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Companies did just fine selling products with non-personalized targeted ads that were intended for a wider audience before there was an internet. None of this tracking is actually needed in order to sell ads or make a profit.

Economic expansion is felt a lot worse in the opposite direction though. I buy products targeted with advertising to me all the time.

Then I'm sure you'd be happy to opt in to targeted advertising, and everyone else can stay safe.

People also were able to communicate before there was an internet. None of this internet is needed to allow people to communicate.

Personalized ads are as big of a breakthrough for the ads industry as internet is for people's communication. Both also come with legit downsides, but saying it's not needed is naive, at best.

Ads with tracking are not needed for us, even if beneficial for ad industry.

And personalization based on where ad is being displayed is not a problem in general.

Ads with tracking, like it or not, are extremely beneficial to almost every single business, especially small ones who don't have that much money to spend on advertising.

And placement based ads are disappearing for a good reason - they just aren't that effective, except for specific niches.

Look, I understand that there's a lot (like a loooot) of reasons not to like ads and tracking. But let's get the facts straight about what they bring.

Personalised & tracking ads are beneficial firms because they extract more revenue from consumers. That means it makes consumers poorer by diverting a larger fraction of their disposable income.

As such, I couldn’t care less whether personalised ads are beneficial to big or large firms and help their bottom line. These laws are (rightly, IMHO) targeted at protecting consumers and so I’m glad they’ve been passed and are being enforced.

> Ads with tracking are not needed for us

This is only true in the most naive sense. Through added efficiency we generate additional money. The information industry today and everyone that uses part of it was enabled through that added efficiency/money. Companies paying doctor money for programmers is not an accident. It's a consequence.

Sure, you can do ads without tracking like in the old days. You can also also do some amount of cancer treatment without chemo, or get old without any system of elderly care. It was "just fine" for hundreds or thousands of years. Parts of it might even look enticing. But if you cut out chemo, be prepared to die "naturally" younger, and if you cut out elderly care, be prepared, at the very least, to debilitate a generation of women, who will not participate in the workforce.

You can simply not expect the internet to get rid of just ad tracking, the additional money it provides and have everything else stay the same. A lot of silly things are being done with the money, things that nobody will miss, but if you expect only the bad things to go consolidate and all the fun and good parts to remain when ad efficiency and revenue goes down, I don't know what to tell you.

> That's fine up to the point where zealousness effectively worsens the life of others, and maybe even more than that, our collective lives.

Funny. Facebook's addictive "engagement engineering" was proven to worsen people's mental health in significant and measurable ways. When is that going to stop being fine? When are all the ad tech attention brokers gonna be held accountable?

If advertising-driven social media is wiped off the face of this earth, our lives are going to improve, not the other way around. We don't need advertising, nor do we need social media.

> When is that going to stop being fine?

I don't think it was ever fine. I also don't think it pertains to my comment.

It has everything to do with your comment. Your point is that regulating this stuff could harm people. My point is they're harming people a lot more just by existing and it would be a net gain if they were regulated out of existence.

Any addiction is worsening people's mental health. Social media are part of it, sure, but it's naive to think that getting rid of Facebook will solve the problem. Hacker news is also addictive and has lots of people who spend way too much here and it's worsening their mental health.

HN is a poor example, as it actually provides settings to limit addictive usage (maxvisit and minaway), thereby putting the user in control.

Most of social apps nowadays have usage trackers, that will prompt you that you exceeded time you wanted to spend on it.

Your point is stronger than you probably think: there are entire countries where ad-supported smartphone apps are the only really viable way of communicating for the majority of people because things like normal phone calls or text messages are ridiculously expensive for the locals. The business of financing communications through ads is actually helping millions of people in these affected poorer countries.

That's just my personal observation. Make of that what you will.

“No free lunch” comes to mind. That phone and Internet access get paid in some way.

Removing the possibility of financing phones and calls through ads changes the entire market dynamic. I can’t say for sure that the ad-free prices wouldn’t drop because they were suddenly the only option available and scale gains (or a survival need) would drive costs down.

Companies won’t lower their prices if they don’t have to, but they will go to great lengths to survive…

I think you make an interesting strawman, but look in the reverse direction. If companies put the same revenue figure per customer as a pricetag, and then offered a discount of 100% to opt out, would it work?

Have two pennies if you can answer that without a presumptive bias.

That's simple enough: I don't know. But I get the a vague feeling you are being rhetoric and you think you do? If that's the case, please, just offer up the answer alongside your thoughts leading up to it.

Also I don't think I made a strawman (of any quality) but it's somewhat telling you think I did. To be super lame: I have very conflicted feelings about this topic and no conclusive opinion.

Occam hits the nail on the head - those with valuable data will pay, the value of "privacy" is not a long tail graph, it's a diminishing return.

So the products for the poor are subsidized by the information of the able at a cost to everyone. That doesn't feel sustainable to me - we're barely twenty years into the Google era, and how many hours have been wasted opting out of tracking? How many useful things could have been created for a dollar per user instead of mesothelioma ads?

That the indigent get 'free' service is a byproduct of the fact that companies abuse everyone else to subsidize it.

"Your" data may be worth a buck, but to the right person, targeting "you" is worth a fortune - the value you extract from your Gmail address is the same, the value they extract is not.

There is an adverse selection problem: the users who would pay are probably the richer -and most profitable- ones. The only equilibrium is a very high price to opt out, far above the average revenue per user, and essentially nobody would pay for it.

Insurance has similar problems since a long time: search for Stiglitz and “unraveling“ for literature on the topic.

I think a key point to consider is that when buying a good or service that has a quoted price, a consumer can make an informed decision as to whether that good or service’s utility to the exceeds the utility of price being asked for. When there’s all sorts of tracking going on behind the scenes and advertising that leads to them getting better targeted ads (which presumably lead to them spending more, because otherwise firms would not pay to have such targeted ads) then it becomes an opaque situation that does not allow the consumer to make a reasonable calculation.

Good riddance. If the EU wants to outlaw that business model, then that's their prerogative. I wish the jurisdiction I lived in would do the same and more.

For one alternative way to do microtransactions another way, see how Flattr 2.0 did it with its browser plugin :

https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/flattr2.html

https://github.com/flattr/flattr-extension/

(Yes, this does potentially give a lot of power to Flattr. But not that much, barely more than Patreon, as long as most of the processing stays local, and they only get the aggregate usage once per month ? And the open source aspect should keep them honest...)

Ah, so since we arw talkint about harm, when will facebook account for the massive fraud they enabled? They proffit millions off scammers on their platform. If I was assisting fraud on a massive scale, I would be in jail long time ago.

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2019/01/martin-lewis-...

The NYT stopped selling personalized ads in Europe, and their ad revenue there kept growing (source: https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-cut...)

The idea that they have to make money some other way when profit margins are 40% is spurious. There are cases where advertising is banned and it improves the local economy because the soda companies no longer have to compete by placing their placards everywhere. The tobacco companies happily agreed to no advertising on TV. A huge number of businesses benefit from a smaller ad market.

That being said, this unequivocally lowers demand for software engineers and puts downward pressure on our compensation.

Governments can get away with punishing companies up to the point they become unprofitable. I feel like internet ad companies have flown too close to the sun and privacy regulations are proving more productive for governments than anti-trust or tax law. Privacy is an acceptable excuse, but the real motivator is Europe is tired of sending so many ad dollars to US software engineers.