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

They'll still surveil even if you pay for the product. Why wouldn't they? It's an additional income stream.

Even websites without ads often have tracking and fingerprinting simply for their own marketing efforts and security features.

> 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."

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.

Advertising doesn't require surveillance though.

  > but as long as advertising is how folks make money on the web

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.

are apps and phones more private?

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.