One of the main forces responsible for the loss of privacy on the internet, at least in the relatively free countries of the west, is advertising. The root of the problem is this: everyone expects that surfing the web will be free. How did this happen? It is a combination of factors.
In the early days of the web, and also in the early days of any particular product, web sites were and are generally experimental, and the designers were loath to charge for letting the public play around with their new ideas. Even Google and Facebook were like that in their early days. Everybody knew, at some level, that they would eventually have to find a way to monetize their product, but that was always something to worry about later.
When later comes, it is obviously almost impossible to expect people to pay for something that they have been getting for free. This is especially true given that people already pay a fairly hefty fee for monthly internet service in their homes. And it's absurd to expect the ISPs to pay content providers without charging higher fees (but I'll have more to say about that model later). The other problem is figuring out how much to charge to read a news article (for example) on the web, and how to manage the payments.
Once the internet reached a certain level of popularity and availability, and especially after the introduction of portable devices (phones and tablets), it was clear that print journalism was pretty much dead. No one wants journalism itself to die, of course, but journalists won't work for free, so what can we do? One daily issue of the New York Times costs $2.50, but it contains hundreds of articles. What should it cost to read one article? A penny? $2.50? A monthly subscription fee? Many professional publications do use the subscription model in order to get unlimited access, but no one wants to pay $10/month just to read one article.
Enter the miracle of advertising. Just like the good old days of print, advertisers will pay you to put ads on your web pages. What's more, they will pay you extra if you can tell them something about your readers, and help to target their preferred demographic to your appropriate articles. They will also pay you in proportion to the popularity of your pages, so in order to increase that you have to pay the aggregators like google to feature your articles in response to queries. This becomes a huge all-consuming monster that feeds off of your personal data. So everybody except you is making money from your data. Of course you do benefit by getting to surf the web for "free". What are the downsides to all this?
First off, there is the blizzard of ads you get on almost every web page. Some of them come with video and audio playing, and it's difficult to figure out how to stop it, short of muting the audio altogether. I am not interested in ads, and if I do notice one, that only makes it less likely that I'll ever buy that product. Even more annoying is the wasted time. The text I want to see would load almost instantaneously, but now I often have to wait 30 seconds or more while all the ads load. They all come from different sites, with high resolution graphics, and each one changes the page layout, so that I have to wait until the page settles down. Occasionally the ads have bugs that may even hang the browser.
Of course some people like the ads, and even those who don't pay much attention to them may find that they enhance the browsing experience by the jazzy addition of color and motion. But consider this. Every ad that you see comes with code that can, and often does, collect information about everything you do on the page, including your keystrokes, and so on. And it can send the information to anyone it wants. Have you noticed how many web pages want to know your location these days? Do you ever wonder why?
All this collection of information about you allows them to show you targeted ads. That is, you'll see more things that you are likely to want or need. This may seem like it's a good thing, but actually it's a bit of a mixed bag. When you buy something you don't need, you are not only cluttering your life, but you are harming the environment both by potentially discarding it into a landfill, and by supporting the pollution and consumption of natural resources associated with its manufacture. Moreover, you are spending money that you might really need for other things. There is nothing really wrong with this, assuming you have real discretionary income. There was a time, not too long ago, when many people did have real discretionary income, but nowadays, most people seem to be struggling to get by, even in a family with two full-time jobs.
One thing you can do is install an ad blocker in your browser. But many sites now detect the use of an ad blocker and force you to turn off the blocker on their site before they will let you see it. This feels a lot like the endless battle between diseases and antibiotics. As soon as we develop an antibiotic that controls a particular disease, the disease finds a way around it.
It seems like there must be some way to make money on the internet without resorting to a blizzard of advertising. The most common model is the subscription. Some publications won't let you read anything without a subscription. But if I just want to read one article, I certainly don't want to pay $10 a month. And once you sign up they make it extremely difficult to cancel. Some sites will let you read two or three articles a month for free, but after that you have to subscribe. This actually works pretty well, but since most people don't subscribe, they have to supplement their income with ads anyway.
The subscription model seems to work pretty well for streaming media, like movies and music. Most people are OK with subscribing to a single source of music, like Spotify, because it can play pretty much any song there is. Movies are another matter though. There are dozens of movie sites now, and they all own the movies they show, so that it you want to see a movie on Netflix, you have to subscribe to Netflix. It would be prohibitive to subscribe to all of the sites that have interesting content. It turns out many people are now sharing their passwords with friends and relatives. I'm sure the media companies will find a way to fight back against this soon.
A more appealing model is to simply pay as you go. On Amazon you can rent a movie for about $5 without a subscription. This is a lot less than the cost of a movie in a theater, and several people can all watch for the same $5. Plus you can watch it multiple times if you want.
What if there were a way to pay a very small amount to visit a page? Personally I would pay 5 cents to visit a page if at first glance it looked interesting. According to one statistic, the average person visits 89 web sites per month. At 5 cents each, this amounts to $53/year. A $10/month subscription is $120/year, and that's only for one site. So $50/year for all the sites combined seems like a pretty good deal. If you write an article and one million people read it, then at 5 cents each, you get $50,000. Not bad for a day's work. And you don't have to fuss with getting ads onto your page, and your readers don't have to see them.
Suppose you could download a "bag" of nickels from your bank. This wouldn't cost you anything. Each nickel would be signed by the bank, and contain your account number, plus a unique number to prevent copying. Websites could ask for one, or maybe more, nickels, and you could instruct your browser as to your personal rules for granting such requests. In addition to limiting the number of nickels that could be paid without approval, you could require that in exchange for payment, the site would not be allowed to display any ads. You could also demand that the site not collect any personal information about you or your usage of the page. Eventually the nickels would end up back at the bank, which would deduct 5 cents each from your account, and pay it to the current holder. In essence the nickels act pretty much like little checks. Plus they can also be passed around among other holders. If you have a web page, and you get a nickel in payment, you can use that nickel to pay for other web page visits.
Unfortunately, even if a scheme such as this could work, it doesn't really solve the fundamental problem of personal privacy. It may prevent web pages and their advertisers from collecting your personal data directly. But it doesn't reduce the monetary value of your data. In the ad-based system, web pages wanted to maximize their traffic, because advertisers would pay more for high-traffic pages. Now they want to maximize their traffic because it pays them directly. Naturally the more they know about their potential users, the more they can target and manipulate their traffic.
Many people happily give their personal information to social websites like Facebook without much thought as to what might be done with it. The very structure of Facebook makes it difficult for them to completely protect access to your data, even if you specifically request that. Many "apps" run on the Facebook platform, and some may pretty much require at least some of your personal data. Facebook can do its best to vet the developers of apps, but it is impossible to actually guarantee that they don't misbehave. Furthermore Facebook may feel that it is safe to sell "anonymized" statistics about it's users. But this is just the information that the most malicious actors want. If you want to sway an election, you want to develop a "map" of users who are most likely to be susceptible to a certain kind of appeal.
But it is not my purpose here to detail this type of abuse. I do want to mention another kind of payment plan that we really really want to avoid. I mentioned earlier that "obviously" your ISP doesn't pay the websites you visit. What if they did? Now that net neutrality is gone, your ISP could block access to these sites unless you subscribe to some package of sites for which you pay an extra fee. Eventually, they could cut off access to the unpaid web altogether, so if you wanted your site to be visible, you would have to get syndicated by the XYZ channel. Perhaps the old "black" web would still be available in some limited form, for an extra fee.
I have to believe that something like this is the wet dream of the big ISPs. It makes the internet be like cable TV, and don't forget that many people get their internet from the same company as their cable TV, so this is a model that they already know and love. I don't imagine that a scheme like this could be imposed overnight. Nobody would stand for it. But somehow it could happen in small steps that each seemed good by itself. Hopefully a strong net neutrality law could avoid this.
