this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
267 points (97.5% liked)

Fediverse

33766 readers
200 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Invasive tracking and pay-for-play search engines has broken the internet. It’s time to reclaim our independence with the Small Web.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Sky ad technology can be developed out of the good of someone's heart. Maybe to show emergency alerts quickly. Disaster warnings. But then, it gets in the wrong hands.

We could say similar stuff about the internet. I don't think Tim Berner's Lee had bad intentions when founding the World Wide Web. It's a double edged sword. Same has happened with a lot. I even believe that God's sacrifice on the cross- an act of perfect love for all humanity- has been misused to control, manipulate and abuse. The guy who created dynamite wanted it to be used for safer mining practices, not a weapon. Many things we make as humans seems to be invented for good, but used for evil

Internet advertising wasn't initially that bad either. People would pay to have a button for their site to appear on another page. Or a video to play on a streaming site. Then someone thinks "let's actually make more relevant ads appear. This video is about videogames, let's show a videogame ad." Then: "We can see what videos this user likes, so we can get an idea that they like videogames, so let's show them videogame ads, even on other videos". And it eventually morphed into "We can see this user visited this videogame shop 1 month ago thanks to our other maps service. Let's show them adverts for that shop's sale". It's just crazy.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I certainly hope you're oversimplifying for the sake of expressing a core concept. Because the amount of tracking, and profile building goes far FAR beyond what you've just said.

It's like 1984 (the book) is tame by comparison.