Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertisers are panicking

I generally agree with the poster. A majority of "modern" companies that pop up have one of two strategies nowadays:

1. No sustainable business model, nothing to sell to users. Grow as fast as possible, get bought by one of the established megacorps.

2. The product is kind of there, but it is only an excuse to grab as much data as possible. Again nothing to sell to actual users.

The ad business has kind of become a market that trades among themselves, they don't sell anything but the promise for others to sell more, except now companies that mainly sell ads also buy advertisements for their business.

It's become a huge house of cards and you really have to wonder what the reason for their existence is.

Thinking purely as a customer the fact that I have just no way to just give a company my money and in turn they'll just leave me alone with all of their useless and hostile bull** is hugely frustrating and I think they deserve to go out of business if they truly have no other way to keep the shop running.

No, I do not want this single strawberry for free just for you to break into my house and photocopy as many documents as you can (and leak them to the public a few months later because you don't care a single bit about keeping your data secure)...

Informed consent is almost always lacking. 99.999% of people party to it do not understand this bargain. Do you fully understand it or just "in principle" - which is fine until the rubber hits the road.

"All you have to agree to is being warm, sensitive and caring to our clients." Fine. Prostitution should be legal and absolutely nobody should be subject to it on that basis of understanding what they're signing up for.

Properly informed consent is always crucial to this argument that people are fine with it. The dishonesty, bait and switch, ongoing secretiveness of it should not be necessary and would not happen if it were informed consent. But that consumer fraud being perpretrated 100% built google and facebook. There is not now nor has there ever been consent. Morever when consent is completely withdrawn - you delete your account - they keep a shadow account. To HELL with them and those who pretend all this is honest and above board because it just isn't.

No. It is in fact your sense of entitlement that makes us sick.

Update: ok, after checking danbruc's comment history, they probably weren't arguing for tracking, and the second paragraph should be read in third person... I'll take my downvotes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Advertising and marketing have been, at least as far as my cultural memory extends past the 80s, cynical and soul sucking. Always trying to figure out what was going on in people's heads and spit out some amalgam of an image or lifestyle or identity for people to latch onto and, critically, for businesses to exploit.

The wrapping paper has eternally been "what's wrong with matching a product to a customer" and justifiably that is a difficult point to disagree with. If we are to have products and customers it is almost self-evident that they should be harmonized. But the premise in question presupposes that a customer will have a need; to the degree that needs are invented as much as the product even to justify the expenditure of resources to create a product in the first place. In the end we loop back to the the previous paragraph. Creativity in service of what? pure exploitation.

Software Engineering is, or can be, an exceptionally creative profession. That alone isn't justification for whatever we design! We must be more careful.

I still cannot imagine that it is more effective to completely get to know me and subsequently serve me Makita ads for weeks because I looked for and bought a cordless drill months ago, then to serve me a context relevant ad. Like an SSD ad next to a benchmark article on SSDs. And that is on them, because they don't communicate. We should all try to make those companies fail. Our collective human attention is not something to be taken lightly. It was about time some company made a move that is pro their own paying users.

Reading this article also makes me feel like FB orchestrated this whole privacy horror, using consultants and lobbyists to convince the world they need tracking for good ads, because tracking is what FB does. But maybe we don't. I really wonder what happens if all these companies tell FB and the trackers: Let's see where this ends up, it may well be proven that they didn't need FB and its inane tracking in the first place. If you sell Mountain Bikes, just pay a website owner that lists MTB trails when you want some ads on their site. Disintermediation, it's what the internet is about. Sure there can and will be third party advertisers, but they could focus on site content rather than site visitors. And who knows, maybe I'll come to your site more often when I don't see that I blocked 79 trackers, downloaded 3 MB for some text and had to dig 3 pages into "options" for disabling tracking cookies finding out that I actually really can't.

You know who is a lookalike? All those other visitors on that site that targets a certain demographic.

“I don’t think anyone truly understands how many businesses in the world are 100% dependent on Facebook,” I think you have more problems when you are one of those companies, what's your plan B? Evidently you are not just dependent on FB, you are also dependent on something that the majority of your users really don't like.