Oh no $20 to remove ads from an app that was made by one guy as his full time job. I’m proud to support anyone who works hard to make a more accessible, more enjoyable experience.
Oh no ads track you! My full time job is literally managing Google ads. We barely tracked you personally as it was. We could anonymously target generally the things you were interested in buying or what you’ve recently been looking at online.
And then Google crippled Google Analytics and it’s a shell of what it once was, and your data is even more anonymous!
If I work for a lawnmower company I couldn’t give a shit who you are or what you do online, all I care about is if you’re thinking about buying a lawnmower, so my client can show you what he’s got to offer. Then you can ignore the ads if you don’t like the product or its price point. That’s what Google does.
I’d rather that than be shown “Generic Chinese cashgrab mobile game ad that doesn’t actually reflect the gameplay” ads.
The guy worked hard to make possibly the best UI/UX on the platform. Either pay for his work or let him get the (barely any) money from showing ads to pay for his time. Either way, he worked for it.
Do you work full time for free too?
I don’t think most people worry about lawnmowing company. They worry about Google.
What google essentially sale is manipulation: they make money by changine your behavior, which is a extermely dangerous business in a democratic society. What makes it even more dangerous are
- It is a for-profit company, which means people with more money have more power to manipulate the general public
- It caters to U.S. government (since it is based in the U.S.), which is one of the most imperialistic governments today, with a terrible record of over-surveillance.
- Everything can be hacked, all the information that is stored will be leaked sooner or later. And these data can easily fall into the wrong hand; in fact, they tends to fall into the wrong hand.
That’s all perfectly sensible things to be concerned about. But given that we’re talking about an android app - if you’re eligible to use the app, Google almost certainly already has all your data anyways.
Yeah I’m sure there’s a tiny subsection of the people in these discussion who have custom ROMs flashed, but the vast majority are posting about Google tracking them on a google phone - or (even more annoyingly) posting about it from a phone that doesn’t even support the app, and so doesn’t remotely affect them
You raise a valid point, ~~but your original answer, to me, seems to normalize tracking to some extend: “since lawnmowing company dont care about your data, hence ads that tracks you is nit a big deal”, which is not the case. ~~
EDIT: I thought I was replying to someone else.
I think a better argument is that “since you are already on android, so google will have all your data anyway”.
That being said, one final bit of nits, even if you are on a google phone, google probably dont watch your every move. With every new place to interact with ads, there is more chance people will be tracked. Finally, I think the more one relying on google service the harder is to move them on a degoogled platform. So adding google ads to an app is definitely not harmless. But like you said, these probably dont matter to 95% of people.
There are companies that aggregate all the data from Google and other services to match your anonymous data to your actual person so they can match your address name and all personal information to what you do online
@ZippyZiggurat @drekly, it’s called create incommings by surveillance advertising, I call it Spyware as is.
They sell your data to third parties, which apart of a violation of your privacy rights, is a big security risk, nobody can control how your data is traty and protected, several cases of dataleaks with even bank and medical data prove this. There are other methodes to create incommings which don’t invade privacy.
Not this way
(Test made with Blacklight https://themarkup.org/blacklight )
The ads are what supports the developer. $20 to remove them is just a better bulk upfront deal than waiting for fractions of pennies to come together over time. The $100 version is a straight up grift though. I cannot overstate this, the ads are what supports the dev. There is nobody here not getting paid for their work.
