A Medium publication on government surveillance, Google's power, whistleblowing, and privacy, with posts touching on the Snowden story.
Commenters link it as the author's own writing on surveillance and ad blocking. One reader says the posts complain without offering actionable solutions.
Standard adblock would be adblock plus which is tied with advertisers through its infamous "acceptable ads" feature.
see: http://www.mobilegeeks.de/adblock-plus-undercover-einblicke-in-ein-mafioeses-werbenetzwerk/
https://medium.com/surveillance-state/cd2cb53bcaba
http://www.infowars.com/google-reportedly-paid-adblock-plus-not-to-block-its-ads/
http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/adblock-plus-accused-of-shaking-down-websites/
Ghostery works for the advertisement industry by building profile of blocked ads to allow them to tweak the ads so you don't want to block them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/516156/a-popular-ad-blocker-also-helps-the-ad-industry/
Northwest, I was going to comment that this article is full of complaints, but doesn't offer up a single, actionable solution. I wrote a post on Medium a while back (https://medium.com/surveillance-state/7d456a6a04df) trying to identify some of the root causes of our problems and offer up a fix. My ideas may not be the best course of action, but at least it's putting something out there.
I'd love to work on building a community that can evaluate, develop, and test out different ideas (although my time is somewhat limited right now). I'm pretty experienced developing in Python/Django, and have plans to teach myself Meteor this fall.
Let me know your thoughts.
Last year i wrote this: https://medium.com/surveillance-state/32ba2b38c219 - and got a proper dollop of hate from certain segments in the webmaster community. They claimed it was 'sour grapes' - I have 140k visitors a day, am doing great, better than great. The monopoly is bad for all of us, even though I'm benefiting as it is.
This Google thing is WAY out of control.
The real issue is that it really doesn't matter that government knows your personal data unless you've something to hide. The problem is that government does not care about one person. The data becomes a threat only in large scale, when it can be used to predict and control society: https://medium.com/surveillance-state/f16655a5879f