Technology

37711 readers

154 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

432

PSA: Reddit is Forcing Users to Accept Personalized Ads (www.macrumors.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

102 comments fedilink hide all child comments

TL;DR: Reddit is removing the option to opt out of ad personalization, targeting ads based on user activity. Some specific ad categories can still be limited, but there's no more opt-out option.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For those who are paranoid about this - some of you have a Facebook account, and half of you have a Google-filled smartphone. Privacy is important, but IMO there should be a balance between convenience and privacy - unless you actually do stuff that requires the utmost privacy or you need to stay fully anonymous everywhere as much as possible.

Division of identity - that is, having unique profiles/identities for different types of things you do on the web, using alias emails and anonymous email for certain things etc. - is a more viable strategy than trying to be 100% anonymous on the web.

Commercial social media that is free does and will track your activity on the site, whether for personalized ads or for algorithm purposes. Lemmy and Mastodon don't because they're FOSS, and don't run on ads (99.9% of the time).

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Apple is not considerably better for privacy either by rhe way. They just pay more for marketing that says they're more private than the rest of big tech.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Commercial social media that is free does and will track your activity on the site

I don't think many people have an issue with this. It's all the bullshit they pull to track you off the site that is the problem, and they do a lot of that.

Edit: and the selling of that information to third parties that you would never consent to. That's also a huge issue.