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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

> What the latter side ignores is... basic human agency? Nobody has ever had a gun to their head and been forced to buy a salad spinner off of Amazon because they saw a banner ad or read a sponsored article on a recipe blog. I have regretted purchases I've made, and some of those were probably only made because of an advertisement. That's my fault, not the advertiser's. If you don't want to buy something in an ad, don't buy it. A company having more fine-grained detail about your socioeconomic status or third-party purchases does not remove any of your agency.

My agency is removed when the mechanisms used to serve those ads aggressively invade my privacy and surveil pretty much any and every activity I do in daily life. This happens regardless of whether I click the ad or not. How does one miss this side of the argument? And no, "use an adblocker" or "use ublock origin" does not fix the problem.

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I'm not even talking about the adtech surveillance aspect of it. The discussion is often about how advertising itself is, at its core or "fRoM fIRsT prInCiPLeS" or whatever, a Bad Thing. If I'm going to see ads I'd rather see ads for a specific product I might actually want to buy than for products I have no interest in or generic "hey did you know Coca-Cola exists?" brand ad nonsense. I'd love it if that happened without invasive surveillance or Samsung-level malware but I think that's besides the point.

But to your point, what agency of yours is removed when you buy a product known to actively spy on you, you take no measures to stop it, and that ends up with you being shown ads based on whatever you were browsing?

You seem to lack a fundamental understanding of adtech and the mechanisms surrounding it. I'm not trying to be rude or dismissive, but it goes much deeper than "I bought a product and am being tracked." Everything digital collects information from you, with the primary purpose of selling the data to advertisers that target based on that data. It's not, "I bought a smartfridge, so I get what I deserve." It's "I went to mcdonald's, my friend used the mcdonald's app, now mcdonald's knows a ton of shit about me and I will be served ads based on it." I do not want Mcdonald's to know anything about me. That is the agency I am losing, because I cannot do much about it. You may think that's harmless, but there's been articles written about how McDonald's in particular has so much ability to surveil they basically can see like a state. Or stories like this: https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossi...

There is no opting out without entirely opting out of every day life. Whatever viewpoint you're coming from always seems completely oblivious to this.

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