As someone who pulled the plug on residential Internet, I have naturally clung onto broadcast radio. It occurs to me that tuning into broadcast content gives a rare media source where you are not tracked. There is no digital footprint on your listening.
Tor (along with a couple even more obscure technologies like i2p) are the only viable cloud-sourced ways to escape consumption tracking. Tor is indispensible but it’s not as traceless as tuning broadcast signals. And Tor users are plagued with access discrimination.
Yet broadcast radio must be struggling. They likely lost copious listeners to the Internet. Seems like there is a missed opportunity to promote their stations and privacy along with it. Radio stations should inform people that tracking online is not just to advertise but it’s also used for personalised political manipulation.
Duckduckgo’s privacy theatre demonstrates that privacy promotion works. But DDG relies on trust and it’s rife with scandals. OTA¹ broadcasts do not rely on trust. Promoting privacy would have a long-term self-promotion effect. That is, as listeners come to develop their value of privacy more, their listenership becomes stronger.
Some (most?) stations likely also stream online. But they could still play a different jingle on the broadcast service, no?
¹ OTA: over the air
They probably could, but I suspect most are configured to just mirror whatever they are actually dumping into the airwaves. The FCC requires station identifiers, so I suspect they probably aren’t interested in tweaking a mandatory part of the broadcast for a potentially very minor benefit.
I think your point in valid though. Most media consumption in present day relies on opt-out tracking but terrestrial radio relies on opt-in tracking via Neilsen. So there’s definitely a privacy angle, but I don’t think enough people who listen to the radio care about that or are educated enough on the topic to understand what they are being told.
