[JacobSeated]

Would anonymization change your mind? I am not saying it should be required, because I do not think that personally. But, anonymization with sufficient entropy should presumably invalidate any argument someone might have against targeted ads, and at the same time allow website owners to pay their employees salleries, while covering server costs. Etc.

It seems Google is also working on making the "tracking" more or less client-side, in the browser, which should also measure into considerations in these discussions.

Regardless, in public spaces. E.g. Streets, restaurants, banks, I expect increased surveillance is more or less inevitable, and in the future, AI will also be leveraged to track people. There is a slight double standard in all this, because people are demonizing online tracking while tolerating tracking and surveillance in the physical world. Or, worse, they are simply flat against tracking, ignoring the necessity of it.

Let us say, even if Meta offered a completely ad-free experience, your data would still sit on their servers, and by definition you would still be tracked even when opted out. The only difference would be that your data would not be used to target you with ads. That is a pretty whimsical accomplishment imo.

Offering a service devoid of tracking is close to being a physical impossibility with current technology. Not even decentralization would sufficiently destroy your unique signature while using the internet, and you would not want it to, because if it did, it would also be hard for others to trust that you are the person you claim to be.

Political parties and governments could use your data against you, and even data collected by companies. Potentially political entities could use this for malicious purposes, and that is personally something I am more concerned about than tracking itself (or being shown targeted ads by individual companies for that matter).

[alkonaut]

To be clear it’s not “tracking” in the “tracking cookie” sense that is a problem. It’s the treading of PII with third parties. For example for use in ad-budding. I don’t mind meta knowing everything about me that I have told them or using that to show me ads from their own servers where no information reaches a third party.