Hacker News Reader

The problem is that people still don't understand what it is they are trading for a "free" web. It really takes a story like Jacques wrote to drive it home. It has to touch them emotionally, because what we are asking them to be wary of touches them with very strong emotions (facebook, for example).

Great. You just inspired another european privacy law where website will be forced to ask you to read the terms before processing reading. What it will achieve is users will be annoyed and install a termblock extension to their browser, I mean kind of defensive software.

There are other options that lawmakers have.

In the analogy (and online), the newspaper with blank spaces (aka the ad-supported site) is a small and insignificant data player. It's mostly advertisers that are collecting and retaining the data, and not just on websites but in all kinds of ways. The profiles are kept by advertisers, and sold on data exchanges, completely out of the reach and control of the ad-supported site. So unfortunately, ad-supported sites that offer up their ad inventory via real-time bidding can't provide the information you'd want. You would really need to opt-in at every point where data is collected, which is everywhere.