How would could we destroy Gemini like we destroyed the web using ads? Surely this is impossible, you exclaim! Not so. No dirty deed shall go unrewarded under capitalism and thus customized advertising and tracking is still possible, but it’ll be text based.
We have paid advertising that looks close to regular articles in the local newspapers, for example. So text-based ads are not impossible. Just think of all the email spam. It’s spam even if you don’t download all the pictures. Text-based is no defense against spam, and it’s no defense against ads on Gemini.
It is possible to track people using the IP numbers they are connecting from. If you run a server that writes IP numbers to a log file, you can write a server that keeps those IP numbers in a database. Sure, this fails in a lot of cases: people sharing IP numbers; people switching IP numbers. But it also works in a lot of cases.
Therefore it’ll still be possible to auction ads off to agencies and include the appropriate text – it just won’t be as in-your-face and as blatantly distributed as it is right now. It’ll take some programming on the backend. But as we can see right now, there’s enough money to do all the programming in the world for surveillance capitalism. The only reason people aren’t doing it is because Gemini is small.
Anyway, as tweed-cat said on the Gemini IRC channel: I think it would violate the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). But then again, the GDPR doesn’t cover the whole world, and even if you’re covered, somebody has to drag the offenders to court. So perhaps the ad industry won’t grow as strong as it is right now? I don’t know. If something is probably illegal, and might get you to court, if somebody were to investigate it, small time criminals might do it, but large companies will often not do it because of the legal risk.
In short: the small size of the community is what keeps us safe, and the GDPR is the shield that might protect us if we were big. I hope it’s true! 🚀🚀😅
#Gemini #Ads