“What happens next will amaze you”

Ad blockers have been in headlines a lot recently due to Apple's introduction of that functionality to their latest mobile operating system. Advertisers and publishers are not happy with this loss of revenue; users are not happy being tracked across the web.

A recent talk by Maciej Cegłowski on personal data, its collection by dysfunctional advertising networks, and their own pillaging by robots, explains clearly and depressingly why we've reached this standoff.

Here are a few choice samples, but you should really read through the whole transcript.

In this world, privacy becomes a luxury good. Mark Zuckerberg buys the four houses around his house in Palo Alto, to keep hidden what the rest of us must share with him. It used to be celebrities and rich people who were the ones denied a private life, now it's the other way around.

Today we live in a Blade Runner world, with ad robots posing as people, and Deckard-like figures trying to expose them by digging ever deeper into our browsers, implementing Voight-Kampff machines in Javascript to decide who is human. We're the ones caught in the middle.

Advertisers end up right back where they started,still not knowing which half of their advertising budget is being wasted. Except in the process they've destroyed our privacy.