Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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I disagree. I see no problem with media companies locking their content behind a paywall, because that's their IP and they can do what they want with it. The reason they don't is because that would destroy their income since people will just go elsewhere for that information.
I have no problem paying for information, I have a problem with spreading my personal information all over the Internet. I honestly don't think these sites care too much about my personal information, but they need to get it to process recurring payments and whatnot. That just opens me up to security issues, so I choose to not make accounts.
So that's why I want some form of anonymous payment system where I can pay for access without divulging my personal info. I'd just load the browser with $X/month, and the browser would pay $Y/month for all of the users that use the browser to access that site that month. That keeps transaction costs low and preserves my personal info. The browser could also potentially provide anonymous demographic info since that's useful for curating content.
Unfortunately, no such payment network exists, or at least no such system is popular.
Adding that not all people can't affort to pay a monthly fee, maybe to one or two newspaper, but it's absurd tto create dozends of paid accounts to be informed. Worst in the case of research papers in some sites. That means that people have to pay a fee to dozends of sites or they remain ignorant abot important succeses in the world and maybe important informations for their studies. I'm from Spain and it's absurd for me to pay to Washington Post, NY Times and others for an ocasional consult an monthly fee. I'm an old retirée and need making money sudokus to reach the end of the month, paying already a lot of money, simply for the access to Internet. Fine for you when you can pay for every newspaper you visit for an information, but I have no regrets skipping the paywalls for an occasional piece of information.
That's totally fair.
That said, the current choices are:
That's a crappy set of options, so it's no wonder people opt for ad blockers since both alternatives involve sharing personal information (which is likely to be exposed in a breach).
Instead of that, I want these choices:
Advertisers still get relevant advertising, but they don't get the personal information, just data about which ads were accessed due to which categories. Users could choose which sites to pay for directly, and which to pay for via ads, the only change is that privacy is preserved.
I think that ads which are related to the content of the page you visit is the best solution, there are no adicional informacion needed, nor these from the browser or other sources, you visit a page with information related to computers and find ads and banners from computer brands. That is. It is absurd to see there food ads, because you visited before the catalogue of an supermarket which filled you with trackers. The only problem is surveillance advertising, which must be declared illegal, without these surveillance and tracking, ads ar not the problem and no more need of an half a dozen blockers and scripts to avoid this crap.