From time to time, important news gets overshadowed by other headlines, even though it could have a profound impact on our (online) world. To most of us, few things are more bothersome than the dreaded cookie banners. On countless websites, you’re confronted with a pesky pop-up urging you to agree to something. You end up consenting without really knowing what it is. If you try to figure out what’s going on, you quickly get lost among the often hundreds of “partners” who want access to your personal data. Even if you do give your consent, it’s questionable whether you truly understand what you’re agreeing to.
Someone from a developing nation told me that hating advertising is absolutely a luxury of only wealthy nations. Without ad supported formats LATAM, EMEA, and APAC would have far less access to entertainment and information. It made me reexamine how much of my thoughts on this are privileged.
It’s not about advertising. It’s about spying on our online lives. Not the same thing.
Yeah but that’s not what I was talking about. I too do all the necessary fiddling to try and reduce the amount of fingerprinting an advertiser can do to me. That said, I’m a social butterfly so I have every kind of major social media and chat app because I have to.
Then what are you talking about? I didn’t downvote your post, but probably like people who did, I have trouble understanding your point. Everyone online - privileged and underprivileged alike - is under omnipresent surveillance of countless actors. Until very recently this was completely unregulated. Information about our behavior, interests, opinions, relations, health, anxieties and dumb shit we post in moments of confusion, is gathered, sold, recombined and resold. The rich and powerful are doing it in hope of gaining ability to predict and change our behavior - i.e. gain more power over us. So just because you are more privileged then some, you should not care? Or not appreciate that something good, even if small and insufficient, happened about this awful situation?
As if there’s no other way.
This sounds like a far-fetched excuse, advertising is ugly, obnoxious and poisonous.
It has zero qualities.
At the moment there’s no other way that makes sense for the companies looking at these regions. The reality is that the infrastructure to deliver digital goods is that it costs the same no matter where you’re delivering those goods to. So if people in that region have such a weak currency, they’re paying you one 100 th of what say France is paying for something then offering the service to them maybe an unprofitable venture overall. That said, I’m not a businessman because I fucking hate this kind of shit, but the guy’s comment really made me stop and observe my own bias.
You already get the benefit of lower prices for digital products that have the same production cost regarless of where it is sold. I understand that your wages are lower, but I can not like paying a lot more for the same services/
Generally, you wouldn’t see things like Netflix and HBO enter Latin America without ad supported versions.