Our Growing Obsession with Privacy and Its Potential Effects

With the rise of an ever-connected society, personal privacy has come to the forefront in concerns for many tech-minded people. With the rise of personal computers, smartphones, and other internet enabled devices, the cost of maintaining a website has increased as well. Long gone are text only websites, with image-laden and heavily stylized websites becoming ever more popular. Additionally sites such as Netflix and YouTube, focused on streaming an endless amount of high quality video content, have grown exponentially over the years and now make up to almost 50% of all internet traffic. With such extreme growth in internet traffic, companies must find ways to offset their server costs. Many companies, such as Netflix, may attempt to offset the cost by providing their service only after users have paid a fee to access it, but the most prevalent way companies and individuals attempt to offset this cost is advertisements on their page.

Paid advertisements have popped up everywhere on the web, and can take many forms from text-only ads at the top of a Google search, a video ad at the start of a YouTube video, to as inconspicuous as a native advertisement. However many companies and advertising platforms may have found click-through rates (the percent amount of a time an ad is clicked per how many times its shown) to be sub-par. As such advertisements have become ever more intrusive in attempt to increase the users likely hood of clicking them. Many people would consider this annoying, decreasing the quality of our web browsing experience, myself included.

Most insidious of all is advertisers attempt to track a users entire browsing history. With the most basic form being if the same address views an ad on site A, and site B, the advertising network can notice their browsing trends and make ads more targeted, displaying ads more supposedly relevant to the user when they visit site C. This is all once again in hopes of increasing ad click-through rates. This has become ever more prevalent with social networks and other entities who would wish to track your presence on the internet. Often times what leaves you with tracking cookies isn't even an advertisement, but one of the plethora of social media buttons that people embed on their site. If you've seen the Facebook "Like" button or more than one site, chances are Facebook has that information kept.

This is where ad blocking software comes in to play. To combat this ever increasing prevalence of, quite often intrusive, advertising, users have turned to ad blocking software to clean up their browsers and get back precious screen space. Despite its initial purpose and name, ad blockers do more than just block ads these days, as stated previously they've had to block various social media buttons and other embedded elements from third party sites.

All those reasons are why we've seen the rise of ad blocking and privacy focused software on the rise as of late. But I fear many of these solutions cast a broad net over the issue, and end up resulting in harming some websites. I'm not here to argue against using such services as ad blocking software, vpn services, etc. They have very valid uses. This year alone we've seen how companies like Verizon and at&t use super-cookies which could enable anyone to track your online identity. However users must be aware of how their software affects websites and individuals. Individuals have been able to pursue new means of lively-hood, or improve existing services using certain statistics, and it'd be a shame if some of those were left on the wayside in favor of absolute privacy.

The first and simplest issue is indeed ad revenue. Many services thrive off ad revenue, whether it be a video sharing site, a public forum, or a simple blog. While many people may earn enough to afford being able to take a financial hit off cheap web hosting per month, it is a good notion to reward those who generate content and provide services online, with some being unable to afford the hosting expenses otherwise. While some services do offer a pay-for-service model, most must break into the market offering free or ad-subsidized services. It can be hard to convince a new user to pay for an unfounded service where market competitors offer almost feature-parity at a lower or similar cost, and with a much longer standing to back them up. Additionally we've seen the rise of jobs that did not exist before the internet. New forms of employment, were someone can live solely off of creating content for video sharing sites, online news and journalism websites, and other such forms of self-publication, are made possible by ad revenue. While such people may get additional revenue via sponsorship's, merchandise, subscription services or other such means, ad revenue is still a prime contributor to many individuals monthly paychecks.

There is also the issue of non-malicious user tracking and information gathering. While ad-blockers may have initially been created for the sole purpose of blocking harmful Advertisements, many now do far more, and forms of tracking circumvention are more common such as accessing the internet through a VPN. A popular blocking extension on the rise, uBlock, explicitly states "uBlock is not an ad blocker; it's a general-purpose blocker." This includes all forms of information gathering services put in place to benefit the user. Many content distribution networks that host an immense amount of content seen on the internet charge differently to offer better hosting to different zones, so while a developer may wish to offer better services to its European customers, they may instead see a plethora of those Europeans as originating from east Asia due to vpn / blocking software. These companies or individuals could take a financial hit by providing services where they need not, or by subpar customer satisfaction due to poor distribution of funds. By default uBlock blocks all sorts of analytic tools, bug reporting software, and other such services that are put in place to benefit the user. This can result in problems the service or content provider simply isn't aware of.

Lastly I'd like to touch on non-malicious advertising. Advertising is not inherently malicious, the goal behind targeted advertising is certainly to increase click-through rates, and while some may think this is purely in the interest of the advertiser for monetary gain, it does indeed benefit the user with content more pertinent to the users interests. Some sites make use of advertisements to spread awareness of similar content or help out the community. Many web comic artists for example provide pictures and links to other artists to spread awareness of other artists and comics out there. Community driven sites like Reddit may provide advertising for services that are provided and built by the community, and sometimes built for the community. While at the end of the day many seek some sort of monetary gain for their advertising, that itself is not inherently malicious, and the goal may indeed be good in nature.

In conclusion I wish to make no claims of rejecting some advances in the protection of ones personal privacy, but wish to bring to the forefront awareness of the effects that many of these broad-net solutions can cause. The protection of our personal freedom is paramount, but while we seek to sidestep the many tools larger corporations put in place to track us, we must in turn reward those who wish to do good by us. The internet is a thriving ecosystem of networked people and devices, and simply ripping out one of the cogs that makes it works could have more far reaching effects than people may realize. Education is of paramount importance, and if after looking into what effects your actions cause you feel they are still justified, that is fine too. One's evaluation of his personal freedoms and privacy is his own. I talked mostly of ad blocking software in this post, but these ideas of awareness apply to almost every facet of how we interact with technology.