please stop spreading this false dichotomy, advertising existed before every move you made was tracked, and it was quite profitable. There is zero reason that such invasive bullshit is a requirement, period.
Are you on Facebook? Because the kind of information that you can gather about someone from a UDID pales in comparison to the kinds of information Facebook has about you. Privacy on the web was dead a long time ago...
Before every move you made was tracked, there were only a handful of companies that could deliver ads to people: a few TV stations, a few radio stations, and one local paper. The Yellow Pages. Maybe some billboards.
More competition and greater accountability (you can't really measure conversion rates for TV ads) means advertising services have to be more effective. Showing people ads for things they actually want is the best way to go about that.
Facebook et al do not owe you ANYTHING. The anti-tracking crowd seems to feel it's entitled to services while providing nothing of value in exchange. That's not how the market works. Your attention alone isn't worth much if a website can't show you ads you're likely to act on.
I don't like it either, which is why I run AdBlock and pay for things that are valuable to me - NYTimes, New Yorker, local paper, and phone (nothing sensitive on GMail so I don't care). As the saying goes, you're not the customer, you're the product.
Before every move you made was tracked, there were only a handful of companies that could deliver ads to people
Yes but that had nothing to do with tracking, it was just the nature of the medium. I would like to agree with your idea of tracking as payment, but I really can't, because:
a) Most of the time I don't have a choice. There's no option to pay them money and even if I pay them directly, they may still keep collecting tons of personal information about me on top of it.
b) It's sneaky. I don't really know what information they have and how they use it. I just have a couple of completely meaningless words from their privacy policy.
c) I don't know the price I'm paying.
The last point is the most important one. The value and the risk associated with a particular piece of information greatly depends on what other information it is combined with, but I can't control that. The company could get acquired tomorrow by some ad behemoth that knows a lot of other things about me, so the price I'm paying could change after the fact. That's not the way payment works. I have to know the price I'm agreeing to pay before I enter that contract.
c) Technically you do. It was in the privacy policy (or what was omitted from the privacy policy), and in the clause that says the privacy policy can change at any time without notice.
Deceptive, yes. Personally, I'd like to see more sites adopt privacy policies written like 37signals: http://37signals.com/privacy
If you have the option to become better at serving your customers, you do it. When you interact with a for-profit organization, they are a) extracting something of value from your or b) subsidizing the service with funds from a different business area that does.
Fundamentally, if a business owner can do something to more effectively serve his customers, he does it. If he runs a free service, those customers are advertisers.
We need to change consumer attitudes so people aren't opposed to paying for services they find valuable. When the general public is the customer instead of the product, it will find its voice more effective.
So all of this tracking is only necessary due to the web? What about retailers such as Target or Walmart? Their weekly fliers have been around longer than the web, yet they too are tracking us as much as they can in order to target their advertising. This has nothing to do with there being too many channels to choose from.
It is more likely due to the fact that advertisers have much more data available to them and much better ways to analyze that data now than they used to, so they can send these types of targeted (pregnancy ala Target) ads than they ever could before.
Advertisers in the Mad Men days would have done the same if they had the data and tech available to them back then. Don't blame them, it is their job to advertise and they are using everything in their means to make that effective.
My issue is with people saying that it's all because we're in some sort of new 'era' and that people are 'asking for it' because they are using free (+ advertising) services.
Target and Walmart are the counter-point, because they are doing the same sort of tracking on paying customers.
Advertising has always been targeted, but lately consumers have been making it more and more difficult for advertisers to do so. Compare the number of magazines, television shows, radio stations, or highway routes to the number of websites or apps available today. When most of your target demographic reads the same 5 magazines or watches the same couple dozen television shows, targeting is easy. Now that everyone has the ability to, essentially, plot their own course through consumable media and entertainment, targeting must follow suit.
