You're not alone. Not at all. I'm also tired of the mentality that we need advertising or the internet would cease to exist. In my opinion, if you need invasive advertising revenue to exist, you don't need to be on the internet.
Advertisements are slowing everything down. Tracking us. Serving us malware in some cases. We don't need them. Pi-hole/adguard could be standard. I'd rather pay $200 more for a TV set than have one with "analytics." I'm sick of the ads and block as many as I can - Google's "unobtrusive ads" included.
Other people have a glass box with ants inside... I sometimes enjoy starting AdNauseam [1] inside a VM so that I can watch the machine click on all those ads that I never see (as long as the pi-hole works).
It feels a bit like a bonfire with other people's money ;)
Hardware like TVs are especially insidious because unlike a service you don't simply decide to stop using it one day and the ad revenue stops. Rather ad revenue continues for the lifetime of the TV and there is very little chance that a company will forgo that recurring ad revenue in exchange for an increase in up-front MSRP
"I'm also tired of the mentality that we need advertising of the internet would cease to exist."
IMO, it's not a mentality, it is just propaganda. When "tech" companies are advertising-supported intermediaries conducting internet surveillance, then they are in a position to control the flow of ideas across the wire. There is no limit on the number of self-interested, bad arguments that Silicon Valley can inject onto the internet as attempts to influence the www using public and protect its "business".
That's why I pirate; no reason to pay for these streaming companies, and have my personal info collected to be sold and receive ads. Just frak these companies, I'm tired of this.
Remember that old meme (I was not even called a meme at the time!) about the steps required to watch a genuine DVD compared with the ones required for a pirate file? We need an updated version.
I'm exhausted to the fact that we have no rights to our own data or bio-metrics.
Airline (TK and Delta do this) wants to roll out face recognition.. TAKE YOUR MASK OFF AND GIVE US YOUR FACE DATA. No explanation of opting out. (Turns out it's being used to implement exit controls at the US border)
Have you published anything regarding your smartwatch or speech recognition solutions? I'd be interested to read about your custom watch project and your offline speech recognition project if you've published anything about those.
In the last few years I've also made the switch to a Linux workstation, alternative Android OS (Calyx), pi-hole, etc in an attempt to take back some of my privacy. I also spent some time trying to build my own voice assistant using Mycroft AI but I found it lacking at the time. I just ordered a smartwatch a few days ago (after avoiding them for years) and I went with a simple model with an e-ink screen to hopefully give me some new functionality without demanding my attention. If you've shared any details about your projects I'd love to learn more about them.
I wanted to have WiFi connectivity and an e-ink display. But yes, I could have saved myself a lot of effort by purchasing a PineTime... It's just that I truly enjoyed the "work" of building my own.
This is an acceptable solution for those who are able and willing to put in the time and effort, but it entails essentially becoming a part-time sysadmin. Great if it’s a hobby; not great if it’s not.
We should have regulations so that everyone can enjoy this level of privacy easily.
It's worth considering a reduction in how much you watch. Let's be honest; you can just exist without being told to buy something every 15 minutes. Don't use services that force ads on paying customers, limit your passive screen time to no more than an hour per day, and find other things to do that advertising can't touch. Try being content not living vicariously through fictional characters or real people arguing with each other.
You're right, but I think that takes the spirit of the issue a bit too far. In my experience, it's highly dependent on where you live. Where I live, which is somewhere between urban and suburban, there really aren't enough ads plastered everywhere such that it's at all interrupting. I don't think most people outright hate every single form of advertising – it's the frequent interruption, obnoxious music, unreasonable audio volume, and over-repetition that frustrates people, not to mention the quite blatant social engineering present in at least half of TV commercials in America. In certain urban centers, yes, the outdoor advertising approaches the absurdity of TV commercials, but that by no means represents most livable places. Most reasonable people would agree that there is an acceptable level and forms of advertising.
No, it really doesn't take it too far. If anything, it doesn't go far enough.
You know those ads in Minority Report that track people viewing them? They're here now. Maybe not out on the street, and maybe not via retinal scan per se, but there certainly are eye tracking and facial recognition technologies watching to see if you're looking in the direction of indoor digital ads.
Yes they are out on the street. They were already discovered in electronic billboards in Belgium.
Retinal scan no but face scanning is very feasible. The Chinese government has made an art out of this and will have no qualms selling it to western companies.
Does an adblocker not solve this problem for you? I see very few advertisements day to day, but I go out of my way to not watch TV live and turn up to the cinema late because I dislike ads as much as it seems you do.
Im exhausted about people complaining about. It's a fact that targeted ads pay a lot better. This enables better services that are free to the end user. Most people just don't want to pay for things. 99% of facebook users have never paid meta a dime, yet they have the audacity to complain about a free service. There are paid social media alternatives, or even self hosted ones, but by and large they fail because certain industries can't sustain off of a end user paid model.
Ads are also a great progressive tool. Indirectly the rich pay more than the poor for the same service.
> I'm so tired of good, useful tools and services requiring a forfeit of my privacy in order to use them
You forgot free [w/ good & useful]. If the market could support paying for the services and tools instead of ads, businesses would move that way.
No matter what you think of the privacy aspects, I worry that we've decided to build the entire modern tech universe around the mother of all bubbles. All manner of bad business decisions seem to be running with the assumption that back-end ad/targeting/etc. revenue will eventually patch the hole in the sides of their business model.
Here's my theory for the bubble factor:
You can sort of divide the ad market into four quadrants.
1) Premium advertiser, premium content. Coke and Toyota paying to be on the front page of the New York Times etc.
2) Premium advertiser, low-grade content. A lot of this is remarketing, where that damned fridge you looked at once six months ago follows you across the web.
3) Low-grade advertiser, premium content. This is likely the rarest quadrant, as it's too expensive for amateurs to play in.
4) Low-grade advertiser and content. Think of the chumboxes at the bottom of news sites.
I feel like Quadrant 1 and 2 are surprisingly at risk.
Premium advertisers have experts running their campaigns and analytics up the wazoo. Eventually they're going to ask "Is it worth paying Google/Meta/etc. NN% of the total spend when we could probably call top-50 publishers directly and arrange a deal? They may also be more brand-sensitive, worried about blowback from inappropriate ad placement in Quadrant 2.
There is a real risk that the "better" sections of the ad market eventually graduate away from brokered networks, and eventually Google and Meta are left as a glorified Taboola. Is there a lot of money in there? Possibly, but I wonder how sustainable the money is. I suspect a lot of revenue from small advertisers is due to very poor inefficiency (bad campaign design, poorly managed spend, dark pattern tooling), and it runs a risk of death-spiraling as the quality of the network tanks.
Facebook is an interesting monetization problem because the product is so intensely based on network effects. A strategy to maximize ad revenue may end up coming at the cost of some user abandonment, which is the ultimate risk for their platform. They need to thread the needle of "how creepy can we be without making people leave."
it's even worse. I actively go out of my way to ensure I do not support these companies...and I petition all my friends to avoid them. I will offer them free training to get off the services. gladly would give a couple hours of my time to setup their own personal streaming services....just to see Disney cry a little...and Netflix and the rest of the moronic executive scum
A capitalist economy isn't the problem, the problem is that we have a capitalist government. Laws could be written to keep the amoral monsters who value increased profit over everything else (including human life) in check, but "our" representatives have been bought and paid for by companies who want to push ads and since money = votes oppressive multinational corporations have more power over our government than any of us do.
I'm so tired of my information being sold off to third parties in order to deliver ads.
I'm so tired of good, useful tools and services requiring a forfeit of my privacy in order to use them.
Does anyone else wish that they could just exist without being told to buy something every 15 waking minutes?