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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

The revenue difference I have heard, ballpark, for targeted advertising (based on tracking) on the web, en masse is 2x. So the gajillion dollar online ad industry would only be set back by 4 or 5 years. So, 2018? Not bad. I say, do it. Ban targeted advertising on the web.

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Yup - and we can go even further - the tech companies (& all companies) should by their own volition treat personalized data at what it is - highly toxic waste.

While it is mildly interesting, I've never read any articles, studies,or other info that the highly touted promise of PII to increase sales, effectiveness of advert spending, or ad relevancy for consumers is anything but a complete flop. Decades of effort by the top tech firms and investors, and contextual ads are still more relevant -just show ads quasi-related to what I'm reading/viewing right now.

Highly likely that Google could this afternoon vaporize every byte of PII they hold and be just fine. FB might suffer, but more because surveillance tech is their core worldview then that they couldn't survive.

If they are smart ,they'll vaporize it this week, without any legislation. But I'm not counting on it.

It's not the ad industry that would suffer, but small businesses that buy ads. Targeted advertising is how new products and services can bootstrap themselves into existence. As scale increases, targeting accuracy declines, so larger companies don't benefit as much. But if you want to put your product in front of 1000 people who will be highly likely to try it, targeted advertising is superb. If that goes away, it's the startup ecosystem that will be hardest hit.

Targeting doesn't have to be done via tracking. It can be done by content, you know, the way it's been done since the magazine era.

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