Hardly. I'm the guy upthread, lamenting the current state of things.
But with e-ink, you can be detached. Knowing someone buys a newspaper is hardly a surprising thing. To put it in perspective, a large number of people subscribed to the paper, and it was delivered daily. The same was true of magazines subscriptions. As long as the media is offline (eg, PDF, epub, similar), and the reader OSS, then the tracking and ads aren't an issue still.
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I don't disagree with how poor things are, but one issue is government moves slowly. Laws being passed today, are the result of trends 20 years ago. For example, in my legal jurisdiction, vendors (eg, Best Buy, big box stores) are responsible for the thing they sell. It's not just "ship it back to manufacturer", for obvious reasons.
Eventually the issues with e-trade will be dealt with, just as issues with shoddy sellers were deal with a century ago. Here's an example...
Back in the 50s people would send items through the mail, then demand people pay for them, or pay for return shipping. I'm not kidding. Even when it wasn't easily defensible in civil court, all the legal threats would scare some into paying.
So laws were passed. If you receive something in the mail you didn't order? It's yours. Period.
But this took a decade to happen, if not more.
This is the sort of thing which will happen in this new market.
And yes, Amazon sucks as it is now.
It's really quite fascinating to me how a lot of new markets aren't about novel, but instead about not having terrible behaviour regulated. For example, Amazon has the worst customer service in all existence. It used to be good, but they now take immense pains to hide all support channels, and where I live, it's a maze of incomprehensible clicks to even attempt to get a chat.
So... I have to call now. Every time. And now they have the same wall of "noise" on the phone, so it's harder to get through there. In the past, I've done chargebacks when I can never reach a company, and that will be the inevitable conclusion here too.
Which shows how incredibly stupid Amazon is, when this household buys $4k of stuff a month from them, and just has edge-case returns sometimes. I'm sure they'll cancel my account first time, and, well, who cares.
When companies get to this level of "screw the consumer", they're at the edge of all ability to improve profits. There's no where left to go. I expect Amazon to have issues due to things like this, and the squeeze on foreign imports, and crash and burn on its side.
But back to your point? Yes, we should. Or, we should just pass laws which make centralized advertising, that is, the collection of Pii impossible.
Ban all Pii? Ban all transactions of Pii? And you end advertising as it is.
Hardly. I'm the guy upthread, lamenting the current state of things.
But with e-ink, you can be detached. Knowing someone buys a newspaper is hardly a surprising thing. To put it in perspective, a large number of people subscribed to the paper, and it was delivered daily. The same was true of magazines subscriptions. As long as the media is offline (eg, PDF, epub, similar), and the reader OSS, then the tracking and ads aren't an issue still.
--
I don't disagree with how poor things are, but one issue is government moves slowly. Laws being passed today, are the result of trends 20 years ago. For example, in my legal jurisdiction, vendors (eg, Best Buy, big box stores) are responsible for the thing they sell. It's not just "ship it back to manufacturer", for obvious reasons.
Eventually the issues with e-trade will be dealt with, just as issues with shoddy sellers were deal with a century ago. Here's an example...
Back in the 50s people would send items through the mail, then demand people pay for them, or pay for return shipping. I'm not kidding. Even when it wasn't easily defensible in civil court, all the legal threats would scare some into paying.
So laws were passed. If you receive something in the mail you didn't order? It's yours. Period.
But this took a decade to happen, if not more.
This is the sort of thing which will happen in this new market.
And yes, Amazon sucks as it is now.
It's really quite fascinating to me how a lot of new markets aren't about novel, but instead about not having terrible behaviour regulated. For example, Amazon has the worst customer service in all existence. It used to be good, but they now take immense pains to hide all support channels, and where I live, it's a maze of incomprehensible clicks to even attempt to get a chat.
So... I have to call now. Every time. And now they have the same wall of "noise" on the phone, so it's harder to get through there. In the past, I've done chargebacks when I can never reach a company, and that will be the inevitable conclusion here too.
Which shows how incredibly stupid Amazon is, when this household buys $4k of stuff a month from them, and just has edge-case returns sometimes. I'm sure they'll cancel my account first time, and, well, who cares.
When companies get to this level of "screw the consumer", they're at the edge of all ability to improve profits. There's no where left to go. I expect Amazon to have issues due to things like this, and the squeeze on foreign imports, and crash and burn on its side.
But back to your point? Yes, we should. Or, we should just pass laws which make centralized advertising, that is, the collection of Pii impossible.
Ban all Pii? Ban all transactions of Pii? And you end advertising as it is.