> Regardless of how you feel about data and surveillance and privacy or whatever, at least ad targeting has a long proven track record of actually delivering low real prices to consumers.
That really depends on how you define "real price", doesn't it? It's a price I'm not willing to pay.
I just feel like people keep talking about the "price" of privacy in abstract, and we've had decades for someone to make a case for material damages. It's so intellectually dishonest.
We've had the Equifax hack, it isn't even a problem with ads, just data gathering generally, and we're all looking around for real damages there, just people who hypothesize that something something a meaningless form of speculative identity theft may have led to some abstract damage. I hate Equifax, and I hate the data gathering they do, but I'm not going to be a blowhard and say, "there were unobservable damages here and they must pay random suckers."
The BP Horizon oil spill put oil on the shores of Lousiana, there's real mispricing of environmental damage. But that shit is real, oil and pollution are real, they inhabit the literal real world. Your website browsing history is imaginary.
Time and time again people have been given the opportunity to pay for an e-mail client or a search engine. Dozens of software services. Ads are so obviously the superior way for the average end user to pay for networked services, trading your imaginary data that is basically only valuable in aggregate and has been very successfully sold anonymously-in-aggregate in exchange for not paying $10/mo for every single little software service you need. And then, because everyone has free e-mail and search, the surplus is enjoyed by society as a whole, instead of some kleptocratic corporation. If anything Google should be making so much more money!
You're paying the price. You choose to pay the price literally every day, it's ridiculous. Every one of these activists pays the price, they are walking-talking hypocrites. It's so intellectually dishonest to say you're not willing to pay it. You use the Internet, you're paying the price, don't use the Internet if you don't want to pay the price. You do, and you will, and there's nothing you can do about it.
The Sidewalk Labs people are the best positioned to provide below-market housing to meet the demand for it. Generally, the people doing innovative stuff with housing will actually succeed to meet demands for things the status quo will not provide. This is not saying much! We should be arguing for more innovative uses of land and architecture. Nobody would force you to live in the Sidewalk Labs complex!
That really depends on how you define "real price", doesn't it? It's a price I'm not willing to pay.