Google has a price for you. We found it.
The Price of Free Google Report.
Proton analyzed over 54,000 demographic profiles using 2025 ad auction data to estimate what advertisers pay to reach different types of Americans. The range is much wider than you might expect.
The average American generates about $1,605 a year in advertising value. A 35- to 44-year-old man in Bozeman, MT, without children, using a desktop and making high-value corporate searches, generates an estimated $17,929.30. An 18- to 24-year-old father in Fort Smith, AR, using an Android phone and making low-value searches, generates $31.05.
That’s a 577x difference between two people using the same free service.
https://proton.me/blog/what-is-your-data-worth-to-googleOpen linkView original on mander.xyz762
Comments189
Imagine if humanity would spend all this energy and effort into things that would actually benefit humanity world wide. Medicine and medical personnel, food research and production, education, housing, care for the elderly....
Oh man, this world could be so nice...
We're still basically monkeys with nukes.
AND impatience
I want to argue against that but that would take too much time.
Ape live short die fast time 4 individual ape priceless
AND impotence
Monkeys with nukes and powerful killer AI agents.
I think about this all the time. Tech company spends $19 billion more in ai, etc. Meanwhile, my local school system is firing teachers over a $500,000 shortfall.
I've said that endless times about the military industrial complex.
Earth's humanity could be so well cared for without that BS.
Are you saying Google search is not beneficial or Proton's price gauge report is not beneficial?
Nah, better using it for guns and nukes.
Gotta nuke something. 🤷
Well let's see...
I'm very curious about what my value to Google is, considering all that.
It's crazy that we have to go to that much effort just to have a reasonably pleasant online experience.
Your location data. You help with traffic notifications, harveating of networks in relation to your location. Even if you dont use maps.
What is bash x spot?
I got it reversed, it's spot x bash. But it's bash script that modifies the spotify client to remove all ads. Doesn't give you premium features, only removes ads. The script must also be run every time spotify updates.
Check it out.
I only drive to my work and back, no where else do I actually drive because I'm an introvert
Basically same,
Only places i have yet to tighten privacy (AFAIK) is email and chats (did make a burner acc on Discord and deleted the old one though). I dont use social media apart from the fediverse. All those accounts are deleted.
Update:
I do use K9 Mail and Thunderbird for email clients and F-droid and Aurora Store as an app store replacement.
I want to set up a Jellyfin local media server. As soon as I get my own apartment I'm going to take a serious crack at hosting my own home server for a lot of my needs.
Why wait? I moves with you!
Im running Jellyfin myself. Still havent ported it to my server tho, just running off a disk in my main PC. Whenever i get more storage on the server or just a proper one (currently just running an old laptop w like 500GB storage) I will try to move all of my socker containers and movies there.
I would want to write some kind of roadmap and define all the cloud based services id need, like NextCloud and other stuff id want available remotely, but that would be done tinkering since id have to configure a VPN for it 😬
Bro that's like my facebook PF...
Since Feb 2025 Google started using browser fingerprinting to track users. While you don't see the ads, they're still building a profile on you.
Pretty sure they started that well before 2025.
They specifically waited until after the inauguration to avoid legal pushback. The Google "Code Yellow" started in 2019 that eventually found this as the final solution.
Also, Ironfox and Cromite are awesome too!
Hopefully Ironfox and Librewolf both replace Firefox itself overtime somehow (Since Firefox new leadership has been enshittifying it), maybe Cromite can do same for Chromium too
What do you recommend for searches?
I have been using DuckDuckGo and SearXNG.
What defines advertising value to calculate this?
I dont buy anything online, Amazon or otherwise. And I dont engage with any ads unless by mistake. I suppose there is value in market research itself but nobody is making any sales revenue off somebody like me.
Everybody who thinks this is definitely having sales revenue made off of them. It needs to be restated forever in discussions like this that the metric for success in online advertising is not largely "oh shit, I could go for one of those right now".
Those are what stick out in our mind because we remember them. I really did see an ad for Roblox as a kid and immediately go start playing. But sooooo much of advertising is subconscious to a point that we couldn't possibly measure its true effect except by statistics.
Even beyond what we purchase: I've been bombarded with sponsorships for Raycons for years. Even with SponsorBlock on YouTube, sometimes they leak through. I will never buy a Raycon product. But I still occasionally talk about them, inadvertently advertising them, simply because they're a good punching bag. I watched a whole video reviewing what pieces of shit Raycons are. Fuck it: I'm talking about Raycon right now. And that's still among the worst-case scenarios for the advertiser. So much of advertising isn't "I want this product now" or even "this product looks desirable"; it's headspace.
The idea that advertisers' psychological manipulation just doesn't work on certain people needs to die and stay dead. If you saw it, it had an effect on you, and any effect is a better effect than nothing. If you realize an advertisement worked on you, the advertisement has failed part of its job.
People think they're not targets because they don't do certain things, but not being part of a group also says a lot about you! User blocking ads? This is information about you. User doesn't buy online? Also information about you. Everything is information and everything together is a valuable consumer profile
What about me? On the rare occasion I see an advertisement, I have no idea what I'm even seeing. I saw a commercial a few days ago when my adblock failed.
A woman running through a public park. A man hidden in bushes, in all black watching her with binoculars. More shots of her running. He slips down into the bushes. Screen goes black, and then plain white text. "He's watching".
WHAT THE HELL AM I EVEN SUPPOSED TO BUY???
If you're a woman, sexy jogging gear. If you're a man, binoculars and tick repellent. If you're nonbinary, donate to your local parks department to fund sidewalks and bushes.
It's just that simple.
The binoculars? Or maybe it was an ad for hot singles in your area?
My assumption would be it was an ad for a VPN or some sort of internet privacy service. An ad got through when it normally doesn't is what leads me to believe that.
Bill Hicks always had the best bit about this.
Ed Bernays pioneered this stuff, to the best of my knowledge.
The Century of Self - documentary by Adam Curtis
I mean, I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but the sentence “If you saw it, it had an effect on you, and any effect is a better effect than nothing” is just absolutely wrong. Getting a person to install an ad blocker is bad, getting a person to talk negatively about you is bad, like the whole “no press is bad press” thing is not true. You telling everyone you know that raycons are bad is directly bad for the company.
Scientists finding out that sodas are bad for you didn’t result in more soda sales, it resulted in fewer.
Companies absolutely do not want you talking shit about them, that’s literally why they use NPS to measure how well they’re doing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score
“If you realize an advertisement worked on you, the advertisement has failed part of its job.” Is also just wrong, but let’s argue one point at a time.
Finally “Everybody who thinks this is definitely having sales revenue made off of them” is such an all encompassing statement it will never be true. I think that the majority of companies I see advertisements for will never make sales revenue off of me. Why? Well many reasons, but you haven’t really bothered to think of why that could be the case and you’ve just made a wide all encompassing statement so I’m not really sure I want to bother. But I will make one point. People thinking about a product has nothing to do with spending money on that product. I’m sure that you know someone that talks to you about raycons all the time (oh wait, maybe that’s your friends). Do you (they) go out and spend money on raycons? Probably not. Same for talking about new cars, etc.
Sentiment matters, which is what a lot of advertisement is, not headspace.
For a great example of this, look at amazon with their Super Bowl ring advertisement (which I didn’t even see). Do you think that resulted in more sales or less?
I'm guilty of exactly this. I buy almost nothing online. But I recently got into weight lifting. I wanted good at home adjustable dumbbells. I have a fully stocked gym that I use four times a week, but when I miss a day, I want to at least do something.
Fast forward to me refusing to pay $1,000 for them. I am the target demographic described in the high income no kids male part and low and behold, a beautiful kind Lemming pointed out I can get the exact pair I had been looking for on Facebook marketplace cheaper (and new) on a website I'd never heard of.
Watching reviews, breakdowns, demos, all were imprinting in my mind that I want this particular set. Am I sucker? Maybe. Did I spend $250 on a product I use often and increases my overall quality of life? Definitely.
Yeah, you look at products long enough, and you start getting imprinted with what ends up looking like a reasonable price. Is it a good or bad thing? I don't know. But, like you said, you use it and it's worth it to you.
Personally, I got a regular set of 1" weights, two 1" dumbbell bars, and clips. And a cable column. That was way back during covid, and it helped get me through being at home a lot. Now I just go to a gym.
Ever since a nephew of Freud introduced concepts of Psychology into the Marketing world back in the mid XX century that advertising has shift mainly to work via psychological effects.
Perfect examples are perfume TV adverts (all about associating a perfume with sex and feeling sexy) and Car TV adverts (generally about associating a car with freedom, success and sometimes power).
So yeah, most of that shit is meant to just reside in your subconscious and subtly prod you towards a certain product or service at the right time, even if only because a certain brand name feels "familiar" or even "trustworthy" when you have to make a choice about a kind of product or service you don't usually buy.
This sounds like something the advertising world would want you to believe. It's in their interest to keep the public thinking that advertising works. It's good for their bottom line if people believe that even if you don't act on an ad immediately it's something that eventually nudges you.
Maybe that's not true. Maybe, in fact, sometimes advertising is a net negative because you're bombarded so often with an ad that you come to resent the company pushing it. I don't know what Raycon is, but based on what you've said I'm also not interested in ever giving them money. So, the worst case for the advertiser is that not only do their ads reduce sales from people who are reached by those ads, they also reduce sales in anybody those people talk to.
The idea that advertisers' psychological manipulation just works on people needs to die and stay dead. If you saw it, it had an effect on you, and if that effect is negative then it's obviously worse than nothing.
For every sane individual like yourself there’s 10 others that happily say “I kept getting these ads for this thing on Instagram so I decided to buy it to see if it’s any good.”
"i got manipulated" is how I hear it
Not that I think I'm not susceptible. I am. That's why I hate ads and do everything I can to avoid them.
I lean into it intentionally sometimes. Some of those things sponsor the things I like, and I want those things to be keep happening, so I'll buy some Pagoda egg rolls that I never would have touched otherwise.
That doesn't work with the really intrusive ads though.
How do you search for a restaurant or a barber when you’re in a city you’ve never been before? Or how do you rent a car on an airport in another country? You ask for a telephone book?
Walk up to somebody on the street and say "what's a good restaurant" or "my hair is out of control, I just got here and I need a haircut, stat"
I walk to the counter that says "rentals", because airports are used to this
Edit: sorry for answering the question I guess
I'm not the person you asked, but depending on the country you live, the good places like restaurants and markets may not be online, so we have to use good old word of mouth to find them. I used to search for all places online, but I had to learn the way of my ancestors to find the good stuff around here, because the places listed online are always the most expensive and presumptuous, while lacking actual quality.
But for things like electronics, cars and anything not available locally, it's really hard to even imagine viable anternatives to searching in the internet
No OP, but I have never done any of those things in your example.
Bullshit. Are you my 93 year old grandmother?
have you ever made a planned purchase? if so, it's almost imposible you were not influence by marketing even if it only was to narrow your choices to what's available in your market
marketing is EVERYWHERE… there is no escaping it unfortunately
Stripes, swoosh, "N" on shoes. Alligator or mini polo player on shirt. A horse hood ornament . A particular signature color, stitching. Ultrawealthy can recognize brands without logos.
I guess you can always buy the cheapest off-brand item without previous search...
sure but you cannot do that for every purchase in your life… and even the off-brands advertise and have exclusivity agreements for distribution
Like you don't research a place before you travel, or you just don't travel? Do you never research a product before purchasing or do you just work with whatever is available in your local store? If you're buying a car, is it just whatever is on the side of the road or do you search for expert reviews or reliability data?
Oh I was just talking about those particular examples.
I, for one, actively search out the reviews from entities that go out of their way to not be sponsored by the makers of the products they're reviewing.
Is phone book an ad? The fact I bought something does not mean I did it because ad convinced me. When one buys a car presume they check what is available on the market and select option based on comparison. Same with travel, you don’t visit place because you saw poster somewhere, you have limit time so you find a list of popular options and pick what to visit. It’s exactly what you called it - research and review. It’s people rating things helping you make your choices, not companies convincing this is what you want to buy by showing you 10 seconds stupid ass video. Or at least I hope. I never understood the concept of ads beyond informing that this business exists. From my perspective could be just brand name and what it sells. No difference to me. I always thought it would be much better to just have site list of businesses with description and reviews
I typically find those things on the map. Or in specialized apps. Don’t see how it’s ad driven revenue.
Also who is changing barbers every time or moving between cities every few weeks? It’s like once a year thing for most people, isn’t it?
the point was you may be using some advertised service even if you think you don't.
By chance, maybe, but I specifically don’t click on “Advertised” links in search results. Even if do, does it matter if I’d chose service anyway? Coz all it changes is money moved from one rich ass to another. It doesn’t make me buy what I didn’t plan to buy. Contrary, I might avoid products which are too pushy with ads. In place where I come from people used to say that good things don’t need advertisement. So to me this ad changes nothing. If tomorrow world stop making ads nothing changes to me - I do search, it gives me options, I do research and make a decision
Even just walking down the street looking for a place for lunch, the street signs are advertising to you.
my grandfather goes to the nearest building and asks. if they don't know he moves to the next person
I think this shows the fundamental misunderstanding here. It's not about money coming out of your bank account. While that might be the goal, at the end of the day they are not chasing you personally, they are chasing statistics. But it's more than just market statistics. It is about sales revenue, but not about you personally. A few points need to be made here:
#1: GOOGLE is making sales revenue off somebody like you. You are not necessarily the individual target of the direct revenue extraction, the advertisers are. You are the product that Google is selling to advertisers. Are you a shitty, unusable, defective-by-design product? Maybe. Is Google scamming advertisers by selling you to them? Maybe. The point is, that doesn't matter, except perhaps in a philosophical sense. The advertisers are willingly paying for you. They know the statistics, and they are still willing to pay a lot for you and your group, because statistically, they are convinced it benefits them. Google is getting money from the advertisers to provide whatever access to you and the rest of your group that they can.
#2: Somebody is making sales revenue off you directly. I don't know who that is, and maybe Google doesn't either, but to survive in this world as "A 35- to 44-year-old man in Bozeman, MT, without children, using a desktop and making high-value corporate searches" your money has to be going somewhere, and trying to find out and adjust where is an addictive and profitable passtime for Google, advertisers, and all other data brokers involved in this trade. Whether they actually succeed or not, they're going to have a hell of a time trying, and they're going to convince other people it's worthwhile for them to continue to try and they're going to get paid to do it no matter how fruitless it might seem. Again, it's not necessarily about you individually, it's about what they can sell you as.
#3: At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter whether the individual you actually buys anything. Even if you truly are totally DIY, off-grid and self-sufficient and dumping all your money into a pit under your mattress. If you do end up simply being an outlier in your particular demographic group, even if you're in a large category of outliers in that group, what matters is that the group buys stuff, and you're part of it, they don't know if you're the good part of the group or the bad part of the group, they want the whole group and they'll let it sort itself out. The other members of that group will more than make up for your lack of revenue stream. It's possible just one single member of that group will make up for literally every other wasted target in that group. These so-called "whales" are like the gold sifted out of thousands of tons of gravel and dirt. You don't care about how much gravel and dirt you went through, getting a higher percentage with much less effort out of a much smaller claim doesn't make you any richer, what matters is how much gold you ended up with. Would they like to narrow that group to remove outliers like you to get an even higher return on investment with even less effort? They would probably consider that an ideal. Does it really matter to their bottom line? Evidently not. This works for them and the people who pay them. It's why they're one of the richest companies in the world.
I've just had an epiphany (or maybe a half-baked showerthought) reading this thread.
All marketers are trying to sell people stuff, but if you think about it, what's the one thing in common that they're all trying to sell, and that they're presumably best at?
Their own services.
So who knows if this "advertising value" has any relationship with reality, or if it's just inflated bullshit marketers make up to sell themselves.
Also note how all the AI companies are either tech companies funded by advertising themselves, or funded by other tech companies who are funded by advertising. The goal of advertising is to convince you of things. They literally made a product designed to convince you of things, they made it really convincing, and then they convinced everyone AI is some world-changing, job-destroying, civilization-revolutionizing, future-defining hyperscale meta-technology that everybody has to have because it will simultaneously pit the entire world against each other and unify it into a post-scarcity tech utopia. And people are only now starting to do a double-take and actually start to look closer to see that it's just a cardboard cutout of artificial intelligence distilled from real people, with no actual intelligence behind it and quite possibly no real future.
How much someone is willing to spend to put an ad in front of you.
It's literally defined in the very first line of the article
This feels like a good post to mention AdNauseam! For anyone who wants an adblocker that helps more than just you! It basically blocks ads but also sends a click request to every ad that should have been loaded. The data being sent with this request contains spoofed garbage data that makes the tracking data sets lose value. It also keeps a funny metric on how much the estimated cost for your clicks is :)
it doesnt function with other adblockers though :(
It is a ublock fork, the best adblocker on desktop.
As Pear said, its built on top of uBlock Origin, im pretty sure it has all of these same functionality with element blocking and filters built in.
Ad networks have things like DoubleVerify, Human and Integral which can detect this, and it can cause account bans and captchas as well.
Account bans? Which accounts will be banned?
Social media accounts. The big social media platforms look for signs of automation (like auto clicking ads) and may lock your account for "spam" if they detect it.
You use an android because you like it
I use an android to drive advertising revenue down
We are not the same
I use an android because Apple has been insufferable about allowing users to run that they want to run and customize their phone how they want to customize their phone.
Google is now showing signs that they want to do the same.
I will move to a linux tablet, watch and a cellular wifi AP if I have to
You should try GrapheneOS. It has no Google crap installed by default, and if you install Play Services for apps that need it, it will be sandboxed so it can't track you or limit sideloading.
Not far enough. Google if fucking with their appstore, they eventually want it to be a walled garden. If that happens, developers will be hard-pressed to release versions for both Google and aurora (or f-droid or whatever)
I want chat, I want a working camera, a working web browser and to be able to make and take calls. That's all doable from Linux today, the battery life just really sucks.
GrapheneOS supports F-droid and essentially all APK files. The built in camera and SMS apps work and so do most IM apps and web browsers.
I'm already looking into it lol. From this point on, every device I purchase needs to run Linux.
As far as I can tell, we're getting close. The kernel needs more handheld power-saving techniques, and honestly, we need some more small-format current technology devices supported. Everyone is locking everything down.
I'd even roll my own SBC project, but the power situation is still too damn sketchy
We are getting very close. FEX and any Waydroid improvements ValvE upstreams will also help a ton for apps that depend on them. I've also had success with setting up suspend-on-sleep on older laptops battery-wise, so you could always try that in the meantime.
I've made it as hard as i can to track me. And I will continue to do so. Fuck advertisers.
At this point it has become my hobby
Yup. I made it my life’s work to deprive those cunts like Google of as much money as I can. Fuck them so hard
If I see an ad get though my layers of blockers, I see it as an embarrassment. Usually just means I got to refresh ublock.
Link is to a shit pdf on a proton drive. It's a basic description of the Google auction house. The prices they list are largely driven by the bids advertisers place, but that's not to say Google doesn't charge a bigger minimum for different demographic segments, they very much do. As does Facebook etc.
For example, one reason that parents are worth less is because of the products they listed. Diapers cost less than business lawyers, so the margins are much slimmer, so advertisers aren't going to bid as much for an ad placement.
It does miss one thing that is, in my opinion, one of the more revolting aspects of their auction house. As a bidder your dollar is worth less than a big company's dollar, even as little as one tenth. You could bid a million dollars on an ad space that Apple only bid $100001 on and you'd lose. That gap is dynamically calculated (at least in part) based on comparative search rankings.
Here's the text without their ad at the end:
I wonder what the value of an ad nauseum user is...
I need to start poisioning my data more and make it stupid expensive to advertise to me.
I just got this ad which just felt hilarious as I've no connections to Ghana
That you know of!
Yeah!
The sinister part is that this ad might not be for you.
Do you have a friend, family member, or coworker that has shared wifi and space with you that has a connection to Ghana? This is meant to get you taking to them about it
Nope, I have my own network that's locked down and not shared with anyone else. If I'm not at home, I'm on 5G, never public/work wi-fi
Could be a rough postcode guess, then. With lagtime.
My play store ads are all based on my VPN IP from weeks ago. Sounds like you're done well foiling the algos.
AdNauseaum.
But google still gets paid. The advertisers will just pump money into Google's coffers.
I think the amount would go down though if we all poisen our data, making it useless. :thinking_face:
That's just loss to the end user advertisers. Google still gets paid.
Just imagine how much people have to buy through ads to justify this amount of ad spending.
It's just Americans. Very vulnerable to suggestions and very wealthy at the same time.
Everyone is susceptible to advertising — the principles rely on fundamental human psychology, just the same as propaganda. However, Americans simultaneously are served more ads in their day-to-day than most other places, and also have a captured education system that is designed to create more unthinking consumers.
Americans are also the primary target it's all adjusted for. Ads are a social mechanism.
Even ads for non-American audiences sometimes copy ads aimed at Americans in various detail which doesn't make sense there.
Somewhat similar to perception of fashion differing between living in a big city or in a rural area. In a big city everything is happening around you. In a rural area you learn of things happening, might get interested, might not.
OK, I might be simplifying things.
"Wealthy"
Yeah. Americans are very wealthy in general. And very trigger happy for spending with their credit cards
K
Compared to the rest of the world - yeah. Be that 30 years ago or now. Things that are normal for Americans are something impractically good for the rest of the world.
I mean, there are median and average income maps and such on the web.
But I admit that everything is different, say, in most countries you can do fine without a car. Of what I've read and heard about USA, a car seems more important than a place to bunk (I mean, the whole concept of someone with financial problems sleeping in their car seems wild from a country where a car is something less basic than a living place).
America is gold-plated and even then only for top 5%
Wage slavery exists all over the globe, america included. Thinking Americans are "wealthy" while actual billionaires exist will ensure our globe never unites.
The ruling class united long ago, that's why they keep winning.
I think there's a degree of moving goalposts here.
A mid-XIX-century worker could die of hunger if they lost their job. There wouldn't be any social services or boarding houses for poor to feed their children, and their wife - you know. OK, I mean, there were boarding houses, but that was even worse than growing up in a poor family.
An early-XX-century worker was still in similar danger, but there were both organized labor and changing level of life. Working their way out of poverty being real and a lot more accessible press and education were some of the changes from the previous. And political rights too.
A mid-XX-century worker could basically live normally through hard work. And one could say that both in Warsaw block and in the West social nets were in place. In the third world not yet. !@#, me and writing about hard work.
"Wage slavery" of a person who'll die of hunger and of a person who'll feel bad from looking poor, but will have socialized options for food, board and even help with looking for a job, are two very different situations.
So let's please remember that we, Americans included, already sort of live in a socialist heaven compared to 100 years ago.
I think humanity is improving.
What country are you from? Clearly you aren't familiar with Americans' reality.
OK. Russia. Suppose I'm not.
By corporate searches, I think they mean searches for work.
I don't spend much discretionary income on stuff I search, that amount of advertising/SEO would be almost entirely wasted on my personal life. But my work related searches are very different, products and services I use for work projects add up to much more than I make in a year. I mostly use DDG though, fuck Google.
What's really crazy is that other than the fact all of this data is collected about you and freely sold among all these companies while it's nearly impossible to see your own information or try to correct inaccuracies. It's like a social credit score and online systems are very good at following people between devices.
They don't sell this data. It's too valuable to Google. They charge companies to display ads to people. They don't tell companies who is who so they can show them the ads themselves. That's why you can't access this data. No one can.
Yep, they are still very convinced I'm a senior citizen. Possibly because of some bureaucratic mixups from when my dad passed away; at least that's when I started getting AARP mailers, end of life planning and other such stuff intended for someone thirty years older than me
They're getting to you early.
You can, if you allow personalized ads.
Not that I believe for a second not allowing them changes a single thing, they just don't show it.
Imagine the amount of resources humanity could have if we just ended this garbage.
Helps explain why Microsoft has started injecting ads into the OS so aggressively.
You can't generate ad revenue from me if I have ad blockers.
Until you log into gmail and give them a fingerprint to share around. They still track you unfortunately.
Then how do you support our corporate overloads?
They'll just have to eat the money they already have.
Let them eat cash,
I'm beginning to think Tim Berners-Lee made a mistake inventing the WWW.
Honestly, bbs would be nice for a lot of reasons in ... Just such situations as these.
Little ,regional, kinda dumb.
The little mesh radios are pretty interesting technology for the time.
How much revenue is a person using an ad-blocker generating?
Probably near zero. Any ad that slips through is noticeable and it's a company I especially hate, and am less likely to ever do business with.
Still some, but less, I imagine.
I expect my price is through the floor. Living in Ireland with ad blocker enabled and Google set to disable ad tracking and personalized ad delivery. Even when I use their YouTube app and am compelled to see ads, many of them are bottom of the barrel garbage for pay to win games / casinos and outright scams because Google can't match a more lucrative campaign against me.
It's funny because I also listen to podcasts on Spotify and the podcasts are so bereft of matching campaigns the ad break starts and stops almost instantly. The only one that doesn't is Behind the Bastards which repeatedly inflicts 2 minutes of plugs for other Cool Zone Media podcasts that I'm habituated to auto skip through.
Fuck I’m getting rolex ads and nice vacations lately.
From the looks of it I do a lot of “high value” searches and I’m perpetually online due to work. I bet they fucking love me.
Clear cookies and use a vpn to book flights.
High-value, low-value
😑
Google is a femcel
This one is really interesting. If using a desktop is more valuable to advertisers, including online stores, why the fuck do all sites and services try to push people into using phones by degrading desktop experience!? That doesn't make much sense
The desktop is worth more because of the assumption that you’re a corporate buyer at work.
The choice to force you into an app has nothing to do with this at all
If desktop users are valued more, it's because advertisers pay more for them. If a store is willing to pay more to advertise to a desktop user, but also tries to prevent them from using the site, it sounds weird to me.
Yes they stated this.
Because the advertisers thing they’re corporate users at work
Corporate advertisers are more willing to pay to advertise to corporate buyers. Non-corporate, non-business personal users are not corporate buyers in this context so they benefit more from funneling them into an app for purposes unrelated to advertising to them.
Also higher value searches are probably done on desktop a bit more?
Phones have wider reach. There's more people doomscrolling on their phones on Instagram, Facebook and reddit, than there are on desktop. It's a numbers game.
Its wealthy people that know better/have the means to live life outside of their phone. So they make their purchases on a computer. It doesn't take too many wealthy people to wildly throw off the statistics.
Because there are more Android users
Don't wanna see you slacking doing low-value searches! Brb writing a a script generating some high-level net traffic, so they waste more money on me.
That's not wasting money, that's literally generating money for them.
Buying local and obscuring your searches are how you starve the beast.
Oh wait, i forgot i was stupid 😭
I mean it kinda depends. If too much company money is spent on fake net traffic companies will see online ads with google arent working properly and be less willing to give them money. But it would have to become a real issue. one single person cant really break the system
Only a third of people online even use an ad blocker.
You're taking about real effort to be a drop in bucket.
What i said duh
And the assholes only give me back like 2 bucks.
Tax them and turn that into a UBI.
Even if you got the full 1k that would never be enough to survive. Maybe a yearly stimulus check
UBI isn't about stopping working and not earning more money. It's about giving everyone a minimum so they can be picky, and jobs have to offer conditions that are literally better than nothing, as 'nothing' now comes with UBI.
There are also places where 1k is more than enough, and those places tend to be depopulated.
I wonder how much money people have wasted buying my data. I have ad blockers everywhere, I never see a single ad or sponsored message, if their system actually works it should be marked worthless.
Imagine if that $1600 a person was put to anything even remotely useful.
It would be interesting to calculate the user's value of the time wasted on this shit.
My guess is that online advertising has a negative return for society as a whole. It should be illegal.
This article eerily reminds me of myself. I just moved to West Virginia after having a child.
Strange place for an ad for reserving an email address (for up to 15 years?) but I think I'm good, thanks. Baby formula comes first.
Also their "e2e" is only in the browser, which is only e2e if they don't get a warrant, at which point it's trivial for them to get your browser to decrypt everything for them.
I wouldn't mind Proton if:
At least you're allowed to criticize them here, they haven't permeated anything to the level of Reddit communities where their official statements are given priority
Why would it be trivial for them to get access to your browser?
Because any webpage you load has total control of the content it serves, including the plaintext of your emails along with the keys you use to decrypt them.
e2e encryption in browser is effectively not e2e in any meaningful sense, this goes for any thing, but Proton are the worst for trying to convince you that they can't do this.
Software that is targeting people who might need encryption should be honest about it's own limitations.
I'm still not clear how they would access it.
Do you understand how web pages, servers & JavaScript work? If you don't understand how a server would access information you send it, this isn't a lack of knowledge about how encryption works but a lack of understanding about how the Internet works, which is fine but you're just going to have to trust me that a server can access data that you send it, because I'm not going to explain how the Internet works you can look that up unless you have a specific misunderstanding.
But then how is your child going to get [email protected] if you dont reserve their right to the shameful first email address??
Little Elon-𝕏11 is just going to have to find his own way in the world
That's not counting what they get to hand it over to terrorist, police state, zionazi governments, globally. Global West, Gulf states, Levant.
This is just a google adsense sales pitch, lots of those guys will be broke :D
Im priceless. Or worthless.
That might be what they pay Google to advertise to those groups. But do they manage to get that much profit out of those advertisements from those groups?
I know it is not true to say that "advertising doesn't work on me" but I wonder if the revenue the advertisers are getting out of that professional man in MT adds up to anywhere close to $17,929/yr worth of sales of their products/services.
Some people might think it's nonsense to pay more to reach some group than it gives directly, but there might be a degree of diffusion such that it's not.
Suppose, that computer-savvy woman is the source of advice for her many friends after trying some things out or whatever.
Suppose, that professional man uses occasionally a free tool for their task, that seems to be "first page in Google", but is in fact the most familiar from 8 things listed on that first page.
Then they use it again or their coworkers or friends know that the tool exists. Then eventually they might buy it.
It's all probabilities, but those that spread.
Why did I even write this, it's obvious.
What does this actually mean? An add pops up and the person says yes I’ll click and buy it?
No. It means an ad pops up and Google knows enough about you individually to say, “that was an extremely high value ad placement. That person was in your target demographic, has a history of similar purchases, and was actively searching for keywords you rank highly. Because of that, we’re going to charge you more for having placed your ad there rather than anyone else’s. Same if they click the ad.”
You just need to see the ad for the ad network to make money off it.
Wild that one of the most desirable regions, Durham NC, is within 1 hr of one of the least, Greensboro NC.
wow…
Ok but what actually is the issue? Whenever I ask this people respond things like oh they are making money off you. Again what is the actual issue?
Data collection. One of the reasons the Nazis were so successful was because countries like Germany and the Netherlands kept excellent records on people. As soon as they got access to those records, they were easily able to identify people as undesirables and send them off to the camps.
Today, Google collects data like this on you, and then the US government buys it off them, bypassing constitutional privacy protections. This is the one of the ways ICE is targeting people. (Feel free to replace with your local equivalent.)
In order to prevent things like this happening, we should prohibit the collection of the data in the first place.
OK so it's done. All the data scraping is illegal.
Now all that money they are making either comes directly out of our pockets or you don't use it any more. A lot of countries now cannot afford the internet as a complete service.
The thing is though that people are selfish so this isn't going to happen.
And it worked just fine without those services, or the Internet at all, for thousands of years. I'm not sure if the Internet has been a net positive or negative for society yet.
Here is 1. How Meta exposed vulnerable teens to get expolited by advertisers:
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/meta-allegedly-targeted-ads-at-teens-based-on-their-emotional-state/
Which is absolutely wrong and indefensible. This is about how you use the data though which absolutely should be heavily regulated.
Here's the thing though. If we stopped the actual data gathering then we would be paying for all internet services directly out of our pocket. Now I have disposable income so I don't mind doing that.
How is this not about data collection? Why do you think Meta is collecting data about teens mental conditions? It's definitely not the teens that are telling Meta that they are depressed themselves. No, instead Meta spends millions on researching human psychology, just so they can come up with whatever fuckep up algorithm that will enable them to gather that data.
Back in the day, when you went to a website, you would either see ads that are somewhat related to that website, or you would see ads that are completely random. Now, thanks to data collection, advertisers can exploit your personal habits or medical conditions to exploit you. Thanks to data collection, the US government can track womans period cycles to track if they are possibly pregnant, and if they might have had an abortion.
Who do you think is going to do the regulation? The money hungry corpos? Or the same US government that is currently hunting anyone who don't agree with them?
You are fundamentally wrong about data collection being a separate issue then how that data is used. One does not exist without the other.
The point I was making was that if no data was gathered then people would have to pay for internet services such as emails, search, maps etc. That is not going to happen because people don't want to put their hands in their pockets.
Why? Advertising was a thing way before digital data collection and personalized ads was a thing. Let's imagine a current world where data collection was illegal. Do you think Google would make no money in this scenario? I am pretty sure they could still sell ads even if they were doing no personalized data collection. They could sell these ads based on where those ads could be displayed. So, instead of advertisers targeting specific demographics based on their personal data, they would instead choose what kinds of websites or search results they would like to display their ads in. Problem solved, no?
It seems like you are either too young to remember this, or maybe forgotten about it because of the norm we have been living in for so long, but internet existed way before personalized data collection, screw that, way before even Google was a thing, and we were still able to use the internet. Who do you think trained all these slop genarators if not the pre-AI small hobbyist and enthusiast websites that shared their knowledge with the rest of the world, usually for free. Hell, you are literally on a decentralized network of forums, most of which has been running by people paying for the costs themselves, or with the help of donations.
I would argue, something as essential as an email address should be a government provided service, since you can't even login to your online government services, or can't even open bank accounts without one.
Targeted ads. I live in a third world country having its economy devastated by targeted foreign online gambling advertisements and I can tell you the consequences are severe and in large scale.
People can mass spam websites without data. Targeted ads are ads based on my search. Without this we would be paying for all internet services. Searching, email, maps everything you would need to pay for.
I didn't consent to this. If you're cool with people taking advantage of you without your consent then that's on you, but acting like exploiting people without any consent is somehow not an issue then you are extremely fucked in the head.
But if you use it then you really did consent to it. It's right there in the t&C's.
On an aside, if I have to suffer ads I would rather have ads which are about things I am interested in.
I did not consent to anything, I did not agree to any terms and conditions. Consent is active, not passive. Companies like Google and Meta are also tracking you regardless of whether or not you are using their service through other websites. Again, I did not consent, I am not using their service. Stop defending predatory, rapist behavior.
That's the point though. If you do not consent then do not use.
I'm not using Google or Meta services, but they are still tracking me. That's my point. Stop simping for corpo rapists.