Today, I discovered a man with some interesting ideas;
his name is Daniel Brandt.
Daniel is a conspiracy theorist, and he was known to have harassed many people. There are hardly any records remaining on his personal beliefs, as his websites are long-gone (and unfortunately excluded from archival). But aside from purported hostile squabbles with bloggers and wiki admins, Mr. Brandt also disseminated some based ideas.
You see, over 18 years ago, Mr. Brandt believed that Google AdSense was ruining the Web by rewarding SEO gaming. Today, the exploitation of SEO on Google has completely ruined the search engine; Searching for anything will commonly deliver web pages full of garbage, which will only sometimes contain the desired information. By 2005, Brandt was already complaining about this, that it was ruining the web. It's so fucking sad that this problem dates so far back; Sure, it probably wasn't even 10% as bad back then, but it still existed!
Brandt created one of the earliest ad/tracker blockers that I've ever heard of, a proxy site called "Scroogle". His crusade against Google revealed that he opposed such large-scale tracking by Big Tech, which he believed was in bed with the government. These days, we hear such dystopian stories all the time: For example, recall this week's news coverage on the mounting privacy concerns associated with using automobiles. Auto manufacturers are designing cars filled to the brim with sensors, and then selling the data they collect to brokers, and even worse, giving data away to governments who simply ask for it. From Hyundai's own privacy policy: "We may disclose personal information to ... cooperate with investigations or lawful requests, whether formal or informal, from law enforcement or government entities."
The saddest part of my delve into this guy's history is that many people just saw his overall behavior and called him a wacko (and I agree to an extent).
His warnings about Big Tech ruining the end-user's experience & providing the end-user's data to unwelcome third parties were ridiculed as tinfoil madness. But almost 20 years later, Daniel Brandt has had the last laugh.