New York City to Consider Banning Sale of Cellphone Location Data

Which really makes no sense when you think about it because it's already illegal in Europe and Japan so might as well just remove it altogether.

Oh interesting, I misunderstood

> That assumes there is only one way to reach users

No, it doesn't. If you have three pipelines between points A and B, removing one of them will raise downstream prices. It doesn't matter that there are two others. Removing an option will increase the cost of the others, even assuming equal effectiveness.

> That assumes there is only one way to reach users, ie through internet wide surveillance. This is simply not true. You have a new wakeboard gadget, advertise it on a wakeboard forum or a wakeboard site. I visit EETimes so I can see the ads.

This assumes "ad tech" == "internet wide surveillance". That is certainly the most profitable subset, but it is still just a subset. Something needs to serve those ads and make sure they are relevant to the content they are shown with, even if it exclusively uses the context of the specific page being loaded. Something needs to manage campaign tracking to know which specific sites or which specific ad copy is driving users in, even if no information about the users themselves is captured. Something needs to manage the connections between the ad copy and the site being advertised, both to ensure users go to the place they are supposed to and to combat malicious or hijacked ads.

All of this is "ad tech". Even if you think we should return exclusively to the days of random, untracked banner ads some amount of ad tech is necessary.

Look up tax incidence and elasticity of supply / demand curves. Yes, it could definitely be reasonable to assume, from a modeling perspective, that companies currently charge the optimal price for maximizing profit. However, once you impose extra transaction costs on companies (like a tax), the equilibrium price will then change (previous equilibrium is no longer the equilibrium because external state has changed).

By your argument, taxing a transaction in a market would not ever raise the price charged to the demand side. It's pretty easy to see by reading a chapter about tax incidence (which is different from where the tax is legally placed) and elasticities of supply/demand curves that this is definitely false (not just in theory, but also in practice)

> psychologically effective times if this were true, then billions of dollars would be spent advertising in bars and therapy centers (where people are most vulnerable).

I agree psychological tricks can be used by advertising ("one weird trick to...") but it's not a major practice to advertise when they are vulnerable.

> don't need 90% of what we buy are not necessities. So this is not just a problem for advertising but for 90% of what we produce. It's okay for people to buy (and advertise) things that they want, not need. In the modern era, we have wealth way beyond covering necessities.

> can't afford them is this a problem with advertising or people's finical responsibility?

> they are actively harmful Is advertising the problem here? If a product or service is actively harmful, why is it legal? Or you prefer a system where there are legal harmful products, but we just can't talk about them?

It seems there are businesses that are bad (or you don't agree with), but you are projecting advertising as the root of the problem. Maybe consider it's the core business you don't like?

> Because in order to prevent all bad things, you need to prevent many good things, too.

That's nonsense. Please explain, for example, how you think making it illegal to sell people's telco data in the 80s when we already knew this was happening would have prevented some good thing.

Preventing selling data would have only prevented a few rich sociopaths from getting a bit richer. They knew it was wrong, we knew it was wrong, the only reason it happened (and is still happening) was because people like you refuse to ever allow regulation, and people will likely prevent any regulation that does happen from having any teeth or a broad enough scope, so it will just keep happening. The "innovation" your ideology is incentivizing is just finding new loopholes to crawl through and screw people over.

I get it, the concept that regulation might have side effects makes sense if you talk about it only in general terms. But whenever I find myself arguing against this ideology, it's in a specific situation where your ideology is just being used to let sociopaths profit off of amoral behavior. Your ideology makes sense in theory, but over and over again it simply doesn't play out in practice.