Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

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From its start, Gmail conditioned us to trade privacy for free services (www.engadget.com)

submitted 7 months ago by minnix@lemux.minnix.dev to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

At that time I honestly doubt NetZero was scanning my emails to deliver targeted ads. Doing that required hiring teams of engineers to write the software to do the scanning, scoring, and then mapping advertisers to specific customer groups. Its non trivial.

Most ISPs didn't have the money or the foresight to do that.

[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 2 points 7 months ago

I don't know who NetZero are/were, but a number of UK ISPs were selling email and browser keywords to advertisers in the early aughts, including big players like BT and FreeServe. Some even tried to launch a project that would use DPI to inspect all web and email traffic and dynamically inject ads into email and webpages.