
Online privacy: what’s at stake - aj
http://cdixon.org/2010/10/22/online-privacy-whats-at-stake/
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fbcocq
_It is widely believed that a flourishing democracy requires an independent,
diverse, and financially solvent press._

Most of Europe has a socialized independent press, in Germany it's financed by
a soon to be mandatory per-household charge (currently mandatory per-TV/Radio
charge) and it's been _mostly_ working out so far. Quite frankly I don't
understand how you can call a company owned newspaper like the NY Times
independent.

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cdixon
I think a non-profit press is one solution. It just doesn't seem to be the
solution favored by Americans. Given that, it's probably best to have a
selection of well written for profit news sites with different points of view
(NYT, WSJ etc).

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nobody_nowhere
Great article. Rapleaf is clearly crossing the 'ick factor' boundary, and the
NYT and WSJ writers who have been going after them for the past few months are
definitely starting to get some traction.

The reality is that personal identification (as opposed to anonymized or
pseudo-anonymized id) isn't necessary to drive the kind of value advertisers
need to see ROI gains relative to the ways they buy today. Whether or not the
ad industry can organize around a coherent strategy here is questionable, but
there are tens of billions of dollars in incentive not to have regulatory
agencies come in with an iron fist.

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points
> "With print newspapers set to disappear in the next few years,"

I stopped reading after that. I'm sorry, but if you're going to start basing
the rest of the article on crazy false projections, there's not going to be a
lot of point.

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cdixon
If you follow the link, you'll see that quote came almost verbatim from the
publisher of the New York Times.

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points
...which is one newspaper in one particular country, who are betting
(stupidly) on digital distribution.

Does it not surprise you that they're betting their money on a paywall site,
and proclaiming that print newspapers will die? Of course they'd proclaim
that! They want you to sign up to a subscription.

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gloob
They get your money when you subscribe to their print paper too, you know.
It's not like their business model actually requires the death of print.

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points
I'd bet they would in theory get far higher margins _if_ anyone did subscribe
to their online paper. Also they get to look like they're ahead of the curve.

I'm just saying, it's hardly an unbiased opinion of where things are headed.

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pmikal
Privacy is the new sharing.

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mattmanser
Good article, but I think the conclusion he makes is way off mark:

 _The good news is that the things users want to keep secret are almost always
the least important things to online advertisers. It turns out that knowing
people are trying to buy new washing machines or plane tickets to Hawaii is
vastly more monetizeable than their names, who they were dating, or the dumb
things they did in college._

Your preferences + your email address is extremely valuable to online
advertisers. And an email address is generally a personal identifier. Well,
all of mine are, even my gmail one is an identifier if you know what I do or
what country I'm from as I have a fairly rare surname.

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cdixon
Agree re email. But this can be done in a right way and a wrong way. Right way
= new york times explicitly asking you for your email upon registration and
respecting email spam rules. Wrong way - data mining off facebook.

