It isn't though. It's trivially easy to find people who suffered concrete harms from lack of free speech protections, because they usually end up in prison or exile. Consider what happened to Manning or Snowden. Although most people would agree that it makes sense for there to be limits on free speech for people in the military, nonetheless, they suffered badly for speaking out. Look at the fate of Chinese activists who speak out. Or for a non-government take, look at the lives being wrecked by cancel culture run amok.
> Under your point of view the GDPR is a completely useless law as well, because it protects the user from a phantom menace.
GDPR is in fact a useless law in my view and I've expressed that many times. Partly because it's far, far too vague to be a law at all let alone one with such high penalties attached. But mostly because again, nobody cares. When actual Europeans are polled on what matters to them, internet "privacy" (let's assume for a moment that GDPR actually creates this) doesn't appear anywhere in the list at all:
https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2553
"Europeans thought that the most important issues facing the EU at the moment of the survey were the environment and climate change (26%), rising prices, inflation, cost of living (24%) and immigration (22%). 41% of respondents mentioned prices, inflation, cost of living as one of the most important issues facing their country, before health (32%) and the economic situation (19%)."
Note: cost of living and rising prices are amongst their top concerns. What makes prices rise? Fining companies, imposing onerous regulation on them and preventing them from funding products via advertising.
> With tracking, it's a whole different story! Also, most of the good things that tracking can give users, could nowadays be done on the edge, local to the user device, without reporting it back to the central servers.
Again, "tracking" is a vague abstraction. There's no real harms being done here. Transient anonymous numbers that are linked to general categories of interest aren't tracking in the sense that a government agent following you down the street is, or even the NSA recording all your phone calls. The potential for abuse is just orders of magnitude lower, as evidence by the fact that you can't find people hurt by it. Compare to actual abusive tracking by governments, where people have been drone striked!
As for doing it all locally - maybe one day but ad fraud means you can't trust the client.
I don't really want to this sounds like a reductio ad absurdum but really, this is like saying that you don't need to have written down privacy or free speech rights in a country which is truly democratic because it has been impossible "Finding concrete, specific people who have suffered concrete specific harms". Under your point of view the GDPR is a completely useless law as well, because it protects the user from a phantom menace.
> And finally it's also somehow internally contradictory. What would it take to have a world free of annoying ads? Well, people would still need to find out about services, including those they maybe didn't even realize existed. Basically you'd need to replace broadcast brand-style ads with very specific "pull ads" where they're only seen by the people who need to see them. Which is ... exactly what search advertising is.
There is GIANT difference between advertising and tracking individuals en masse. I have no problem with billboard advertisement or passive one. I still don't like them and personally try to filter them out as much as possible (by paying for services directly or using adblockers) but I don't see them as a big moral issue. With tracking, it's a whole different story! Also, most of the good things that tracking can give users, could nowadays be done on the edge, local to the user device, without reporting it back to the central servers.