Why? It's relatively common for governments to prohibit businesses and services from discriminating against certain types of users, why do you think it's ridiculous in this specific case?

Whether we like it or not, tracking data used for ads is the currency of the free internet. It is how things are paid for.

This is like a government saying to a restaurant "You can't discriminate against people who don't want to pay you money for the food. You can ask them if they are willing to give you money for the sandwich, but if they say no, you still have to give them the sandwich"

Tracking is not necessary to make money online. It’s just helpful.

It’s more like the government saying, you can’t discriminate against people who demand that their food is cooked in a kitchen that isn’t filled with cockroaches. It’s going to hurt the bottom line, and might kill some businesses, but it doesn’t reduce to a prohibition on making money.

> It’s more like the government saying, you can’t discriminate against people who demand that their food is cooked in a kitchen that isn’t filled with cockroaches

What?! Are you seriously speaking of prohibiting cockroaches?

Cockroaches are everywhere! They are essential to survival of businesses! And it would be impossible to completely get rid of them anyway. Prohibiting cockroaches in public restaurants would push immense cost upon eaters. Without cockroaches how could we possibly get rid of the food waste, that routinely accumulates in kitchens? Do you expect us to spray our kitchens with toxic pesticides? To hire some specialized people of to lick food scraps off kitchen stoves with their bare tongues?? Insane!

Clearly, you are the enemy of the people.

I think a better example would be: you can only get food if you give us your address and consent that all other restaurants in the vicinity send marketing mail to you. You also consent that we and they exchange information about when and what you ordered.

To me it sounds very sensible to make such a business practice illegal.

That actually sounds pretty good if you don't have much money. Free food in exchange for agreeing to receive free scrap paper.

I'd totally use this service if it existed.

It exists http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/08/shiru-cafs-offer-stud...

"the government" as in >we the people< says to all the restaurants (and groceries): this stripping of all of our clothes before entering is nonsense and we can't choose not to eat, so we will force you.

If that's so, it's as if an unknown and possibly arbitrary amount of money was taken from your wallet every time you picked something up from a store. Yes, it's nice that I can walk into Whole Foods and just pick up a few oranges and leave, but if I get home and it turns put they cost $25 each, is it worth it? The data market is not mature and transparent enough for the transactions it's capable of making.

> Whether we like it or not, tracking data used for ads is the currency of the free internet. It is how things are paid for.

You're right, it's the currency now. It would be great if it wasn't. If there was some way to force the industry to come up with new, non-privacy-invasive methods... Hey maybe if we made a law to ban the old, bad, way....

>tracking data used for ads is the currency of the free internet

Advertisers will still pay for ads even without the tracking.

The only examples I can think of for the US where this happens have to do with historically discriminated classes of identities; e.g., gender, racial minority, etc.

Are there other examples?

Agreed. I think of it akin to smoking, drinking, drugs, speeding, or various other acts you can partake in. The government should largely stay out of your life but society has deemed some things "for your own good". In this case, I could see certain types of advertisements or data harvesting which is largely misunderstood to be managed by the government, where they decide that companies can't track you - whether you want them to or not.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying I agree with any of this. Nor that any of this is truth in any way. I just view the governments involvement here, saying how ad companies can behave, to be similar. Whether that is good or bad is complicated, and out of the scope of this conversation.

There's been laws about that sort of thing for decades. A business can no longer refuse to serve black people. So we, as a society, are using that logic.

They can refuse to serve you, however, they can't then turn around and claim that those who clicked "I consent" actually did freely opt-in to tracking because they genuinely wanted to be tracked - because, obviously, they most likely did not.

In essence, GDPR states that you're not allowed to violate the privacy of people unless they really want to (freely given, informed, narrow/specific opt-in consent) - and this time, all the oft-used loopholes to "extract consent" don't really fulfil the criteria, as forced consent is not considered consent.