Have you ever not clicked a link because you didn’t want to send a signal to an algorithm or the entity behind it? To avoid being targeted with more of the same, and with the ads that go with it?
If this happened to you even just once, this should be all it takes to convince you that online behavior tracking needs to stop.
Today, any website and app we read reads us back. In many cases, they even read us (that is, track our traces across the web) long after we left the site in question. Did we ever, collectively or individually, consent to any of this? I’d argue that we never meaningfully did. That this is non-consensual, no matter how many cookie banners or Terms of Service legalese documents we’re forced to click through.
We should not accept that our behavior is being tracked and analyzed wherever there’s a browser or a smartphone. This is not normal, and it’s not desirable, either.
Yet this replaced the social contract we had for funding news and media, which was pretty much “I trade a bit of my attention by seeing an ad in exchange for journalism getting funded.”
This, today, is not that. Not even close. This is a one-sided deal that takes advantage of the complexity of technological systems to hide the real trade-offs. And it needs to stop.
