The coming collapse of surveillance marketing

1) People tend to opt-in for this stuff. Be this loyalty programs or agreeing to cookies on a website (see UK cookie notification policy). This is a commonly accepted personal choice even if a user doesn't entirely understand what they are agreeing.

2) There is a hell of a lot of money in measurement/advertising. Any attempt to stop this will come with significant lobby from many major corporations and advet companies.

2) Free works. Do you think people will move on mass away from free services like gmail/hotmail/Facebook and pay $10/mth when they can get it free in exchange for some tracking?

4) General apathy - consider the mass society reaction, or lack of reaction, to the Snowden revelations. Sure people don't like surveillance but the're not that fussed at the end of the day

4) There's nothing nefarious about what marketers are doing. Lawmakers will recognise that. The goal is to get relevant ads in front of you. And this is a good thing. It's better than better than blokes seeing tampon ads, kids seeing beer ads and and girls seeing beard grooming products.

Where I feel we will see changes is;

1) Stronger and more coverage on opt-in/out rules.

2) Rules about transfer/selling data regardless of the fine print we hit 'I agree" to. E.g. Businesses like banks are tying in with a loyalty programs to enrich each others data. We should really have a choice. Aggregated data, who cares, but if someone can plug in your email address and see the last 50 items you bought type thing will get greater protection on how saleable this information is between organisations.