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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community based ads (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by yams@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Now I'm against ads like everyone else, but if a website needs ads to survive why not just use a system that doesn't violate user privacy? I understand it might be more efficient to track individuals however if one were to just use site/topic specific ads wouldn't that offer a degree of privacy? Idk please give me your opinion.

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[–] zksmk 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Those are called context-based ads or contextual targeting.

The downside is it needs human intervention. It's hard to automate it online, without it preserving the typical track-y nature of online ads (the ads would still be getting served from an ad server to the browser directly, and therefore still no privacy.

It works if the ads are hard coded into the webpage by the publisher server-side, but then the advertiser has no idea how many views the ad got, and therefore how much to pay for the ad space... which means the advertiser needs human intervention to decide how much to pay by a guesstimate, which means this whole scheme can't work for small random websites in an automated fashion.

It might, and that's a mighty precarious might, work with some kind of crazy blockchain scheme (y'know, that whole distributed consensus thing... lol... an actual use for blockchain for once?!), but unlikely, very unlikely....

Basically , I'm all for it as an alternative to donations or volunteering if they aren't possible , but you need to actually attract advertisers that want to advertise on your website first.