should I give up my data to any private entity?

If their business model depends on ads, then I say it should die.

[dead]

I’m glad you mention this. From today https://www.404media.co/cbp-tapped-into-the-online-advertisi...

>The effect of that data is serving you better ads.

On the contrary, the ads become worse, since they become better at trying to get me to buy some crap I don't need.

The more irrelevant to my profile they are, the better.

This is not just about "better ads" - though I don't understand the term better anyway here. This is about profiling people. Ads are just one benefit here. Profiles can be sold to get a better idea of the potential customer base.+

> It basically just powers product discovery in a giant global marketplace.

That is also incomplete. See how profiling led to ICE finding people - and ICE has a proven track record of executing US citizens. That is also a fact. It does not mean profiling led to the death of the people here, 1:1, but it meant that it is a contributing factor to the build-up of government troops killing people (which is very similar of Europe 1930s by the way).

Would you write your name down the side of your car?

I disagree, because there’s always a chunk of advertising that seems to be all about targeting low-income or people who aren’t financially savvy and I don’t think it’s ethical for an apparatus to take advantage of them.

Insurance is likely using that same data to adjust rates.

” it’s not a big deal. Just gets you better ads.”

I thought this was just ignorance.

Then I checked the profile. They ”have lots of experience with digital advertising “

This might’ve been true in 2012 but definitely is not the case today

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”

> Ok, can you give me a plausible example of what that harm could be?

There are countless ways the data collected about you can be used against you. Companies are using this data for everything from setting prices, to deciding which policies they'll apply to you, what services they'll offer or deny you, even shit as trivial as deciding how long they should leave you on hold when you call them on the phone. It's been used to deny people housing, or employment. It's even resulted in innocent people being arrested and investigated by law enforcement. This guy (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...) wasn't worried about Google tracking everywhere he went until he had to get his parents to clean out their savings to pay for a lawyer in order to prove his innocence.

AI is only going to make it easier for companies to leverage the massive amounts of data they've collected against us. Companies have been trying to get consumers to accept discriminatory pricing practices this data enables for a very long time (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41272-019-00224-3) and it looks like they're starting to wear us down. Digital price tags are becoming increasingly common. So are demands that consumers scan QR codes to get prices. Prices don't have to be set so high that they become unaffordable to you, they can just slowly eat away at more and more of your earnings.

The system is set up so that you will never know when or how the data being collected about you is used against you, but every company is looking to leverage that data to their advantage every chance they get. I get that it's easy to feel defeated and think "My ISP already sells my browsing history, Google chrome already collects all by browsing history, so who cares if I let 30 other random companies collect it too by accepting their tracking cookies on every website I visit?" but those companies collecting your data care very much and it's not because they have your best interests in mind. They aren't going through all the trouble to track you across every website you visit because it doesn't matter. Taking a few basic steps to help protect yourself is just the smart thing to do, especially when it's something as simple as using an ad blocker or an add-on to auto-reject the countless "Can we track you" requests.

I guess the thing that worries me is more so population effect versus direct personal ones. When companies know they can extract useful information from a source, there becomes a market for the information, which further incentivizes others to collect the information. The other thing is that even if you don't care about ads, I assume you care at least about browsing privacy. The main reason why GDPR was even passed was data privacy and security.It is difficult to know who has what personal information and for how long they keep it. Because of that, it just takes one breach where suddenly your email/username/personal information, along with all of your browsing activity, gets leaked. This wouldn't only be the ones that you purposely entered your email address in; it just takes one site to have your cookie "fingerprint" and email connected, and suddenly all the sites that recorded that fingerprint will have a record that you visited them. All in all, I agree that there is a low chance of personal harm to you, but I look at it like putting motor oil in the storm drain. "Low trust" cultures where people only care about the direct effects of actions to themselves instead of society as a whole always fare worse than cultures where everyone sets a standard of what is acceptable or not.

A plausible example: Your insurance company knows how much money you make, and how fast you drive, and takes this into account when setting your insurance bill. Even if you never thought you gave them this information.

And when the government uses that data to round you up? Sure maybe you aren't an immigrant... but are you in the next group they target, or the group after that?

Maybe not, but does that matter when they use an advertising profile to make your life hell before determining you're not in the problem group? Will they even bother to check? They already have been hassling and detaining citizens on similar sloppy suspicions around immigration.

Even if you're a perfect aryan and think you're safe from the current regime... will the next one have the same notion of perfect?

Preventing add-ons from auto-updating is helpful. Enshittification happens more often than serious security updates, especially when it comes to add-ons that do something very basic such as hide a banner.

We have all kinds of evidence for it (for example, here's an article about the data sold to insurance companies https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driv...) and we've had evidence for a very very long time (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/data-brokers-selling-personal-i...)

The data collected about us online is extensively used against us both online and offline. The multi-billion dollar industry around collecting and selling every scrap of data about you and your personal life didn't spring up because nobody was making money from it.

Certainly advertising is essential to the business model.

Essential is contextually defined by whoever implemented the that part of the front-end basically.

And there's Firefox Klar on Android. It forgets everything on exit. Some people call it a porn browser, but I've gotten used to it for general use when I don't need to log in somewhere.

Are you saying ”I don’t have anything to hide”?

All of your data starts affecting everything your data is used for.

You may get worse rates for a mortgage, or not get one at all. You may be denied insurance or insurance claims. Cherry-picked details of your online activities may be used against you in a court of law, if you ever find yourself in one for any reason (think custody).

These are the very mild examples from a somewhat functional society. In the other end of the spectrum, where societal breakdown is imminent, you have things like getting disappeared, thrown in a concentration camp, executed on your own front yard.

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing...

Also, gig workers get paid less when in a poor financial position. Harassed, detained when crossing borders.

These are the start, not the end.

IP is personal information, at least under GPDR in Europe.

https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/

Not the point, no one benefits by having an accurate (or non) dossier built on them, up for sale. The drawbacks may be infrequent and postponed but as history confirms, quite real.