Funding Choices – Google’s new tool for GDPR compliance and content monetization

I would not trust any opt-out offered by a company who's bottom line is directly dependent on violating people's privacy. The only opt-out that can be trusted is one that does send any network requests to the stalking company until consent is given.

That's the same reason why you wouldn't want to ask an alcoholic to guard a warehouse full of vodka at night, as you'd probably find a few empty bottles the next day. Same thing with an advertising company, even if they claim to respect your privacy, nothing guarantees they're not secretly looking at it anyway (and using it to adjust their ad tracking in a way that's undetectable from the outside, as to not be sued for it). It's even worse, because at least with alcohol you can count the bottles and find the empty ones. With data collection, if they're careful, you have no way to know whether your privacy has been violated.

Put Google's JS on my website and let google harvest all my user's information. Sounds about right. I don't see much difference between FB and Google these days.

Unless you let that alcoholic guard two warehouses, and allow him to have a few bottles from one of them. In that case, he'd be stupid to take from the one where's he not suppose to.

I'm still surprised no one has yet figured out a way to store sensitive data about personal interests and preferences on the client-side and let the client itself pull appropriate ads for the user to see. The quality of such a system should be comparable or better to server-side technologies with the right amount of tuning, and much less privacy-invading than existing approaches.

Personally I'd love to support more websites through ads if two conditions could be met:

- A way to ensure that ads don't try to harm me by e.g. leading me to websites serving malware or abusing my computer's resources (e.g. miners)

- A way to keep my privacy and control what data is collected about me (and who has access to that data)

Currently I simply can't turn off the ad-blocker even if I wanted as most sites become completely unusable and outright obnoxious by showing large, blinking or content-hiding ads, videos, popups or fake overlays. That's why most people use ad-blockers (IMHO). If ads are decent, relevant and non-obtrusive I personally would be happy to see them.

Also, go to any large website these days (without ad-blocker enabled) and check how many third-party trackers they load. There are many sites that send my data to more than 50 (!) different ad networks and partners, which is just insane.

So to give Google info about my visitors and later compete with me? No thanks.