This comes up every time gdpr or ads are discussed. But it’s pretty simple I think: not enforcing privacy regulations forces site owners to break them.

The reason is that so long as some sites show tracking ads, the monetization possible by privacy-friendly ads is almost nothing.

The long term goal must be that no one cheats, so that ad the revenue from well-behaving advertising can go up.

Remember the consent dialogs aren’t ever asking permission to show ads.

Hot take: People who produce content with the goal of getting money should just do something else.

You don't need invasive and pervasive tracking and wholesale trade of user data to display ads.

Google earned billions of dollars doing contextual ads before tracking user's every motion became the norm