(Rob Wilton)
There are services which state they are free, but "if you are not paying for something, then you are the product".
Then there are services, which have premium setting, where you are just not seeing ads but that most likely sell your data anyway.
And then there are services where you pay, and your data is sold and someone else who is profiled similar to you is seeing the ads.
Personalized are often really badly targeted, but it depends on your personal level of privacy protection.
Chrome pretty much completely tracks you.
Are those plugins you can install to protect you from trackers/ads trustworthy? There was a case where ad block plus actually tracked clicking information.
Third party companies can pay ad blocking companies, so that their ads actually get through.
It is getting almost impossible to avoid being tracked, or not give consent for things when you want to use the service. It is not really a genuine choice, if you can either consent or not use it.
It should be a basic thing that is available to not have ads on basic things like voicemail, TV,.. if you are willing to pay for it.
There are very little alternatives to tracking systems which are not by Google and not selling the data. In general whenever a service uses a third party service which sells data, there is no control over it and the only thing that can be (or legally must be) stated, is that the first party themselves does not use the data. Which is not very calming for the users.
Contracts are often enforceable hop by hop: User has a contract with Dropbox, Dropbox has one with AWS, and AWS screws up and data is breached, the user cannot really do much?
If we think that market forces are not operating correctly, is regulation an answer?
Cryptonomicon - Book ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon)
Non-creepy Laptops: https://puri.sm/
