It's not just targeted ads. We see a new data breaches every week that leaks customer data and is used in identity theft that causes actual, quantifiable damages to users. The entire internet, and increasingly physical goods in our homes, has become the equivalent of a ghetto where every single person has to have bars on their doors and look over their shoulders constantly to avoid having shit stolen from them or their privacy violated.

The GDPR didn't arise out of some feeling that companies we're making too much money. It arose out of the fact that the industry refused to self regulate. They were given years to do this and the standard operating procedure for security around data right now is to lol because who cares if you have a breach, that's a problem for the people you harvested data from, not you.

The bad side effects from this data harvesting are called negative externalities. A similar set of negative externalities is pollution.

Do you think it's immoral for regulations to make certain business model that rely on dumping poison into the water or air unprofitable, just because those companies could have made some money if only they could do what they liked regardless of the harm to others?

"Getting to use a website for free in exchange for your browsing data being analyzed is a great deal and a win/win for everybody."

Which is why you are perfectly capable of giving consent to other websites to do that.

"Surely anyone who disagrees with your feelings on this matter must be a sociopath, though."

No, just those who insist on a "take it or leave it" approach.

You're not allowed to "degrade the service" or allow access contingent on consent to targeted ads/tracking, so the practice isn't going to be sustainable for websites when only a tiny percentage of users give consent, seeing how they get to use the site one way or the other - have their cake and eat it too.

> only a tiny percentage of users give consent

Implying that the majority of user's wouldn't just instantly click the largest button that says "make this annoying wall of legal text go away" whether that is agreeing to tracking or not?

While the inability to target ads based on data about you and your search history searches removes some amount of advertising income. Websites would still be allowed to show ads, and I would imagine that those ads can be specific to the article currently being viewed.

This is exactly how conventional TV advertising works, just because you don't know the gender, race, political views and entire life story of a website user, doesn't mean you can't get almost the same effect. You can target ads in general at specific content and hit most of the correct users anyway rather than targeting specific users and the content they have viewed in the past.

"The study, which looked at ads run on member networks during 2009, showed that among users who clicked on a behaviorally targeted ad, 6.8% converted. That compared with only 2.8% of those who clicked on a run-of-network ad."

https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Behavioral-Targeting-Doubl...

No one's arguing that the targeted ads don't make more money. We are arguing that the extra value from the ads is not worth violating everyone's privacy.

A quote I heard recently is "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make." That's what the tone towards small businesses/websites in relation to GDPR sounds like to me. I can't understand valuing this right to the "privacy" of not having your (often anonymized) identity tied to a marketing profile so much that you'd rather some free small websites no longer exist and others move to subscriptions.