This is such an important change for Europe. I've worked with 100+ start-ups as a consultant, and I've talked to EU ones who have been strangled by some of the regulations.
I care about keeping my personal data private so it will be more difficult to use for profiling me for whatever (whatever!) reason, but all are for other's benefit on no or marginal benefit for me in overwhelmingly major part of the cases.
If startups cannot do properly, then they should not do at all! They must spend on handling personal data well if they want to handle personal data at all! There are way enough already and most are just go out and bust, circulating data collected who knows where and how. And they are surprised it is so hard compiling data on people, people are increasingly reluctant to share because the so many abuse and actual damages caused by personal data abused.
People are important, not the startups!
I cannot even use my official government ID application that is mandatory almost everywhere without signing on to Google or Apple, so much for data privacy and sovereignty.
If they cannot do without exploiting people for their organizational benefits, then they can go to China and USA, they do not care about living standards over there! That is the place for ruthless, greedy, lazy fast paced groups to stomp on people! As they already do.
The EU is not the strongest and who cares?! It is strong enough, and that's what counts! Fullfills the needs. Good. Not everything is a race to infinite numbers in quarterly reports! Less inflated pushy tech idiots racing each other to oblivivion? GOOD!
Essentially all modern advertising is done algorithmically. The platform takes conversion events (a typical event is "someone fills out a form"), that signal is sent to the platforms, and the platforms use it to serve your ad to other people who may be interested. GDPR as it is means you need opt-in to do this, so it greatly reduces the effectiveness of online ad targeting.
So in practice, say you make a new cool B2B tool for, say, plumbers. It automates your plumbing business and makes plumbers more money.
In the US, you can make a Meta ad campaign with broad targeting and Meta will use algorithmic magic and be able to just find plumbers for you to show your ad to.
In the EU, this doesn't work as well, so its harder to find plumbers to show your ads to. Less plumbers get to use your product as a result. So its just one reason it's hard to get your EU based Plumbing SaaS off the ground.
You get ads for fridge AFTER you bought one since they now know you browsed them.
What works is content based advertising - so advertise a power drill on a woodworking hobbyist site. No tracking required there. Conversion can be obtained when user clicks a link via redirect. Like in the good ol times.
But this modern approach that massively invades privacy has been sold to businesses and now they require it even though it is probably ineffectual.
This still requires tracking to follow the user through the whole flow, which is required unless you want to be defrauded with fake users at the very least, but also very important to track the actual performance of each ad source.
You can't just buy a domain, put your service out there, and expect it to gain traction. Advertising that you actually exist is essential for any service, but especially so for smaller businesses and startups.
I am trying to imagine a scenario where you just track the actual conversions (sales) and the only datapoint is where your customer originated from, something akin to podcasts/youtube giving affiliate links. That could work right? Or maybe I am missing something. If I am not it feels like the current model only benefits the middle man and is detrimental to everybody else.
GOOD!
Good! I don't want ads to be a thing in the first place. It's a good thing that industry is being strangled by regulation.
We tried to get rid of any tracking banners but have been unable to do so.
Is that like I’m strangled with my start up of “cheapdvds.com” because I can’t sell someone else’s data?
“25% of our users that arrived from the newest ad came from Facebook and 85% of those were mobile users.”
So abusive. So much selling.
RIGHT?!
I have not seen GDPR reduce the amount of data people track. It's just resulted in piles of cash being burned on lawyers' advice to make sure the company has as little GDPR-related liability as possible. Subprocessor agreements, updated Terms and Conditions, etc.
Some good has come out of it, such as less backup retention, and some basic data breach plans, but a lot of it is theater.