1V1vuio0pswjnm7·Sep 28, 2021
"At this point if you have even the most basic connections (US bank account, home owner, gps, insurance, a car) the more sophisticated tracking methods can still learn about you and reach you with a decent success rate."
Lots of younger people do not have all of the above. If everyone had all the above, then the statment would not contain "if", it would be a given. But lets assume every living person can be "learned about" and "reached". That does not necessarily mean every person is worth learning about or reaching. This sounds very much like a person with a heap of surveillance data trying to make it sound valuable.
"It's just that most companies are using crap ad tech."
As an unwise HN commenter once said, "The market has spoken." :)
"... and reach you with a decent success rate."
How effective is "decent".
Why should I pay for th
Read the rest
is.
No doubt people are working hard trying to improve surveillance and are making progress against users who havent a clue whats going on, nor any interest in getting one. Kudos for the easy victory. Like shooting fish in a barrel.
But whats the point in trying to surveil someone like Mr Peguero. Hes not hiding his identity or location, or his preferences (Silicon Valley is garbage).
If "adtech" surveillance succeeds against someone blocking Google IPs, then what. Whats the end game.
Anyone who is willing to take the time to block Big Tech with a firewall is, IMHO, unlikely to be a very profitable ad target.
Advertisers should only care about people who are likely to spend money on their products/services. However people conducting blanket surveillance trying to pitch to advertisers ("adtech"), they are the ones who have an interest in arguing, honestly or dishonestly, that every last "identified" individual is a worthy ad target. If I am an advertiser, I am not going to be particularly interested in trying to advertise online to someone who is running OpenBSD or blocking Google IPs with nftables.
Individuals like the OP are proactively saying, "No, thank you." (The OP is actually saying "FU".)
Personally I find its quite easy to control/limit/stop data transfer initiated by websites/popular_browsers using a forward proxy. And I can use AI, too.
However I think blocking 8.8.8.8 and other Google IPs at the firewall is also good practice, not necessarily to stop ads/tracking by websites but to limit the users resources available to Google. Given their incentives and the fact we as users do not pay them like advertisers do, I think its naive to trust Google's employees will, for example, always honour the system DNS settings.
Unrelated but its possible that many OpenWRT users using default settings are actually pinging 8.8.8.8
https://github.com/openwrt/packages/blob/master/net/mwan3/fi...