Narrator: "He was."

You're a baby.

"This sounds like paying for something slightly more elevated than doing a google search for symptoms"

You don't want people doing that as a foundation of wide-scale health policy. Google in the hands of the average person is a loaded gun. When you have questions about health, you should be talking to a doctor.

Look at how "doing the research" has worked out for American voters. Not particularly well, and I'm not even trying to be partisan. Having everyone on the same page in terms of medical consensus, even if it's sometimes not optimal, is more cost efficient than a nation where silos of medical belief are encouraged at the policy level.

The cost of devaluing of expertise and the notion that everyone should be their own agent for everything is going to be the lesson taught post-American empire. An easy way to talk to a doctor is the best first line of defiance for a healthy population. Now, a case could be made that that doctor should be somebody you can develop a relationship and history with, and this is where virtual services probably lose some degree of effectiveness if you're just talking to different doctors every time.

You can just not visit Facebook. The comparison is fucking stupid.

s/like/lie

Ah yes the old "anyone can do anything they want. Some people even like!" argument. Really brings a lot to the table.

You don't know how ad networks work. It's entirely feasible to sell a slice on your inventory (eg: users) to advertisers. You do this even if you're tracking all your users, because that's literally what selling targetted advertising is. People you're not tracking is just another slice, and if you don't want to serve them ads, you just .. dont. I wrote ad servers for a living for 7 years.

Any article that begins with a definition is always accompanied by some moron who thinks this only started happening around "here".

go back to sleep dad

Somebody got psyop'd but ... the twist is that it's you.

I loves me a false dichotomy.

Anyhow, nobody is preventing anybody from making decisions. There is, as there should be, a concerted effort to ensure the information they have available to them isn't factually incorrect, particularly information made available for malicious intent. To suggest otherwise is to deny why nation states and bad faith actors engage in disinformation in the first place: it changes the decisions people make.

Saying "people will figure out what's true or not if everything is out there" isn't true in theory (all truth builds upon other truths, there needs to be stable ground to build upon) or in practice (as evidenced by bad actors knowing and acting on it).

No.

Slashdot, a place for people who don't understand how the internet works

(Obviously the cookies are client side, I just mean the destinations, both publisher sites and google search, are doing all the tracking /w google .. with the cookie identifying the end user)

Google doesn't need your IP (or headers for that matter) for browsing habits. All their tracking is on server side, tracked via cookies. You can turn them off, and Googles fine with that. A bazillion people don't. They don't need fallbacks.

Anybody who is using IP for tracking is shifty by definition. Not Google/ReputableBusiness shifty, but shifty shifty. These are endpoints that say, "okay, so you're denying cookies? too bad, we've got your IP, we're still going to track you, very much against your wishes"