Lol. No shit, Sherlock. We've been screaming this for decades.
this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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They are so close to understanding a solution, but they failed to choose the correct one.
The real issue is that it is legal for these companies to stalk us then sell that data freely. Limit data collection for all citizens and heavily punish companies who continue to track.
None of them have the guts to put CEOs behind bars.
We dont even need them behind bars, give them fines that actually hurt. Talking several billions of dollars.
They likely wouldn't do that either though but ffs I'd love it if they did something
If the CEOs didn't do it, the shareholders would ruin their lives.
Advertising is a cancer.
It is a(and one of the many we suffer from) symptoms of capitalism.
Online advertising is a cancer I would say. When I get an ad mailer I'll look through pretty much the whole thing, because it's most likely local businesses and I know just looking won't come back to bite me in any way.
OTOH, it seems like ~44% of junk mail gets thrown away without ever being opened: https://zerojunkmail.org/environmental-impact
That's a bunch of environmental destruction and personal annoyances caused, so the label "cancer" seems fair to me.
If they try to deceive me by making the outside look handwritten or using wording like "FINAL NOTICE" then yeah, straight in the trash without a 2nd look. If it's obviously an ad from the get go I'll usually give it a skim at least.
That's good! But I'd still prefer if I and the other 44% could at least say "please stop producing and sending us trash".
They should really make mailed advertisements opt-in, but of course the industry won't do that. And this what makes it cancerous IMO: they never give up trying to inject ads into people's lives.
OTOH, serving content is not free and something needs to pay the hosting/publishing bills.
The problem IMO is invasive ad serving tech and deceptive ads, which are often both uncurated and deceptive.
Sure, serving content isn’t free. Maybe we don’t need to serve so much damn content then.
That makes google a traitor.
Now that the US has declared itself a foreign adversary for every other country on the planet, can we start banning online ads, at least from US companies?
I can't even pause my TV to read something without an ad appearing a second later.
I just bought a TV from a local B2B that does video displays/video walls. They had an extra 96 inch Planar, I paid a bit for them to haul it over but now I have a dumb TV with no bloatware installed on it.
Apparently they have leftover stock from big projects on occasion and are happy to sell them when that happens.
How much was it?
3800, it's LCD but it looks the same as my old Samsung LED that died from 2012.
So it’s LCD and looks the same as your old LCD? I can’t say I’m surprised lol
They have condoned it for years. Pfff… double standards in surplus.
Extremely critical support for the ad industry in this exactly singular instance
a decade too late, the ship and the cuntry has sailed