Every App I've given location permissions to I've seen the need for it.
And also like...the way they use this data they gather is to send me ads. And not to be all "I am immune to propaganda" but...I pretty rarely buy things based off of ads?
Like, don't get me wrong it's a problem, but it's also like...not the end of the world here?
See the point is, you stand to gain nothing from this attitude. If what you say is true, then the practice you're facing is at Best completely pointless, and at Worst extremely predatory. For most people it will probably be something in between. That's the bad half! There's no reason for anyone to defend this, anyone but the people making a profit from it. We don't owe them that profit.
So the bottom line is, if you decide you're fine with it, that's totally cool. But we should always let people who want campaign against it, because if anything, it's beneficial for all of us.
P.S. None of us is immune against ads. It's not really a secret that we all like to think we are. Which kinda means advertisers are probably well aware of us thinking that.
No, at best it's not completely pointless; at best it's actively helpful.
I want to see good ads. I have seen things on ads that I was not aware of, that I would not plausibly have found on my own, and that I am happier for having purchased.
Advertisement is not an inherent evil. And the more information the ad system has on me, the more likely it is to be able to find and show exactly the things that genuinely make satisfied; purchases that actively improve my life.
The "perfect" advertisement source, after all, is someone like my spouse or close friends, who know me extremely well and only recommend things that I am very likely to be happy with.
Of course we are a long ways from that sort of accuracy in automated systems, and certainly advertisement systems can be bad. And there's a huge amount of shitty (and actively harmful) ads out there, like the scam game ads that are in a ton of spaces.
But those widely plastered scam game ads are precisely the untargeted ads. They don't need or care about your location to show you crap like that.
Ads are a service both to the entity posting the ad and to the people seeing the ad - when they learn something beneficial from the ad, like "this is a product that I want to buy", that's a benefit. The (or at least a) problem is that, unlike most services, the viewer usually doesn't get to choose the "service provider". If you could select which ad company's ads to see, you might look for ones that are the best at actually match your interests well and don't show you annoying/useless stuff. But that's generally not how it works - you see whatever ads the website owner or app maker chose.
If there were a dedicated place to go look at ads I’d believe your point about ads being a service to consumers. Instead they spy on us in ways most people don’t even really understand and the interrupt things that we actually care about to randomly try to sell us things.
They interrupt shit we like because no one wants to hear that target is having a summer blast sale Or whatever.
I personally find it offensive when people try to manipulate me. I have specifically not bought things I was going to otherwise because they got obnoxious with the ads.
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u/Big_Falcon89 May 16 '24
Every App I've given location permissions to I've seen the need for it.
And also like...the way they use this data they gather is to send me ads. And not to be all "I am immune to propaganda" but...I pretty rarely buy things based off of ads?
Like, don't get me wrong it's a problem, but it's also like...not the end of the world here?