This is a problem that I've been thinking on for years now.
It used to be common to just buy a newspaper without handing out any kind of personal information. Walk up to a newsagent/kiosk, hand over a small amount of money, and voila, you have your news.
Then came subscriptions. Great for publishers and advertisers: they have predictibility in how many papers to print, know exactly when and where to deliver them, and advertisers know exactly how many people their printed ads will reach. But it came at the cost of having to provide the paper (or their distributor, maybe your local paper boy) with your address and payment details.
Then came news sites. Initially entirely free because the web was new and no one knew what they were doing. Then with ads. Then with more and more intrusive ads, which started harvesting and stealing personal information against our wishes, which started being used to create highly specific profiles of people. To all the better serve more ads.
Then came paywalls. Where in order to read an article, you now have to go through to the ads/profiling spiel, AND on top of that you have to hand out your name/address/email/payment details just to read a single god damned article.
I would love for us to have a way to go back to the original situation. I give you money, and only money, you give me news. No name. No address. No ad profiling. Zilch.
But because of a fear of terrorists, anonymous payments on the interwebs are effectively impossible.
It used to be common to just buy a newspaper without handing out any kind of personal information. Walk up to a newsagent/kiosk, hand over a small amount of money, and voila, you have your news.
Then came subscriptions. Great for publishers and advertisers: they have predictibility in how many papers to print, know exactly when and where to deliver them, and advertisers know exactly how many people their printed ads will reach. But it came at the cost of having to provide the paper (or their distributor, maybe your local paper boy) with your address and payment details.
Then came news sites. Initially entirely free because the web was new and no one knew what they were doing. Then with ads. Then with more and more intrusive ads, which started harvesting and stealing personal information against our wishes, which started being used to create highly specific profiles of people. To all the better serve more ads.
Then came paywalls. Where in order to read an article, you now have to go through to the ads/profiling spiel, AND on top of that you have to hand out your name/address/email/payment details just to read a single god damned article.
I would love for us to have a way to go back to the original situation. I give you money, and only money, you give me news. No name. No address. No ad profiling. Zilch.
But because of a fear of terrorists, anonymous payments on the interwebs are effectively impossible.
It's a sad state of affairs, really.