Online privacy: what’s at stake | Hacker News Reader

Online privacy: what’s at stake

cdixon.org

22 pointsaj12 comments

It is widely believed that a flourishing democracy requires an independent, diverse, and financially solvent press.

Most of Europe has a socialized independent press, in Germany it's financed by a soon to be mandatory per-household charge (currently mandatory per-TV/Radio charge) and it's been mostly working out so far. Quite frankly I don't understand how you can call a company owned newspaper like the NY Times independent.

I think a non-profit press is one solution. It just doesn't seem to be the solution favored by Americans. Given that, it's probably best to have a selection of well written for profit news sites with different points of view (NYT, WSJ etc).

Great article. Rapleaf is clearly crossing the 'ick factor' boundary, and the NYT and WSJ writers who have been going after them for the past few months are definitely starting to get some traction.

The reality is that personal identification (as opposed to anonymized or pseudo-anonymized id) isn't necessary to drive the kind of value advertisers need to see ROI gains relative to the ways they buy today. Whether or not the ad industry can organize around a coherent strategy here is questionable, but there are tens of billions of dollars in incentive not to have regulatory agencies come in with an iron fist.

> "With print newspapers set to disappear in the next few years,"

I stopped reading after that. I'm sorry, but if you're going to start basing the rest of the article on crazy false projections, there's not going to be a lot of point.

If you follow the link, you'll see that quote came almost verbatim from the publisher of the New York Times.

...which is one newspaper in one particular country, who are betting (stupidly) on digital distribution.

Does it not surprise you that they're betting their money on a paywall site, and proclaiming that print newspapers will die? Of course they'd proclaim that! They want you to sign up to a subscription.

They get your money when you subscribe to their print paper too, you know. It's not like their business model actually requires the death of print.

I'd bet they would in theory get far higher margins if anyone did subscribe to their online paper. Also they get to look like they're ahead of the curve.

I'm just saying, it's hardly an unbiased opinion of where things are headed.

Privacy is the new sharing.

Good article, but I think the conclusion he makes is way off mark:

The good news is that the things users want to keep secret are almost always the least important things to online advertisers. It turns out that knowing people are trying to buy new washing machines or plane tickets to Hawaii is vastly more monetizeable than their names, who they were dating, or the dumb things they did in college.

Your preferences + your email address is extremely valuable to online advertisers. And an email address is generally a personal identifier. Well, all of mine are, even my gmail one is an identifier if you know what I do or what country I'm from as I have a fairly rare surname.

Agree re email. But this can be done in a right way and a wrong way. Right way = new york times explicitly asking you for your email upon registration and respecting email spam rules. Wrong way - data mining off facebook.

Unfortunately I can envision quite a few things that users may not want to be fully public (relationship status, family situation, sexual orientation) that would also be quite useful to advertisers.

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