Ads on TV have been non-targeted since the TV was invented, TV stations have survived thus far and are doing a little better than online publishers.
Note that we are talking of tracking individuals. You can still say a lot about the demographics of a TV show and thus do ads targeting based on the actual content being watched. That's not user profiling and while you can infer a lot about those watching, it's not dangerous either, because you're not keeping a history of what that user watched.
Saying that tracking individuals is necessary for getting revenue is disingenuous.
Besides, in case you aren't watching the news, the biggest problem for publishers is by far ad-blocking, not GDPR. If they would have respected people's privacy, security and time, we wouldn't have been in this mess and we wouldn't need laws. In our country we have a saying, you sleep in the bed you make ;-)
I'm definitely not saying that. I'm saying non-targeted ads generate a lot less money than targeted ones which means the content on the internet won't be as good as companies will generate less money to pay for the content.
In the extreme cases as we are seeing now, businesses are shutting down or blocking all EU users because the peanuts they would make from generic ads are not worth the server costs, content creation costs, costs to comply with the law, and potential fine costs (risk).
But no, it won't happen, because the EU is the world's second biggest market. If China can afford to coerce companies into censorship and violating people's rights, the EU can afford to impose some privacy laws as well.
And as I've been saying elsewhere, targeted ads are only needed at this point because people are fed up with ads due to abuse, this being a race to the bottom anyway. Pretty soon targeted ads won't work well either, how well they work right now is questionable and all of that data will have been collected already, ready to be sold and abused.
Take this with a grain of salt since I am not from China and really only know about it from HN: The EU is not nearly as powerful as the Chinese government nor do I think the general Chinese population is aware of how much better G/FB/other sites are outside of china (admittedly speculation on all accounts), nor are they in a country where they can vote to change laws (pretty sure on this one from what I have read on HN).
If G/FB suddenly stopped supporting EU users, they would most likely cry out so loud that the law would get reversed in days. This law seems to target privacy and opt-ins mostly and I as a programmer don't even give a shit about those since they give me amazing services for it. I highly think most people want the free apps with targeted ads over a full block or paywalls.
Not sure what that's supposed to mean.
> If G/FB suddenly stopped supporting EU users
But they won't because they are not stupid. Instead they'll start respecting the privacy of EU citizens, which is going to be a win for us.
> I highly think most people want the free apps with targeted ads over a full block or paywalls.
Most people aren't aware of the threat to their privacy.
Also, do you work for a company that makes its living off targeted ads?
Not that I judge you or anything, I worked on a startup in the past building a platform for serving ads on bidding exchanges (what Criteo has been doing, except they succeeded). And now I'm working on anti-ad-blocking technologies. But I'm also privacy aware, as I've seen full well what targeting can do and I don't suffer from double standards.
The people that defend ads targeting are those that work in the ads industry.
The number of TV stations has a hard limit, so that's why the average TV station makes more in ad revenue than the average online publisher. But the top online publishers (Google and Facebook) make much, much more in ad revenue than the top TV stations.
Perhaps we should just give out operating licenses to 1000 websites and force the rest to shut down :)
It's amazing the point we've reached, where egregious tracking is so normalized that we assume it's fundamental to the internet's feasibility. Facebook and Google aren't meek charity-organizations, trying to give the world free stuff and only asking for the pittance of our data, to help keep the lights on. Their profit margins are enormous. They could do quite well for themselves without any tracking at all, just showing random ads. Not to mention that many people would pay for their services if it meant getting rid of ads altogether.
The reason they don't offer individuals the option to pay for their services instead of being tracked isn't out of charity. It's because they would make less money. Your data is more valuable than any reasonable monthly fee you'd be willing to pay.
If GDPR puts an end to the gold-rush that's happening at the expense of everyone else in society, forcing tech companies to make a normal amount of money instead of an insane amount of money, that sounds to me like an unambiguous good.
GDPR is not against the ad business, it is only setting limits and obligations on how you can use personal data. It is saying that it is not normal for businesses to build huge user profiles without oversight or even consideration.
Yet somehow, I doubt that GDPR would exist if Google and Facebook were German companies, rather than American ones.
And Germans are more privacy aware than Americans, for obvious historical reasons.
People that blame Cambridge Analytica are missing the point, which is that Facebook is a threat to everything we know just by existing.
You are right. GDPR is a very German thing. We essentially have a two digit party (the greens) which rose because of the rejection of a general census (and nuclear energy). In Europe we are also not alone with that (see pirate party).
Oh and regards sensibility: The EU tried that. Google and friends gave a shit. Then result was creating a regulation more painful to them. These companies apply their US based understanding of right and wrong to the globe. You see China, EU and Russia are reacting and applying their local rules. With different methods, but they do.
You can still have targetted ads without tracking user data. Show ads for gaming content on eurogamer/ign, or ads for technology on techcrunch, or ads for Viagra on WebMD