The article is about an organization called Californians for Consumer Privacy. They use Google and Facebook trackers. The key quote is this:<p>“The irony of criticizing Facebook and Google whilst using their services is not lost on us, but this gets back to our rationale for the initiative: Californians should be able to use these services and be secure that their personal information is not being sold. Right now this is not possible,...We end up with this Faustian bargain,”<p>Which doesn't really ring true. To me it sounds like the founder doesn't have a technical background, probably contracted out development of the site, and just went with "whatever they normally do". Because... come on... it's not that hard to get stats on users without passing the info over to Google/Facebook. Certainly not hard to get enough stats to run an effective campaign.
Is content based advertising such an ineffective thing that we _need_ individually targeted advertising powered by trackers?<p>Anyone that does a search for shoes on Google gets ads for shoe retailers. Anyone going to Gizmodo gets the same ads for tech gadgets, maybe even refined by article. Etc, like the pre-internet days.<p>Maybe you think the ads are irrelevant and want the "better experience" that Google and FB profess, then you get to opt-in to tracking for refined ads. Maybe we can even have fine grained controls over the data/advertising such that we can control our privacy or that one weird search we did doesn't stalk us for months/years later.<p>edit: I would be so ok with this business model that as long as the content based ads of a given website respect my attention and security I would actually whitelist that website.
Isn't it the same as complaining about groups, that are against private funding of politicians election campaigns, giving money to politicians in order to change that system? It rings a bit hollow.
The nature of the internet makes online tracking and the minimization of user privacy a natural progression of where things inevitably head. We do, for the most part, live in a capitalistic world. The irony of a privacy advocacy group using the exact tech they’re supposed to advocate against reminds me of the argument for transparency: “Works, but only for the other guy please.”