Adults are capable of consenting to it.

How many adults truly understand the data being collected, with whom it is going to be shared with and how will it be used? I doubt even the people writing the tracking code themselves actually know what will happen with the collected data.

I figured this reply would be coming.

Ages of consent (no matter the context) are basically ballpark guesses. It’s not like every 20 year and 364 day old lacks the mental capacity to responsibly drink alcohol and every 21 year old does. As a society we’ve settled on these ages as being reasonable averages. It is what it is and absent any realistic alternative (cognitive tests before a browser launch is permitted?) it’ll stay that way.

I don't think that's a fully accurate analogy though when applied to this context. I think the argument here is that most people don't have even the most basic understanding of what exactly it is they're agreeing to in the first place. It's like if the ABV of every alcoholic drink was written in hieroglphics as the solution to a quadratic equation. And some nerds would care to learn about how to decipher them but most people would never bother because its far too much hassle.

In society we consider consent/contracts that were entered to without understanding by one party to be null and void in many scenarios. Its a reason for example that most EULAs are dubiously enforcable (ofc it depends on how reasonable the eula clause being litigated is) there have been a good few rulings that release users from having to abide by them because they can't be expected to know their own obligations for every one of myriad services they use daily.

The alternative is to not allow tracking at all.

We have a full legal system based on parents or guardians being able to provide consent for their kids. How is this different?

I never provided consent for my kids - but here they are being tracked.

Did you have a more specific point to make here?

In the US, COPPA requires that tracking kids or even storing most PII of them be accompanied with parental consent. YouTube got hit with the biggest fine to date for doing this, partially because kids were watching kids' YouTube videos but on their parents' google account, and thus were being tracked and getting ads targeted towards them[0].

However, this research seems to be about children clicking ads, and then being tracked by that third party (or maybe even google ads/doubleclick on the page).

0: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/09/...

oh good, where do I opt out?

Federal law says you get the right to not be tracked until 13.