I, as an individual, am not going to have any effect on a business if I opt out or not. No business decision is going to be made because I opt out.
You might argue that it will matter if enough of us do it. Sure, that is true... but again, it won't matter if I do it or not. If N number of people opting out is enough to ruin the business model, then N-1 is surely enough as well. There is a 0% chance that I am the one who finally causes the system to collapse.
I do use an ad blocker, and never click on ads. I feel like that action has a bigger return on investment than no clicking the cookie banner.
If having more information about me allows the website to charge more to show me an ad, and I never click any ads, then I am hopefully helping decrease the return advertisers get by using personal information.
It may be you don't believe in democracy at all, and that's fair, but consumer action is the only way you can affect business decisions, by joining the decision-cohort you agree with more. Joining the opposite cohort because it's less work represents that you're okay with things continuing in that direction.
That said, I agree with the work it takes to navigate cookie banners being excessive (hence dark pattern), which is why my default browser config = ublock + consent-o-matic [1]
> It may be you don't believe in democracy at all, and that's fair, but consumer action is the only way you can affect business decisions, by joining the decision-cohort you agree with more. Joining the opposite cohort because it's less work represents that you're okay with things continuing in that direction.
I actually believe even less in 'voting with your wallet' than in actual voting, for all the same reasons except the cost of 'voting' in this case is even higher (choosing an individually suboptimal option with my wallet hurts me directly even more than the cost of voting in an election does... e.g. choosing to pay more to avoid major corporations costs me every time I shop) I personally think the only way to avoid companies destroying the common good for profit is to price in the destruction to make it explicit (e.g. carbon taxes, pollution taxes, etc).
If I ever decide that it is no longer worth voting then I will probably leave the country under the expectation that other people like me giving up on voting are doing it for roughly the same reasons.
That may be true, particularly in the short term, but you might be hurting everyone else including yourself in the long term. Opening your wallet sends a signal to the receiving business to keep doing what they're doing, even if we all know it's bad.
There's also a cultural aspect to consider. It's normalized to not think of anything other than cost. That's why we have CAFOs, toxic plastic children's toys, landfills full of junk, etc... Pricing in the destruction might help, but at some point our culture needs to change. Outside of the occasional voting, we're all pretty powerless to enact top-down change like taxes and regulations, but we can all build culture.
That is exactly my point, though. The signal from my personal transactions isn't going to be enough to change anything. It will be drowned out by everyone else.
Of course, you are right that if enough people closed their wallet, then the business would have to change. However, that is STILL true even if I keep my wallet open. If N people stopping their shopping at a store would cause it to close/change its practices, then surely N-1 people stopping their shopping would also cause it to change. I could still keep shopping their, get the benefits while they last, and then switch once it finally goes out of business.
Of course, you might reasonably say, "Well, if everyone thought like you, then the change would never happen!" True, but my decision does not change anyone else's decision. The other people won't even know my choice, it isn't going to make other people boycott.
You could argue that people will listen to what I say, and I could influence them. That is true, but that is again independent of whether I actually 'vote with my wallet' or not. The influence I have on other people is the same whether I tell them not to shop there and I also don't shop there, or if I tell them not to shop there but secretly shop there myself.
Obviously there is some other morality at play here, but it isn't as simple as invoking the direct signal I am sending by choosing to shop somewhere or not.
Is it effective? Probably not in the short term, at least for the intended purposes, but secondary effects like personal growth, satisfaction, and social dynamics might be realized.
About voting with your wallet, I agree that it'd be best if companies actually had to pay for those externalities you mentioned. If you have spare money to spend, you can view not choosing the cheapest option as supporting or donating. That's what I sometimes do when e.g. buying locally instead of ordering from somewhere far for cheaper. I can get local faster and it's more convenient, so there's lazyness, but thinking about it as supporting helps me rationalize it further (and it is true). I don't think it really hurts me more than buying something else that I don't strictly need. I see indirect value in trying to uphold things I like.
Cooperation to the detriment of the individual in the animal world is exactly the same phenomenon in a much simpler system. That is widely and repeatedly evolved so we know for a fact that the game theory works out in a vacuum (ie without human cultural factors).
Any high trust cultural behavior is similar.
- Biology gives us the instinct to cooperate and the capacity for empathy.
- Capitalism provides the mechanism to scale that cooperation to millions of strangers.
- Institutions (laws/culture) provide the rules that prevent the "vacuum" from devolving into a state where the strongest exploit the weakest (which is actually what happens in nature when policing fails).
Therefore, in a capitalistic society, cooperation to the detriment of the individual (e.g., paying taxes, following labor safety rules) is not just a biological imperative; it is a social contract enforced by culture to allow the complex system to function. Without the cultural layer, the biological layer alone is insufficient to sustain a modern economy.
I do not think this should be analysed from the perspective of an individual but from the perspective of being part of a collective.
Individually we are pathetic naked monkeys, collectively we are mighty
And I think this is great. Often our convictions aren't, and those are what make us interesting! I also think it's interesting how/why we rationalize our irrational behaviors! For example, I generally feel the same way as you about voting, but I don't like living as (in my mind, at least) a defeatist. Also, I feel that if I didn't vote then I have no right to complain or have an opinion about the things I didn't vote on. So I go vote for those reasons.
But it isn't because my individual vote actually matters.
I mean, insomuch as any action I take is a consumer action, because I am a consumer, this is true. That's why Luigi'ing is a consumer action.
But 'vote with your wallet' is an illusion; you have no way of informing an entity why you are rejecting their service if you simply don't patronize them. On a ballot you're actively choosing another over them. As a consumer, you're otherwise 'invisible' to them.
Walking past Target out of rejection of their politics, for example, is no different to them than the person next to you walking by because they don't need anything from them at that moment (and realistically, they would probably prefer to just switch you for said politically/privacy-un-conscious person). It's still good to stick to your morals, but that alone isn't actually 'consumer action' in the way you mean it.
It requires a coordinated, public messaging campaign that a group is boycotting actively to have any impact on a business. Your individual action of not clicking on Accept Cookies does nothing to influence businesses.
We spent money on goods/services we choose, and receiving money is a very strong signal to a business. Not spending money is an extremely weak signal.
Opposites.
If you aren't worried about the US government having this, it's a sign of significant privilege and safety a lot of others don't have.
It's not possible to be a ghost, but it is possible to reduce your surface area in these systems, which is what I focus on. Denying tracking cookies is a single tool in this quite large toolbox.
Its highly unlikely your vote will swing an election.
If you want easy things to do use cookie blocking extensions.
These are all related to the collective action problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem). This is why we have regulations and rules and laws about things like pollution, because we CAN'T rely on everyone wanting to live in a clean world to make everyone not pollute.
Which is why those things need laws to create any meaningful change.
Right, but this is not solely about cookies or blocking ads. You also leave behind data which helps create a profile. AI is mass-creating profiles of everyone. Not everyone will have the same pattern, but information space is finite and they get more and more data about you over time. You may think this is not relevant for your use cases, but can you make this as prediction in the future?
I'm not a revolutionary taking up arms I'm a voter and a citizen in disagreement. Unless I am seen and counted, then being any of those things is worthless as well.
There is no value in hiding from the system while the system goes to hell and attacks everyone else.
My own personal bend is that I do not want to be sold anything and I want anonymity where possible. We’re constantly being advertised to. Anything small action that I can take to deter that, or make the ads less personalized/interesting/distracting to me, is worth it. Even if I also will never knowingly click an ad.
It’s probably largely a control thing psychologically. With cookie banners specifically, I also don’t want to concede to dark patterns which make accepting easier than rejecting.
You can always choose this no matter what ads they show you. In some ways, choosing to not be sold AFTER being shown ads might be more effective at shutting down that behavior than simply avoiding the ads entirely; forcing the company to pay to show you the ad that you ignore is costlier to them than simply not being able to show you the ad at all.
- CBP has admitted to buying location/advertising data from brokers to use in helping locate people to arrest
- Phishing and identity theft can be made easier due to cookies... security researchers have even demonstrated 2FA bypass techniques based on it
- Price discrimination - Consumer Reports found that flight prices can fluctuate based on your cookies. Sometimes they would even raise the price if you kept searching for routes, as an indication that you were in a hurry, thus likely willing to pay extra.
- Healthcare discrimination - Companies have been found to raise healthcare prices or deny coverage due to cookie data aggregated via brokers where external sites tracked a person's health conditions based on what pages they visited (examples: fertility, cancer and mental health support groups)
- AI models or automated systems using cookie data to predict housing stability, creditworthiness, and employment risk without ever seeing your resume or credit report directly
- ProPublica found that Facebook was allowing advertisers to target their housing ads based on specific age/race groups stored in cookies
- Some recruiting firms have used cookies to infer personality traits and political leanings. Your employment application could be rejected or deprioritized based on that
- Based on the previous examples, I think it is not a far-fetched idea that websites and services could deny you access altogether based on data revealed by a combination of things like your browser fingerprint + brokered cookie data, such as political affiliation, estimated income, race/gender, health situation, etc. Imagine for example, not being able to order pizza because you badmouthed their favorite president online.
It's also harder to change your mind later and go delete a bunch of specific cookies to opt out when you could have just said no from the beginning.
Would be nice if there was some other solution, like maybe encrypting the browser profile and then requiring a pin/password/biometric/something to unlock it on each start.
Many sites I use force email or SMS-based 2FA, sometimes in addition to "security questions" and/or have other multiple steps of authorization (like captchas) required; it's often not just a simple username/password for me.
Now multiply that by 25 different sites. Not happening.
https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/
And yes it often results in endless captcha loops.
Only Tor Browser can reliably fight with it.
Also, that EFF site only checks against other people who visited the same site, so the results are skewed IMO. The other comment that links to creepjs is what I consider the best available open source tool.
Saying you don't see an individual motive here to do anything just says that you don't see how interconnected everyone is in modern society.
Then don't. No need to be sad about it.
> I, as an individual, am not going to have any effect on a business if I opt out or not. No business decision is going to be made because I opt out.
I do it more from a point of view of principal. I don't want following around the Internet by all and sundry who care to, any more than I want to be followed down a dar alley, for followed into Tesco by someone yelling “hey, Dave, I saw you went to the pub last night, my shop has some cheap spirits” or “hey, Dave, I saw you but a network switch the other week, do you want another one?”.
I also resist anything wrapped in many layers of dark patterns, and that describes almost all current ad tech.
> You might argue that it will matter if enough of us do it. Sure, that is true... but again, it won't matter if I do it or not. If N number of people opting out is enough to ruin the business model, then N-1 is surely enough as well. There is a 0% chance that I am the one who finally causes the system to collapse.
If your stats knowledge and reasoning accept that, then I've got an infinite compression scheme for you. It can compress anything including compressed anythings!
You are jumping between two factors of large numbers haphazardly from sentence fragment to sentence fragment, and the logic isn't following you. At some point N-1 might make a difference, and you could be that -1.
> I do use an ad blocker, and never click on ads.
To use your argument on tracking: but many people don't, so why do you bother? What makes you think you could be the +1/-1 here but not there? And by blocking ads you are blocking a fair portion of the tracking, in fact that is why I block ads much more than the ads themselves. I don't run sponsorblock for the other side of the same reason: that doesn't affect tracking at all.
> If having more information about me allows the website to charge more to show me an ad, and I never click any ads, then I am hopefully helping decrease the return advertisers get by using personal information.
And when the database eventually leaks, many others will have the extra information about you.
And again: by blocking the ads using most ad blockers (obs not all work the same ways) you are blocking at least some tracking.
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But again, if you don't want to block tracking, don't. No need to be sad that we've not convinced you with our arguments as to why we try to block it. I know other devs who take your attitude (that is simply isn't worth their effort), and many others who take mine or similar (when it isn't worth the effort, the information or product behind the mountain of “legitimate interest” checkboxes isn't worth the effort either so I'll just move on). Our threat and principal models can be different from ours without either of us being bothered by the other's choices here.
Why should I give up my data to any private entity?
If their business model depends on ads, then I say it should die.
In theory, the government doesn't need the ad exchanges which have very lossy information. They have access to the ISPs and cell service providers, etc, with a warrant. Dictatorships like China and Russia don't need ad network data to be police states, they just use the core phone, internet and computer data.
But in this case, the US gov are using the insecure private data as a run-around to the warrant process. This is definitely unfortunate, and I think laws should be amended to prevent this workaround.
On the contrary, the ads become worse, since they become better at trying to get me to buy some crap I don't need.
The more irrelevant to my profile they are, the better.
> It basically just powers product discovery in a giant global marketplace.
That is also incomplete. See how profiling led to ICE finding people - and ICE has a proven track record of executing US citizens. That is also a fact. It does not mean profiling led to the death of the people here, 1:1, but it meant that it is a contributing factor to the build-up of government troops killing people (which is very similar of Europe 1930s by the way).
https://www.transportforireland.ie/getting-around/by-taxi/dr...
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Additionally, in plenty of European Countries, it's pretty common to write your name on your address: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/B01RP4/personal-name-plates-at-blo...
Writing it down would give more information to everyone else at all times.
What about video games? They only have utility in pleasure and the sedentary lifestyle associated with over-playing them is extremely harmful.
Sounds to me like you have some random things you decided you don't like and want to ban ads for them, not that you've done any thinking about utility (other than as a bad attempt at rationalizing your anti-some things campaign).
I thought this was just ignorance.
Then I checked the profile. They ”have lots of experience with digital advertising “
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”