Consider yourself lucky, because often Bloatware is not so innocuous. Very far from it.
It is a heinous intrusion on our devices. Take Lenovo, for instance, with its addition of utterly useless fn hotkey pop-ups that covers the screen when hitting caps lock!
And MacOS is no better, as they actually completely break the caps lock key by adding a maddening delay to it. E.g. You have to press and hold for it to activate.
You could install a basic setup with a "apt install x x x" one-liner in ubuntu, and it would not take more than a few minutes to configure everything with sensible defaults.
The key here probably is, most people don't want to spend time learning enough about Postfix, Dovecot. Etc. To do that.
It's the average per user, not a precise figure that fits on every user, but nevertheless I have seen no evidence to suggest that it would be inaccurate so far. Maybe you can find some?
You could just opt out by using another platform – or better yet, self-host your own instance of Nextcloud, Mastodon, or similar. It's not like you are out of options.
Meta's services are far from essential.
I personally use and prefer Nextcloud, and it's actually better than the mainstream alternatives in some ways. E.g. You do not have to use Apple's notes app if you do not want it. I am tremendously irritated by the proprietary bloat that is being forced down users throats, mainly by companies such as Apple and Microsoft.
But still, why insist on dictating what other website owners and companies should do with their platforms? In our part of the world, I like the idea that this is "for each themself to decide" (at least to an extent). Interoperability and compatibility with other platforms is important to strive for.for security (Apple devices texting Android devices for example, https://www.android.com/get-the-message/).
Undeniably, however, proprietary communication platforms are not really necessary for anyone to use, because free software alternatives exist that are often better and more secure.
That, I suppose, is why ad-companies typically invest in anonymization. It may not be perfect, but it is good enough in terms of reaching an acceptable balance between respecting privacy and someone being able to monetize an app or a website imo.
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).
Your comparison is quite disgusting and grotesque of course, but let os ignore that for a moment and address the false idea that users are "paying with their privacy"; such opinions is probably the result of a number of logical fallacies.
There is no exchange going on, quite literally, and users get a service, basically for free. Whatever definition you make up to describe the business model does not change this fact.
In addition, so-called tracking is not the problem in itself, and especially so since users are anonymized. It is things like political misinformation and resulting manipulation that is problematic – not targeted ads themselves.
Risks continue to be profoundly exaggerated, and people, even those in the know, seem bend on propagating such misinformation. Please, let's stick to a factually based discussion.
Derailing the discussion with grotesque and perverted irrelevant comparisons of organ trading is not helpful.
Not to devalue the tireless work of authors, but we must also recognize that students in particular do not have enough money to pay for all these books.
At the same time, it can be argued that writing a single book, and selling it thousands times over, is a bit to "easy" in terms of ways to make money. The hard part is to get people to actually buy your book – it does not matter that you wrote the best book in the world if nobody gives you well deserved attention for it.
Bloggers suffer from the same problem, and it is not necessarily because their work is bad. The truth of the matter just is, nobody cares about quality information anymore (And I am guilty of this as well).
We want fast and summarized answers so we can move on to the important part: solving whatever concrete problem we are working on.
AI will probably delude the little remaining value of information even further, and at a point, nobody will manually write comprehensive information anymore. At least not unassisted by AI, and while the quality may suffer, we must also realize that we do not really need 100% accurate information. If we get a statistically significant amout of accurate AI provided information, then there is no need for anyone to write books anymore. It will be a complete unappreciated waste of their time, and nobody is going to buy them.
Even now that I am in a decent job, I still prefer not to buy books, instead relying on free sources on the internet (not piracy). If a given book/information is not available for free, then it is often not important enough for me to bother (note often – not always).
It is also a matter of prioritizing – reading a book takes me way too long, and the process is far-from comfortable due to my slow reading, and for that reason alone I tend to avoid reading entire books. It strikes me as an antiquated way to gain information even without AI. I may open a specific chapter of interest, but reading the entire thing is painfully tedious, and probably unnecessary.
The part about search engine optimization is most probably highly inaccurate; you do not need special SEO skills to rank highly for low-competition niches, so that's that.
The key part, I think: ...the business model focuses on quantity over quality...
This shows that you are dealing with inept spammers, and not someone that is particularly skilled at either SEO or mass-content creation. This model can be killed practically overnight if YouTube cought up on it.
Regardless of the reason, of course not acceptable. We have to insist on complete transparency, and life-time bans should always be liftable through some sort of dialogue. It is impossible to have a productive relationship with someone that abuses AI to conduct reviews that should clearly have been done by a human. Facebook cannot be trusted. Period. Their conduct is extremely abusive.
Same lack of proper review prevents people from restoring hacked accounts, even in cases where it is completely obvious that the accounts were hacked. E.g. The name and/or e-mail was changed by a user in a different country than the account owner.
If Facebook has access to such sophisticated AI, then it is quite amazing that they cannot deduce (even without AI) that an account was hacked. A set of if statements in their code should be enough to check for typical suspicious circumstances. E.g. The user is suddenly in a different country, and happen to change their name (highly unusual and very suspicious circumstances)!!
The privacy argument is extremely important, also in regards to avoiding tracking via ads, but I do not think bypassing or blocking ads is the way forward. In the free democratic world, we really should aim to do better than this, and instead try to actually develop privacy respecting alternatives that is not going to undermine the internet, further empower the big players, or hurt website owners unnecessarily – including Google/YouTube.
The obvious problem with such tools is that it may allow bypassing YouTube's ad-wall, and as a website owner I can see why that is problematic. It is bad enough that local GDPR interpretations can practically prevent website owners from monetizing their websites via interest based ads.
For YouTube it probably does not matter as much it would to smaller sites and bloggers, but it is still a violation of their TOS. So, if you want ad-free, consider simply paying.
Besides, I am personally not too worried what Google might be using my data for. Thankfully, Google is owned by a US-based company – I would be more worried if the company was placed in China, Russia, or any other country that does not care about freedom rights at all.
Of course, there is always the risk of data-leaks, and that's a valid point – but then why do we tolerate that the government has data on us!? That's even worse than a company tracking us!!
Thanks for this. It is similar to how I feel these days; I am currently learning vue.js, and working on 3 different components at the same time (I should probably have focused on a single component, but the boss kept finding things that needed improvements).
I also never worked with vue before. At one point I found myself utterly confused; opening up a file to do something, and instantly forgetting what I was doing, having to go back and re-read code. I was super tired after an near all-nighter at this point, but felt like I had sleep deprived induced dementia or something. In occasional brief moments, I was totally unable to focus or remember what I was doing. Very interesting feeling actually.
When you have not worked with something before, and you are on a deadline, it is just a pretty awful experience. Vue, however, is supposed to be simple and make things easier for the developer. Well, not if you come from a back-end PHP background, with only moderate JavaScript experience, and there is literally no documentation on how things work in the CMS I am currently working with. Have to read existing code and try to replicate things. It is nasty beyond nasty!
It is far more likely that it is due to numerous other causes, some even with proven links – there is, however, still no links to mobile phone use, and no known mechanism by which it could even happen. Non-Ionizing Radiation causing cancer is probably as close to a physical impossibility as you get.
Besides, there are numerous of other sources of radiation that is much stronger, including visible lights. You should ban visible light before you ban mobile phones! This stuff is ridiculous,
Aspartame is still fine, and it is one of the most researched substances. This type of reasoning, that you are using, is down right unscientific, conspiratorial, and dangerous.
And, what about switch statements? In theory it is said they should be faster, but I am not sure that's necessarily the case.
Another option would be to keep a database with the numbers indexed, and then compare with performing a database query.