Think of all the lost productivity wasted on stuff like this...
Of course, if you're someone who profits off of abusing users, you may see the GDPR as wholly negative.
Because users were faced with a raw deal, now we have regulation.
Regardless, I don't think it's clear that the benefits of the market being left to itself haven't outweighed the costs. My snap judgment (which isn't that useful when assessing massively complex topics like this) is that the benefits dwarf the costs.
Much of the internet services that have emerged over the last 20 years have been paid for by personal information that users have traded away in exchange for these services. Everything from Gmail, to Google searches, to Facebook, to millions of Youtube videos, to the vast amounts of self-help content one can find about any topic, is ad-funded, which depends in large part on this exchange of personal information for web services.
The problem is people are taking all of these services available on the web for granted, and recklessly assuming we would have all of them without the ability to target ads using collected PII, and with the added burden of complying with the onerous GDPR requirements.
People who are struggling to get by are not going to have the time, energy, or expertise to comparison shop. And when their identities get stolen because their personal information was leaked by a provider, they're just going to get crushed.
Those proposals of yours didn't happen for a reason: they are not in the interest of the capitalist class, and the way modern markets are set up, capitalists have way more power than other individual citizens.
Denied effective means of organizing to protect themselves from exploitation and abuse, is it any wonder that when the masses vote for politicians advocating regulation?
Find a variant of market Libertarianism where the majority of the population can actually defend their rights rather than get steamrolled and you'll see less regulation.
The cost to innovation is too steep a price for the additional safety gained. As it is, we don't live in a safe world either way. We are constantly struggling against the forces of uncertainty.
It is only through innovation that we better enable ourselves to contend with these forces.
Look at all of the web innovation that has arisen over the last two decades. It's given us a significant boost in our ability to manage the world around us.
Restrictive regimes like GDPR inhibit the free flow of action that generates innovation. It's bad bargain.
>>Those proposals of yours didn't happen for a reason: they are not in the interest of the capitalist class, and the way modern markets are set up, capitalists have way more power than other individual citizens.
I don't agree with your classist categorizations, but let's just say there is a powerful special interest that stands in the way of a given political solution.
I'd argue that any effective solution would need to be implemented over the lobbying and resistance of one or more of said powerful special interest groups.
If a political solution didn't need to be implemented over the objections of one of these groups, then I'd argue that it's almost certainly not effective, for one or more reasons.
So I'd say it's better to not implement a political change, if the ideal solution is not viable.
Worst case, assume they are actually correlating this for ad tracking: you might get more relevant ads instead of generic junk that you have no interest in. That's actually the opposite of abuse.