Some of us are old enough to remember the web and other services before they had ads. I remember quite well when the first started showing up, people called them "banners", and it was infuriating.
I never accepted the change in the expectation that everything will now be ad supported. That's a fundamental, massive shift. You can still say no that imposition, it's not actually baked into any of the technology, just a bunch of bloat glued on afterwards.
Good question - though half of the internet has been built by pretending to offer your service for free. So either we keep doing that or we have to admit that our whole industry has been lying to their users.
The mental model for most people for so called free media is broadcast tv.
Yes there are ads. Yes I dislike those ads but they pay for the tv programming and broadcast.
No, broadcast tv does not keep a massive dossier on me or even know I exist.
Almost nobody expected nor understood that they are now "free from having privacy." It's not usual nor expected nor was it ever made clear. It was also done where there was no consent (shadow profiles for people without facebook accounts) and where consent was expressly withdrawn ("I now know what facebook does and would like you to close my account and delete all data and all backups of data relating to me"). Wildly evil stuff going on there, argue about what the law "says" all you like it's foul and should be illegal. It probably is illegal too if you haven't got billions to buy out of the problem. Que the apologists...
There are plenty of other media consumption businesses paid by advertising where you aren't being monitored in a manner the stasi could only dream of. Free printed newspapers supported by advertising have been around my entire life. This was the expectation.
Could facebook and google have grown if they had stated on their front page, every login that they were keeping records of everywhere you went on the internet? They wouldn't have got any traction whatsoever so they lied. Android will keep track of everywhere you go physically and add that to our file on you. Apple are better is just such BS you have to be a huge fanboy to swallow it.
Everyone concerned should be facing criminal charges for that kind of lying. Trying to claim they didn't know they were lying at the time and it was a bait and switch fraud instead.
Why would they allow someone using the service if they didn't get something back?
That's a good question, but once GDPR is in effect, the law is going to require that all consent is genuine, informed, active consent. A consequence of that is that someone must be able to withhold their consent without suffering for it, unless the thing they're consenting to is essential to whatever else they're doing.
If you're thinking this fundamentally undermines the current business model of sites like Facebook, you're probably right, and given the political rhetoric around the GDPR, it's possible that this was the intention of the EU from the start.
Ad revenue is essential to Facebook running. My guess is that FB will continue to work even without this other data just given what they know on the site.
Ad revenue may be essential to Facebook being commercially viable, but it's not required at all to provide the social networking features that users actually want.
My guess is that FB will continue to work even without this other data just given what they know on the site.
But if they have data acquired with users' consent for social networking purposes, they won't be allowed to process that data for purposes such as targeting ads without consent.
It would be some other perceived flaw. People always do this. For example, someone wants to make the environment better and starts working for it. Then he gets to hear 'he drives a car!'. Suddenly he is not credible anymore.
To me, this all or nothing attitude is what makes most humans quite dumb.
Can't the websites share that information with facebook by proxying that information?
It'd be the same workaround as for ads if you host them it's very hard for someone else to block them, especially if you use dynamically named divs, image sizes etc.
No. You’re not providing your Facebook cookie to the third party site. So, there is no way to associate your identity on example.com with your Facebook profile.
Think of it this way, if you have an authentication ticket, such as what is in a session cookie, then you have access to your account. If someone intercepted that ticket / cookie, they could maliciously act on your behalf and play around on your Facebook - just like you. Your browser therefore doesn’t send cookies to domains that aren’t specified as trusted by the originator of the cookie; I.e. third parties.
So example.com and Facebook wouldn’t be able to associate the two identities.
*except of course through some interesting trickery like browser fingerprinting.
I never said it would be worse than flash, but is that really the level we are holding ourselves to?
Flash was awful, an accessibility nightmare, a security nightmare, was/is not supported on many platforms/devices, and was horrible on battery life. I think we can absolutely do much much better than flash, but the answer is not to throw out the entire DOM and all of it's benefits and start over, the answer is to fix the problems that are easily fixable and settle on a good set of standards that we can have the option of ignoring for performance reasons in specific domains like games.
So websites now no longer simply want new users, they want unique,verified users.
I understand the need for such verification when a webmaster wants to prevent easy re-registrations of trolls and/or banned members, and it's still better than Google's invite only system for when they release something big like gmail or g+, but it's a dark pattern all the way.
I would keep the kid away from anyone who is not the same age as it, give or take 3 years.