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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

How would such a law define targeted advertising? (Serious question.)

Any advertisement that is displayed/not displayed based on personal information of the potential viewer perhaps?

And here is the rabbit hole. What is the personal information?

That you personally visited this site? Or is that not personal enough because we don't know who actually visited this site? Only that a browser visited this site. And if that's the case, couldn't any profile built out of a browser browsing many sites fall into the same bucket?

What is personal information?

Yeah I could see that the knowledge that you have visited the site before and showing an ad based on that is a form of targeted ad. Personal information doesn't have to be accurate or complete to fit that definition. I think any information that falls into the bucket of profiling (answering "who is watching this ad?"), despite whether an actual real person can be identified just with that information could still be considered personal information.

To put it in shorter terms, showing ads based on personal information should be banned, no matter if the information is identifying or not.

I think you've hit on the most important question. The definitions and compliance guidelines sound like thorny issues. Companies, individuals, and the government will all twist any reasonable, "gray" interpretations of the bill to their favor. Maybe a bill with definitions and protections similar to HIPAA, but less strict? However, the strict compliance and penalties of a bill like HIPAA might be one of the main reasons companies work so hard to comply with it.

Transacting without offering money as an exchange medium.

Wouldn't this cover bartering? I could also see someone trying to twist this definition to cover gift cards and other mediums that are not strictly "money." Such a skewed interpretation is why I think drafting such a bill would be difficult.

Is bartering for online services common?

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That's a little too broad, it's fine to let tech sites run tech industry ads and hobby sites could still run hobby ads, etc.

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