For me, the problem that internet ads have that older media ads didn't is all the spying that comes with them. It's the spying that elevates them from being incredibly annoying to being just plain evil.
That's not true; there is nothing preventing anyone from serving ads without tracking, and I'm pretty sure there are solutions out there that do exactly that, even if they're not the most commonly used. Like I said, ads were viable in print, well before the internet.
Just <img href="/ad.png"> would work, and has no tracking and is essential the same as print media ads (or those YouTube sponsors for that matter). While this would probably net in less income than e.g. the Google ad stuff, it's completely viable and I'm sure there are people and companies doing something like that.
But uBlock will block that, because it's an adblocker and not a trackblocker, and that's clearly an ad. That's perfectly fine, but what I want is a trackblocker
It's pretty hard to do online ads without tracking because of how easy fraud is online. With newspaper, TV, and radio we put a bunch of effort into measuring the size of the audience, but those methods are far easier to subvert online.
If I tell you jefftk.com has 10k daily active users so you should pay me $500 to put a banner on the top of my site, should you believe me?
How do you know? For starters there's a bunch of solutions out there that specifically market "non-tracking" as a feature. I assume they're being used.
Come to think of it, you're on a site with track-free ads right now: the ycombinator launches/hiring posts really are just ads.
And whatever the status-quo exactly is right now, what I responded to was "if something is not sustainable without ads then it's not a good business model", and tracking really doesn't come in to play in discussing to what degree the very concept of ads is or isn't desirable, as that's just an entirely separate issue.
The vast majority of ads are supported by and come with tracking. Sure, there exist sites that do ads in a way that isn't so intrusive, but they're an extreme minority. It's also hard-to-impossible to tell if a site is tracking you or not.
So long as more than a tiny number of sites use ads that involve tracking, it's necessary to treat all sites as doing so.
> that specifically market "non-tracking" as a feature
Which ones? All the non-tracking, supposedly-GDPR-compliant ads/analytics out there just use a convoluted and overcomplicated interpretation of the GDPR to claim their solution complies while it ultimately doesn't, or stretch the "legitimate interest" definition quite a bit.
For example, if it's able to reidentify a user coming back to a website, then it doesn't matter if they hash the IP address 20 times which is salted with the outcome of a crystal ball and all under the supervision of a magic unicorn, it's still processing personal data for non-essential purposes and should require explicit consent.
I'm just sharing the experience that most of these "privacy" products (whether ads or analytics - the latter seem very popular on HN) only make that claim because of an outlandish interpretation of the GDPR or whatever privacy law they're trying to work around.
