(The latter still account for the ads I see most of the time, unfortunately.)

Some examples of what I'm fine with: if I visit a hardware store's online website and am then retargeted by their ads, or I visit a hardware magazine's website and am then targeted by hardware ads.

How so? Ad tech wants to eat as much of your data as possible. They’ll use everything they have to make inferences about things you want, things you believe, things you might believe later. I think you could go as far as saying they want ALL your data and then some..

The site showing an ad knows the context of what I'm looking at, whether that's a specific news article or the weather. That's enough info for a reasonably targeted ad without needing to match back to my browsing history, who I bank with, my likely religious views or sexual orientation, etc

This is the value Facebook delivers (targeting and measuring), and it's about to go up in smoke.

Nobody will pay the same price for a billboard.

Or, the facebook pixel embedded in a page you (or your employer) put your tax info into.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/meta-wont-say-wh...

However, personalized ads are more profitable, and so every single platform subverted the rights of the users. And instead of banning Facebook from continuing to do so until they present a plan that is reviewed and approved, which would be appropriate after years of violations, all the authorities now did is explicitly telling Facebook that they can't continue to break the law.

The headline is incredibly misleading. If you take a closer look at what is actually forbidden, emphasis mine: "On 27 October, the EDPB adopted an urgent binding decision ... to impose a ban on the processing of personal data for behavioural advertising on the legal bases of contract and legitimate interest across the entire European Economic Area"

They can still do behavior ads on the basis of consent. And because some DPAs decided that "pay or consent" is OK and there is no binding Europe-wide decision about it yet, that's what Facebook is trying next. If it gets decided that that wasn't ok, Facebook will be fined a fraction (possibly a significant fraction, but still a fraction) of the additional revenue they made by breaking the law, in a couple of years, and then, over a decade after GDPR went into force, they might actually follow it.

What is being targeted is surveillance-based advertising methods. These involve the collection, brokering and combining of user data. This data is purchasable by anyone - including US government agencies which have been using it as way of obtaining information without oversight(1). There is an expectation that other governments and bad actors are also obtaining this data for advantage.

This type of advertising is also responsible for poorly targeted ads that follow you around the internet. Perhaps you mentioned something in passing on an instagram chat, or you liked a photo from a friend on holiday.

Consumers generally underestimate their digital footprint and the risks associated with having this information available. It's more information than what we'd trust our own governments possessing in a single, or any, database, yet we let others take it without any oversight whatsoever. Additionally the information gathered about them can be wrong or invade their privacy in ways they aren't expecting (E.g. infer their sexuality or private desires) (2). Furthermore individual users can be targeted which beyond being able to prank someone(3), is also ripe for exploitation. (4)

(1) https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23844477-odni-declas... or the easier to read: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-government-buys-dat...

(2) https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/16/facebook-faces-fresh-criti...

(3) https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/roommate-makes-...

(4) https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/15/researchers-show-facebooks...

This effectively means then that if you are in the EU and you'd want to use either Facebook or Instagram you'd have to pay for a subscription then because they presumably won't offer the free-service without personalized ads and since the law prohibits them from doing that then the only way to use either service will be to pay for it..?

It’s easy to show ads. Not that easy to make money from doing so. It’s as valid alternative as telling people to use horses instead of cars to reduce CO2 emissions. They both get from point A to B, right?

Too bad, if your business model can’t make money without breaking laws and harming people’s rights, do you really deserve to stay in business?

> It’s as valid alternative as telling people to use horses instead of cars to reduce CO2 emissions. They both get from point A to B, right?

More like banning formula 1 cars from suburbs. People survived before without personalized ads, what will not survive is making 10-digits of profit every quarter and the associated butchery of our life and institutions in the pursuit of profit.

That's not the argument I'm making nor the comment I'm responding to. OP presented non-personalized ads as a viable alternative for their business. It's not. Let's not pretend it is.

It's a totally different conversation from one you try to turn it into.

> More like banning formula 1 cars from suburbs.

It's not, unless there have been F1 cars in every suburb for last decade.

I get it, you hate ads. Great. But that's not what we're talking about.

So like banning lead from paint? Wouldn’t someone think of the poor paint makers and landlords?

If I say "car dealers can't sell cars that go faster than 10mph and if they go out of business then they shouldn't exist", it's clearly fallacious, and I don't see how this is any different.

Biggest example is the IOS privacy which has hit whole industry in terms of marketing effectiveness and cost.

To some extent easy ad revenue has given some of these companies a version of Dutch disease, if this revenue falls away for whatever reason they'll need to win out in features or efficiency. Given that I'd be happy if facebook vanished from the face of the earth and that their website is the definition of bloat I'd say they're not doing too well in that regard.

> Meta said it has cooperated with regulators and pointed to its announced plans to give Europeans the opportunity to consent to data collection and, later this month, to offer an ad-free subscription service in Europe that will cost 9.99 euros ($10.59) a month for access to all its products

> Tobias Judin, head of the international section at the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, said Meta's proposed steps likely won't meet European legal standards. For instance, he said, consent would have to be freely given, which wouldn't be the case if existing users had to choose between giving up their privacy rights or paying a financial penalty in the form of a subscription.

This is already present in EU. Spiegel.de and others are like that. Pay or be tracked.

An alternative might be homomorphic encryption, which would already be doable with current technology for something like a newspaper.

It’s simply that nobody has been sued to the end for it yet.

And legal challenges to that are in the works. Some have even been partially upheld. “Pay or okay” done as a binary choice isn’t okay, like anything else, granular consent is important:

https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=DSB_(Austria)_-_2023-0.17...

In fact, it would still make sense to track ad-free users, if for no other reason than to better target ads to their family members, coworkers, and friends. They probably like what you like.

And "Bob's birthday is coming up, he would love a Barcelona team t-shirt" would be very convincing.

Option A: Continue for free with ads (and tracking and profiling etc.)

Option B: Pay for a subscription without ads or tracking (most seem to use a service called "Pur" (pure))

This does not mesh with some people’s understanding of the GDPR, but at least several German courts said it’s okay.

Their reasoning was that GDPR says that consent must be freely given. If the site provides more service if you consent than the consent is not freely given according to those regulators.

(It seemed kind of goofy to me. In every other context I can think of consenting to something that you do not like in exchange for getting something that you want is usually considered to be freely given consent unless that something you want is something that is necessary).

[0]: https://netzpolitik.org/2023/alternative-zu-tracking-datensc...

Even if they get fined the 4% of annual revenue, that'll be a tiny bit of the extra money they illegally made over those 5 years. And now they'll do the pay-or-consent (which may or may not be legal), and if it's illegal, they'll happily argue for another 1-2 years then pay the fine...

The article seems to use "personalized advertising" and "behavioral advertising" interchangeably, and also mentions that using location for advertising is a breach of privacy - which would prevent any local business from advertising itself to people in the same city, as I see it. Was that the intent here?

E.g., if I go to linustechtips and see an ad for cheap notebooks at Best Buy, that's pretty useless if Best Buy doesn't even ship to my country. I was just curious what the new regulation says about this.

Some will say that ads hijack your attention and therefore should be blocked by default. This is a different question. But since ad companies wanted to track ROI it became a problem, because it’s pretty easy for them to do that on the internet. That’s why more people are opposed to ads on the internet but not on a busstop.

If the busstop ads start taking retina scans to show you more personal ads while you travel around town, people will be opposed to that too.

You don’t need to track every user and every click to show ads and make money. But as ad companies like meta can make more money by tracking your every step they will just do that.

There were ads on the internet before tracking became a thing. And people made money off of those ads.

Agreed. So why is the EU making that illegal? I want to be able to use products for free by opting in to personalized ads so that businesses can make enough revenue to justify having an ad-supported free version of their product.

The incompetent bureaucrats at the EU won't allow Meta to offer that.

This is just blatantly incorrect. Please inform yourself about topics before choosing to comment on them. https://www.facebook.com/help/152637448140583

And if you want more, you can opt in to one of the many schemes that would have popped up if the entire ad industry didn't just decide to ignore GDPR and the DPAs didn't decide to ignore those violations.

The Deutsche Post, or DHL is sort of tracking too, since a looong time. By having their delivery minions gather information about the circumstances people live in, and selling that information to interested parties.

But that's not the issue here is it? *Personalized* ads is the issue. Can the free internet survive without personalized ads? Of course it can. Will a ton of companies disappear? Yes, and so what? Business fail all the time, and new businesses based on different models will fill the void. We might even see a ton of innovation beyond figuring out how to harvest and profile people's data when our biggest brains are directed towards different problems.

The primary issue is liability. Secondary is ISPs not allowing people to use their Internet connections for server hosting (a hobbyist could do colocation, and many do already). Fix the law there and the compute cost is peanuts.

Huh? SEO exists because companies don't want to pay for ads. If advertising disappears, SEO will just become more prevalent and we'll have to suffer through more and more garbage.

Ads are fine, but if the idea is that in order to have a free internet, Facebook needs to monopolize our online presence and shape how we receive information on other sites, then that's hardly a free internet. Facebook ruined the internet.

we're not incentivised to pay as our data is mined and sold anyway, our attention still fought for

For me personally it's also the constant pushing pushing pushing to buy crap that you don't need or replace things you already own. I already have a washing machine, I got it last month, you don't need to sell me another (It's actually amazing that we haven't gotten to the point there advertisers can stop push products a consumer already bought).

Google is actually really good as a "I need to buy X,Y,Z" in that case the ads are super helpful and often more relevant than the search results. I will absolutely click those ads, but I'm not going to order that new washing machine while I'm reading the news anyway.

nothing of value will be lost and all that meme.

On a flip note: that's not reddit to preface comments w/ 'hot take'

Free sites will close without targeted advertisement, obviously; they barely can afford to pay salaries now, so with untargeted ads it will be impossible. And the only media sites that will be able to afford to run are those that are subsidised by the state. This is already happening in Europe, where most of the big media are practically bankrupt and their income comes from the state in the form of subsidies, ad campaigns, internships paid by the state, etc.

You already have a sibling comment in this thread precisely asking for that: the state paying for the media. How do they think this will end?

We all want roads to allow us to roam freely but don't want to pay the government people that manage everything around those roads.

Everyone wants free content but everyone wants to be paid for their work.

I have a pihole and one of the website I frequently visit has been remade and now everything is empty. I'm currently thinking about paying for this content... or just quit and live without this content.

This is not idle talk. Think e.g. about personal credit. An important consideration in certain banking models is filtering out good from bad credits. Guess what, so-called "alternative credit data" which include social media activity is already a thing (search for it).

Its basically a digital wild west. Greed, hypocrisy, misrepresentation, collusion, corruption. As a rule, anything that is not be prohibited by draconian fines and license removals will be done. The honeypot is irresistible and people left on their own are just digitally illiterate idiots.

To groups, not individuals. Soap operas cast a wide net, they don’t target you specifically. Which is very much possible with Facebook ads.

https://observer.com/2014/09/marketing-whiz-drives-roommate-...

Good!

pretty easy if you publicly fund it. My vision of Europe is every town, every city putting some money into building out federated and decentralized systems, supported by small and middle-sized business. Effectively the same way radio or public broadcasting is already supported in say Germany or the UK.

We should go all the way and just rid ourselves of Meta, Tencent et al, sadly there's probably not enough vision for something like it.

I remember early, search keywords-based textual Google ads still being somewhat interesting, and if not necessarily useful at least comprehensibly relevant.

Whatever slips past my adblocker these days is absolute junk. Internet doesn't effectively exist without an adblocker.

It seems we reached a high-peak in the 90's on so many things.

2. Facebook and Instagram are household names, so the media picks up on that.

3. The DPA/Meta situation is going on for a couple of years by now, with rather interesting statements at times (e.g. Meta thinking aloud about ceasing operation in the EU)

The issue is how is that data put to use - how that affects your life and whether those decisions were made with flawed algorithms or indeed flawed data.

And quite possibly, the whole process being so opaque that nobody understands how it works, or why certain things happened.

And, in my view, a lot of it comes back to a lot of these internet businesses scale only if they leave an element of fairness behind.

For example, if you are randomly banned from youtube by an algorithm, it's not economically worth it for Google to fund a process of proper appeal - because proper appeal process needs people.

You then have a choice - dispense with fairness and justice or dispense with a business model that doesn't scale in a fair and just way.

I hate that Europe leads in regulation and lags so much in innovation. At the same time, this is a step in the right direction. True, people don't care about privacy, but it's mostly because they don't understand the extent and implications of letting companies control your data.

I am very very happy to look at all the ads and even personalised ones, as long as those are not overly obnoxious and mostly (obviously-)scammy.

If I have to scroll through endless ocean of ad with my actual priority(friends and family posting something) drowned out at the very bottom of my feed, I will naturally stop clicking any ads.

All we need is a balance, overwhelming and making my feeds/timeline flooded w/ random ads is not really helpful and as a sane person, I am very happy to text my freinds and family and create whatsapp group to keep in contact.

This sounds like the best solution since it will not bother the rest of us who don't want to be tracked.

It is still perfectly possible to place ads in meaningful contexts.

I would add that personalised ads != less random ads.

Mapping the context to the ads is likely far superior in convertion.

But once again, fb is in the business of high margin and already figured out personalised ads based on profiling is the most profitable strategy.

From the press release (https://edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2023/edpb-urgent-binding-de...):

  "On 27 October, the EDPB adopted an urgent binding decision ... to impose a ban on the processing of personal data for behavioural advertising on the legal bases of contract and legitimate interest ..."

If the company has contact info for the user, it should send the user a notification via that contact info. Even if that means having to send a physical letter.

The company should also keep a public record of transfers, something like a page on their website listing when they've transferred data, why it was transferred, and what kind of data was transferred. That would cover anonymous users.

There would need to be something in there covering data transfer as part of what the company's business is. Maybe a list of businesses that access your data as part of the provided services and are covered by the company's terms?

Even better would be to force companies that make money selling your data to share the profits with every person they just sold data on.

I guess company wouldn't care, but I'd like to know if statistics that I'm part of is now also owned by someone else. I don't know why but it'll be nice to know.

EDIT ---

Ok, I get it now. Personalized ads = surveillance. Fair enough.

Doesn't the whole GDPR already cover it though? You can opt out of the surveillance.

It's the whole tracking, data-gathering, and trying to optimize for squeezing the last bit of revenue out of people that I dislike.

That and the stupid amount of bandwidth and compute caused by the ad scripts on every other website. ublock makes the web so much faster, it's hard to believe.

EDIT:

I'm actually subscribed to some e-mail newsletters from certain brands/sectors that I care about, and they regularly deliver personalised ads to a subfolder in my e-mail account. I sometimes even buy things as a result. I don't mind this, because it's opt-in and by consent.

I do mind when facebook tries to infer what kinds of things I might like, which it's generally terrible at and the various "ad preferences" I can set don't seem to make any change.

The categories are much to broad to be useful. I've been vegan for about 7 years. The internet thinks I like "food" and shows me ads for meat products all the time. Good to know I'm wasting the ad dollars of companies I think are bad, but I think it's gross and I don't want to see it.

And yet, I still think they can be harmful. Think of someone with alcohol use disorder who recently stopped drinking, or someone with BED who's decided not to keep junk food in the house. You don't think constantly seeing ads for alcohol/junk food would make such a person feel bad or even impede their progress? Why would that be the cost of them opening any website at all?

Or infomercials poping about anti depressants.

True anecdotes. Teenage girl tracked by video surveillance and profiled as being likely interested in contraceptives because she stood near the condom shelves for long minutes without purchase. With a good chance of being pregnant.

(Advertisers could mail to the household, yes. because she provided the supermarket with her address to get groceries delivered once)

A certain messaging app offered by a certain social media platform that mine personal conversations to profile users down to their emotional states. Those words you type in and send to your confident are put through real time machine learning.

Don't be too surprised you get an ad about chocolate right after you told your date about your favorite ice cream flavor, that's merely creepy. The obsene mental manipulation usually goes unnoticed.

* Micro-targeting for political advertisements (pretty bad for democracy)

* Dynamic pricing based on demographics (you can afford it, so you pay more)

* Insurance knowing too much about you (rejections based on your health, ensuring parts of the population won't be able to get good insurance)

* And just the fact that too much information being public can be harmful (blackmail, scams, etc)

* etc..

It's not just advertising, but trashy and addictive suggested content and potential for abuse by actors like Cambridge Analytica.

> I understand hating ads in general

Also this

Facebook can still show relevant ads without showing personalized ones. For example, if there is a facebook group about car restoration it doesn't take a genius to guess what kinds of ads members might be interested in.

Personalized ads mean they make a ton of assumptions about you using incomplete and inaccurate data. If you actually value advertising as a means of discovery, why would you want your exposure to new things limited to only what marketers think you should be interested in based on stereotypes, or flawed assumptions?

Relevant ads are better because there are fewer assumptions being made. Whatever content you're engaging in dictates what you see, not market research and guesses about who you are.

Now if you have been looking for something else that you want to keep private (gay clubs, abortion clinics, or anything embarrassing) then your phone has betrayed you.

There is also a point that if the ad is more useless, the quantity of ads should decrease because advertiser will not find them worth it.

The problem with accepting being under constant surveillance to make advertisers money is that the data is never just used for ads and even if you never show your phone to another living soul that data never goes away and can end up in the hands of just about anybody.

But that's because it is creepy, if the targeting is too accurate, it feels like you are being watched. Which is true, but a little bit ironic on Facebook and Instagram where people have no problem exposing their entire life to everyone.

Now I do like personalized ads and I get insane ones even though I'm anonymizing my tracks more than most.

For example I do get personalized ads trying to sell me... Private jets!

I mean: I'm maybe upper middle class but there's no way I've got the money to buy a x million private jet.

Yet I get the ads for them Falcons and Gulfstreams.

I do, of course, make sure to click these ads.

Or by giving you the "choice" of paying an absurd amount of money or "freely" consenting to them harvesting all your data, which is what Facebook has already announced is the next step they'll take. Whether this is legal or not under GDPR is hotly debated. While that debate is running, Facebook will happily continue (if you pay to "opt out" they'll make even more money off you, so win-win for them). If the debate concludes that it was illegal, they'll either get away with it because "it was unclear so we can't punish them", or they won't, and they'll pay a fine that at that point will represent a small tax on the additional profits they made through this practice.

Either way, they win, consumers lose, because GDPR enforcement takes 5 years per round and multiple rounds...

It's like a little camera accompanying you everywhere and you don't get to say no and it's used for anything they can get away with.

I know lots of advertisers think they can't live without it --- because promoters have told them so.

No, it's because they want to make as much money as possible.

If promoters told them to turn off all ads, they wouldn't. They don't care about promoters. They care about money.

The promoters of personalized advertising care about money too.

The auction systems they promote can be easily manipulated to maximize profits. And since these systems are "black boxes", advertisers themselves really have no way to know if they are being manipulated or not. The only insight they have is what the promoters tell them.

As a thought experiment, let's go back to the time when the internet existed, adds existed, but targeted adds were in their infancy. Now let's imagine they were launched as some sort of op-in Google BETA this in early 0s fashion.

Assuming, for a moment that the targeting quality was on part — would that have been a success? Ie. would the user adoption have been significantly higher Apple's Tracking Transparancy Policy? (Considering that consent was involved before distrust accumulated in the following decades as result of forcefully surveiling, fingerprinting, third-party cookiea, facebook shenanigans, appstore malware, supercookies, etc.)

Back then, before smartphones, before carrying a device in your pocket that can track your every move, it wouldn't have seemed nearly as creepy.

It's actually kind of amusing to me that Apple is the one acting like it's protecting people's data. Without Apple's invention of the iPhone, which doesn't have to be built to collect as much data about its use as it does, there wouldn't be nearly as much data for these apps to collect!

Advertising is a type of "content", and people like content-, but how one can say it's better than the content recommended by people not paid to promote it?

One, the more people are used to get their content via ads (instead of share by friends), the least they'll be incentivize to share good content.

Two, platforms that are paid by advertisers are certainly incentivize to have the best content in ads vs non ads. Why feature a video in your feed but they can be paid to push the same content from an advertiser?

There are so many reasons why "some ads are great" says nothing about ads being a good thing.

Products with no fancy marketing, frequently coming from smaller local companies, bring much better price/quality ratio.

The sponsoring of brainwashing is worse than the value loss.

That would imply, that (globally) we spent significantly [EDIT: remove -less-, insert:] more on advertising before the advent of personalized targeting.

Got confused while writing by the observation that ad expenditure is rising year after year. So clearly, the "savings" allegedly attributed to personalized targeting have not translated to advertisers.

Why would a reduction in advertising costs equate to lower consumer pricing — if there's a better margin to be had instead?

(a) consent to personalised ads

(b) subscribe

(c) do nothing

Will Meta block people from using its websites if they refuse to consent to personalised ads, i.e., option (c). That would seem quite stupid. Meta would lose the traffic.

If millions of people consent, i.e., choose option (a), it defeats the purpose of GDPR. Meta scores a victory against privacy. They may even succeed in complying before the ban comes into effect.

If millions of people choose (c), i.e., to retain their rights under GDPR, then Meta is fscked.

EU is forcing the issue, but Meta will only present this choice of options to people over 18. Quite a large carveout.

Users in the EU should choose (c) and call Meta's bluff. There is no sensible reason that Meta would block users who do not consent to personalised ads.

If a user wants personalised ads, they can opt-in. Users who find personalised ads useful, such as the lone outlier commenter at the top of this thread, can opt-in.

They are more or less the only player that can do pinpoint personalized advertising with the data they already have.

So this can't possibly be about advertising on facebook dot com, to registered facebook users? It has to be about something more nefarious, such as facebook acting like an ad broker themselves and using their vast data to track people and show ads on other non-facebook sites?

I don't mind ads that are relevant, according to the context.

I mind ads that are generated based on a profile one or more companies have built about me.

Yeah, let's see ads about RC models in a forum about RC models, or ads about Bluetooth modules in a website about microelectronics. That's fine. They will still make money, and the ads would still be somehow targeted.

I don't need to see ads relevant to my Google searches about grieving, when I browse the news.

With kindness, I guess pay for the news then? In a more general sense, if one doesn't want to see so many ads then one should spend less time online, or try to visit sources that don't depend on ads. But for some reason people don't want to pay for the things they value.

Interesting choice, either give up and let them monetize my online persona, or be exposed to crappy ads.

I'll take the crappy, non targeted ads, then.

> In a more general sense, if one doesn't want to see so many ads then one should spend less time online, or try to visit sources that don't depend on ads.

That is definitely not what I said.

The issue isn't ads themselves, but targeted ads. Targeted ads rely on intensive and continuous user profiling, even outside of the sites showing those ads, i.e. there is a third party spying on every single move you make online, then selling that to others.

> But for some reason people don't want to pay for the things they value.

That's honestly funny, because I value my privacy, yet the suggestion is that I'm not entitled to it if I use online services supported by ads?

We have been seeing ads on TV, newspapers, magazines, since forever, but I have never got any targeted ads on those. That business seemed to work fine without having to profile every single consumer.

What's the reasoning behind telling someone to "spend less time online" if they don't want to contribute for free to a perverse multibillion industry, when the alternative has been there for centuries?

And the EU is in fact mainly a trade body, setting standards and categorisations, so there are likely some rules on toilets already in EU acquis on health and safety at the workplace, etc. I doubt they oblige a specific position though, you can rest in peace on the piece

Or for example they prepare a law to be able to get journalist sources (which is even illegal in my constitution!).

I do not think it is a fair position. They are increasingly telling us: you do all this and we... we have superpowers we do not need to do it.

I do not agree with that vision.

So they even build profiles of people who evade tracking techniques. I don't understand how they can think it won't tarnish their image or backfire.

It's funny because on one hand, we don't want government surveillance, but yet people criticize the GDPR or the EU or defend the advertising industry, which is probably a very efficient proxy for government surveillance.

Can’t come soon enough. Kneecap the need to datamine users.

I totally want to see this happen even if that means they will have to charge money for their heretofore “free” services.

This would be a big win for society, in my view.

I think this topic becomes emotive because there are obviously ways to misuse data, but I struggle to see the actual harm in personalised advertising. If there's a data acquisition route that we all agree is bad, then we should ban that.

And no, saying "Yes, I consent to cookies and terms of use and data collection" doesn't fix this.

I'd ask that you remember: the rest of the world isn't quite on the side of the advertiser, and nor should the relationship be abusive and one-sided.

What technical superiority? And, for what it is, i bet it's for sale.

The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap. The government on the other hand can literally ruin your life (or even end it in some countries).

The EU is doing a fantastic job of keeping everyone distracted by pointing the finger at the "evil American tech companies" while simultaneously doing the opposite when it comes to privacy from government...which is the real threat.

I could point to many instances of this but the easiest one is the EU commission currently pushing a ban on encryption.

A company can bar the exits, letting you burn to death [0]. A company can send private militias to force you to work [1] (or because you were sent the wrong set of MtG cards [2]). A company can improperly store pesticide, until the resulting explosion kills thousands [3]. A company can own every house and store in a town, managing your expenses to ensure you can't leave [4]. A company can bribe judges to provide them with child labor [5].

Some of these were illegal at the time they were done. Some of these were made illegal as a result of these events. All of them are within the nature of companies, optimizing in pursuit of profit regardless of the human cost. That nature is useful for improving lives, but must be carefully controlled to prevent it from trampling us all.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)

[2] https://gizmodo.com/magic-the-gathering-leaks-wizards-wotc-p...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

I can’t vote out Google. Their customers are advertisers, not me. And I don’t know which apps on my phone send my information to Facebook or what they do with it.

I can't avoid not paying taxes to fund the catholic church in my country, that uses that money to lobby homophobic laws... I can block Google and not use them.

This is not a simple "just vote them out", unless you're part of the privileged majority that can affect the policy.

And no, they're not going to magically stop funding the Catholic church or become a safe haven for LGBT people.

You can stop doing business with Mom&Pop’s coffee shop relatively easily, just like you can move to a different town to get away from your city government authority.

But you’re practically never going to truly get away from Meta, Google, Amazon, Nestle, McKesson, ATT, and those behemoths due to their size, similar to how you’re going to struggle to get out from under the US Federal government.

If you can avoid a company, the fact that there is an acceptable alternative itself says that the market is not monopolized and so there is less chance of abuse.

In the markets where abuse is possible there are often monopolies, or there is illusion of choice like a (colluding or copycatting)duopoly or one where all the "competing" brands being owned by the same parent conglomerate etc.

It is very difficult to participate in the modern economy/world while avoiding certain companies. It might be possible but there are both social and economical costs involved that majority cannot afford.

Avoiding a company doesn't necessarily mean there's an acceptable alternative. I could use no social media and my life wouldn't be much worse or burdensome.

There's very little I can do to prevent the government from doing what it's doing by myself.