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.

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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
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Should we gatekeep adblockers? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by Timely_Jellyfish_2077@programming.dev to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Genuine question as I'm having a dilemma.

I've seen many of my friends using Chrome without any ad blockers. Most of them don't even know that there are things called extensions that can be installed. Whenever I use their laptops, I want to throw them away. I want to tell them about extensions and ad blockers.

But as much as we hate ads, they fuel the internet. Without them, the internet wouldn't be what it is today. If ad blocker users increase, there would be a massive change in the web, and everything may be paywalled.

So should we gatekeep ad blockers and enjoy an ad-free internet as a minority? It's not like they know what they're missing.

I advocate for FOSS, though. I will tell my friends to try Linux and dual-boot it, and suggest alternatives.

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[–] jmp242@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You should worry about audience capture / gifting from the patreon model for journalists. And the government control from public funded.

Idk the answer, but ads did give us more less biased news in broadcast news for a few decades.

[–] tacticalsugar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Idk the answer, but ads did give us more less biased news in broadcast news for a few decades.

Ad companies have lists of banned topics, effectively leading to news organizations being unable to talk about those topics without losing ad revenue. It's called keyword blocking, so you're actually getting biased news because of ads. It's a well-known advertising strategy to just avoid controversial topics entirely.