| ▲ | autoexec 4 hours ago |
| > I click “accept the cookies” almost every time. I just personally don’t feel it’s worth the effort and cost to try to avoid it. the effort and cost to download an ad-blocker that automatically removes the prompt to accept/deny entirely is practically zero and the amount of clicks you'd save yourself would quickly exceed the clicks it took to install the blocker. > I just don’t think it is something that is worth stressing out about and fighting against. Maybe I am actually naive It seems like you are, but that's just how our brains work. We're very bad at judging long term and abstract risks, especially when the consequences and their connection to the cause are intentionally kept unclear. For example, when people's cars started collecting data on their driving habits and selling that data to insurance companies a lot of people saw their insurance rates go up, but none of the insurance companies said that it was because of the data collected from their cars. I'd be willing to bet the data being collected by tracking your
browsing history has already been screwing you over in various aspects of your life, online and offline, but you won't be told when it happens or why. |
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| ▲ | cortesoft 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > I'd be willing to bet the data being collected by tracking your browsing history has already been screwing you over in various aspects of your life, online and offline, but you won't be told when it happens or why. Ok, can you give me a plausible example of what that harm could be? This seems in line with the exact thing I said in my comment; every time I ask how it could harm me, I am given vague statements about tracking and data. Charging me more if they think I can afford it is surely a thing to worry about, but there are so many ways to do that without tracking that I already need to take actions to defend against that (comparison shopping, price history tools, etc). I am not saying I don’t think companies can take data they have access to and use it to extract more value from me… I am saying I don’t thing opting out of cookies is going to do much to change that, for better or worse. |
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| ▲ | autoexec 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | NewsaHackO 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | pocksuppet 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | chokma 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Another example: there are fallen countries that try to penalize abortion even in extreme cases (rape, incest) Having the data in your ad-exchange’s online profile that you bought a pregnancy test and a bus ticket to another state that allows abortion may be enough to get you jailed. |
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| ▲ | sophacles 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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? |
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| ▲ | gpvos 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > the effort and cost to download an ad-blocker that automatically removes the prompt to accept/deny entirely is practically zero and the amount of clicks you'd save yourself would quickly exceed the clicks it took to install the blocker. For less-often used, e.g., non-English language sites, these often leave a site in an unusable state, e.g., non-scrollable. I often have to go into the developer tools to fix a site manually, sometimes hunting for the element to fix if it's not body or html. |
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| ▲ | fiddlerwoaroof 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > the effort and cost to download an ad-blocker that automatically removes the prompt to accept/deny entirely is practically zero It's only zero if you don't need to interact with sites that break when you're running an adblocker. I run an ad-blocker nearly continuously, but there are all sorts of sites where I have to disable it in order to use the actual functionality of the site (and these are frequently sites I _have_ to interact with). |
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| ▲ | sdevonoes 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There’s a burden in ad blocker plugins: you never know when they will get compromised. Im comparison to that, simply ignoring the cookie baner is less effort imho |
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| ▲ | autoexec 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | bethekidyouwant 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| this is definitely happening and for some reason, no one has any clear evidence on it. Conspiracy theories are gossip for men. |
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