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It can have been incredibly naive and have brought great benefit at the same time. In the 1990s did we foresee that in 2021, tracking our individual web activity and building profiles of our behavior would be a pillar of the business model supporting most of the online economy? Did we foresee that we would be looking to government regulation to prevent comprehensive profiles of our individual web browsing activity from being sold by private companies, and bought not only by other private companies but by government agencies as well? No? Then I think we were, in hindsight, naive. I'm not denying any of the benefits of Javascript by saying that. We did not foresee all of the upside of Javascript, but we were naive about the costs, too.



Not predicting what will happen thirty years hence is naive? The web was all shiny goodness and going to be a panacea for anything you could name back in the late 90s. The fact that it did not come to pass isn’t naïveté so much as a disappointing repeat of what our current economic systems of reward drive companies to do.


The general pattern was predictable - I was involved in making an early ad blocker in 1996. Adbusters magazine was a thing then.

Technically, the detail of super-cookies is inventive and surprising. The general trend for how capitalism inevitably both uses and abuses advertising was predictable.




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