Privacy on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population. Advertising on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population.
Yet any attempt to improve this situation is met with fierce resistance by the lucky 10% who know how to navigate their way around the falltraps. Because the internet shouldn’t have tracking! The internet shouldn’t have ads! And any step towards a compromise is a capital offense. I mean, if it slightly benefits the advertisers as well, then it must be evil.
It seems that no solution short of eliminating tracking and advertising on the web altogether is going to be accepted. That we live with an ad-supported web and that fact of life cannot be wished away or change overnight – who cares?
And every attempt to improve the status quo even marginally inevitably fails. So the horribly broken state we have today prevails.
This is so frustrating. I’m just happy I no longer have anything to do with that…
There's a middleground: privacy respecting ads (like Mozilla is pushing w/ PPA) and microtransactions per page (e.g. pay whatever they would've made through ads, so a fraction of penny per view). I'm okay with either and think we should have both.
I will happily put £10 a month into a pot, if I don't have to worry about how it gets distributed among the various instances I use and I think the same for lots of people, but someone needs to create that service.