Targeting me with ads is absolutely an adversarial situation. I and most of the population would rather not see ads at all. I do not want advertising agencies building a profile of me so they can sell me stuff. Do you?
Maybe you'll come back with a completely-bogus, typical hackernews-ish response, deluding yourself, saying that yes you like it when advertisers target you based on the data they collect about you because of reasons X Y and Z, something something "better for me". Ads targeted at you do not benefit you in any way unless you work for an advertising firm.
And are you seriously arguing that NSA et al do not peek into cloud storage? Have you been living under a rock?
Most of the population seems to have determined that, given the tradeoff between "seeing ads" and "paying more for content," they are more willing to do the former than the later.
Given current transaction costs, yes, but we don't really know what would happen if these were lower (both in money and hassle).
In any case, it's not every day people are given the choice. There's probably a handful of sites you can pay to remove ads, and the cost is usually much higher than the value the user would have provided in ad revenue.
I certainly cannot think of a single site that produces professional content without income. I did not say without ads. Ads do mean, however, that I don't have to pay sites directly and the value I get is well in excess of the value I pay by providing ad impressions.
Economics is not a hard subject. Stop being a reductivist. Or stop being a sneering jerk (and let's not pretend you aren't trying to pick a fight with your tone, 'kay?). Both not-reductivist and not-sneering-jerk would be nice, though.
the value I get is well in excess of the value I pay by providing ad impressions.
You don't pay value. You pay a price, which provides value to the recipient. And the value received by the site being low does not mean the price is, since they're both subjective. Which is the problem with ads: for many, the price paid - the loss in privacy - is much greater than the pennies received by the advertiser. I'm glad you value your loss so low, but you shouldn't assume everyone does.
Oh, but this is where you're wrong; you seem to think one only values privacy if they're scared of black helicopters, but that's not the case. I value my privacy because I dislike the everyday intrusions on people's lives. As Raoul Vaneigem wrote, "The economy of everyday life is based on a continuous exchange of humiliations and aggressive attitudes", and tracking is nothing more than an automated and therefore efficient version of this.
Besides, privacy is like vaccination - it also needs herd immunity. If everyone is exposed, the few "important" people who really need it will stand out like a sore thumb.
It has nothing to do with black helicopters. It has to do with your data being utterly unimportant to anybody except yourself. This is why it's only valuable in the aggregate.
They don't have to care. Target didn't care about some random teenager being pregnant, but her father still found out due to their targeted ads. That they don't care is irrelevant.
Servers go down every day, and data centers go down every month. This project solves a real problem.