Need can only be assessed relative to one's goals. Many business models depend on tracking, so if your goal is to run such a business, then it's needed.
But if you assume the court decisions stands then if your business is based on tracking that means your business is based on illegal activities.
The only way out is to either change your business approach to comply with the law or go out of business. That’s no difference to many other activities that probably could earn money but are illegal.
Why? Tracking is not illegal. It's just tracking without consent that's illegal.
I don't - and I am fully informed and prepared. A month into the cookie banners avalanche and I just started clicking OK without looking. Now I have the "I don't care about cookies" extension and that's it.
I think this question is very context sensitive. The way privacy questions are usually presented ("we want to improve/personalize your experience"), I don't think most people care. But when presented with actual outcomes of loss of privacy (e.g. the Cambridge Analytica scandal) people seem to care a lot. For most people I suspect there's a gap in understanding between how people think their data is used and how it's actually used. Whenever this gap is closed by a major scandal where "how the sausage is made" is revealed, there's often a strong reaction.
But perhaps the biggest indication that people do care about privacy is that ad companies are so reluctant to allow them to opt out of tracking. If (almost) nobody cares, what's the harm in having clear consent or an opt out?
I have an alternative ideology to sell you...
we product enough to feed everyone.
That is: where you can’t track people without explicit consent, consent is as easy to not give as to give, and you can’t choose not to deliver the service or deliver a worse service to those who do not consent.
For most of my life, it's been done with tickets you buy at a booth and put in your dash, then you use the ticket to exit
If all the privacy-violating companies go out of business, there will be plenty of underserved customers for companies with more legitimate business models.
No, I don't think so. I think most people would choose to pay with info rather than cash even if they have the cash simply because they don't fully grasp the actual cost to them. People make foolish (from my perspective) economic decisions all the time. I am currently traveling in the American south where I am surrounded by shockingly vast numbers of morbidly obese people who willingly trade their health for a sugar rush. No one is holding a gun to these people's heads and forcing them to drink sugary soda and eat fried food, but they do it anyway. They do it because they like it, and because they don't think about (or don't care about) the long-term consequences. People are (again, from my perspective) stupid. But I don't think it should be the role of government to save people from their own stupidity. That is a very slippery slope.
People also chose to use Netflix or Steam (and other streaming platforms) instead of pirating. Last one would (and still is) be free. So it's not unprecedented.
Personally, I handover all my fitness information, driving habit information, spending and banking and investing information, my health information, even my location data, my STD statuses, etc to a company so I can get massive discounts on a bunch of stuff in various ways. It alters my behavior in a good way, it alters other peoples' behavior too, and I'm all the more happier about it. I much prefer this over stupid things like sin taxes, consumption taxes and laws that most people don't stick to or agree with (talk about choice and consent, huh).
Another reason for this is addiction. Addiction has people doing things that aren’t in their best interest despite them being otherwise intelligent humans.
Even the words words "privacy" and "invaded" are such loaded and ambiguous language, I don't see how smart tech people are playing along with it as if it's some sort of innate human right in the electronic sense. You have to convince us, you don't get to just skip a few steps and tell us we're all crazy plebs that don't understand the implications of this thing you decided has to be the case. Hence the comment about this attitude being privileged (elitist).
Personally, I would love to see the kind of offers companies would start to make for opt-in tracking. In a much cooler world, people would be able to sell their data, as subscriptions, to companies, with premiums placed on more 'valuable' data at whatever given time, based on advertiser interest.
Of course, no data tracking would be ideal, for me. But if someone wants to sell their personal data, they should at least be able to sell it for a market price.
Yeah, I get that. What I'm sating is: that's a stupid rule. Why should I not be able to say that, especially if it's the truth?
If you can't afford to pay $5 cash, you certainly can't afford to pay the $6 the firm that's tracking you will make from tracking you.
What's the value of a persons data if that person cannot afford any of the products which are advertised using that data? On the other hand, persons on a limited budget are sometimes most happy to spend money unwisely.
The collection, buying, and selling of your personal data isn't always about ads. The data people have on you is increasingly used to determine what you can and cannot do, what opportunities you're offered, how much you pay for things, even how long you're left on hold when you call a company.
The data companies collect about you can get you arrested, can be used against you in family court, or prevent you from getting a job.
Even ads themselves aren't always about what you buy. Ads are often used to manipulate you, change the way you see the world, even change the way you vote.
People who buy ads or buy your personal data don't do so out of the goodness of their hearts. They do so in order to make up not only the cost of buying the ad/data in the first place but extract more money out of you, one way or another.
This means it should always be cheaper to just pay for the service yourself then "pay" via ads or exploitation of your personal data, since the latter involves more middlemen that want their cut.
The fact that poor people can currently "freeload" off the system is an artifact of imperfect targeting rather than intentional generosity on the advertisers' part to subsidize the poor population, and will be quickly closed off the second there will be a way to reliably distinguish the purchasing power of a user as to deny service to those whose ad views aren't profitable enough (as they would never be able to purchase the advertised products).
This is why many governments are in general responsible to provide enough social support that turns all citizens into privileged people.
No, that's not my position. My position is: tracking as a business model is morally justified if it is done with informed consent. A business arrangement is morally justified even if it has potentially deleterious side-effects to one of the parties so long as it is entered into with informed consent.
People buy and sell tobacco and firearms and motorcycles and junk food despite the fact that these products potentially have negative impacts on people's lives that are at least as serious as tracking. One could argue (and some do) that selling Coca Cola is not morally justified, but that position is hardly the slam-dunk that you imply.
I’m going to keep ensuring that this possibly-only-good-for-the-privileged world is realized and I think modern privacy regulation like the GDPR helps, which is why I’m supportive of it.
We're going to have to agree to disagree about that. Have you ever actually faced that choice? I haven't. Until I have, I don't think I'm in a position to make that decision on someone else's behalf.
Here's another thing to consider: we allow people to put their lives at risk in exchange for money and social prestige by joining the military. The only substantive difference I see between that and selling an organ is that the latter doesn't provide any tangible benefits to the elites who make the rules whereas the former does.