Try sampling a population who have been fully informed about what is going on and see the reaction you get.
I've yet to see a 'fully informed' sample from anyone. While people don't like getting tracked, they don't like getting tracked in contrast to an imaginary situation where they can access all the same content with no tracking whatsoever, which simply isn't possible.
Whenever people complain about ad targeting, you should think of the guy who spends all his time grousing about taxes while still wanting the government to pay his for roads and his Medicare and his Social Security. Same thing.
Ultimately, businesses do not have carte blanche to engage in whatever shady practices they like in the interests of increasing profits.
Of course. This is why online businesses will end up doing what, for example, a credit card provider or a magazine publisher does - they'll tell you that they're going to sell your information six ways as a condition of receiving the service, and the public will say 'well, I want the service, so what choice do I have?' Unless, of course, the government makes the very practice of ad targeting illegal, in which case the content goes behind a paywall where the poor don't get to read it.
If publishers who want to spy on everyone make opt-in mandatory in response to measures like this, they will just create a market for publishers who are willing to share their content with ads based on that content alone...
Now this argument is like the guy who thinks the government can balance its budget and lower taxes just by getting rid of some sort of vague unspecified 'waste'.
You are more than welcome to try to make real money through contextual advertising alone. Unless you own a search engine or are churning out made-for-AdSense content tailored specifically to search queries, you will fail. Brand advertisers doesn't do much contextual, so say goodbye to agency CPMs. The contextual stuff itself performs horribly when users aren't explicitly in 'search' mode. Why do you think those 'three weird tips to losing belly fat' ads are everywhere instead of Google AdSense? Yes, even that spray-and-pray CPA stuff outperforms contextual. Now picture all your brand advertising going away and trying to subsist solely on the pittance you get from education loan and car insurance ads. Now picture doing this while trying to produce quality content. Good luck.
I get that people don't like advertising, and I get that they don't like analytics. People expect the web to be like a backlit newspaper, and when they find out that their reading material is reading them back, they're disconcerted. However, they're just going to have to get over it, because that's the real price of 'free'. The alternative is paying for it, which helps turn the internet into a place for the privileged.
I've yet to see a scenario that's going to end up better than the muddling-through we're doing now. You can effectively opt-out just by installing an extension, as can anyone else who really, truly cares about a website knowing they're a college-educated male between the ages of 25 and 34. Stop trying to fix the world, you're simply going to make it worse.
Your entire post seems to imply that there is no way for ad networks to target advertisements without tracking users from site to site.
However, if someone is visiting a site about, say, cats, it is still possible to show them ads for pet-care with no tracking required. If they then visit a site about data structure, then you show them ads about, say, data structure text-books, but the advertiser can't reliably detect that they are the same person who just visited the site about cats, so can't show them another pet care ad.
Tracking users might slightly improve the targeting of ads, but not by much - saying it will make companies in the EU unprofitable is extreme hyperbole.
Of course, the draft directive may not actually be effective, especially as IPv6 rolls out and NAT becomes progressively less necessary and common. IPv6 address + browser header fingerprinting could easily be almost as accurate as cookies to track users, and it doesn't require storing any information.
I guess my problem with this whole debate is that I'm struggling to think of a single site I visit at all regularly that offers this hypothetical content I wouldn't want to lose, yet which couldn't/doesn't have alternatives available other than pseudo-spyware advertising.
Most of the good small-scale sites I visit are related to some particular topic, perhaps a hobby or a particular technical subject. That means they already have a ready-targeted audience without any tracking whatsoever, so if there are any related products to advertise at all, they are pretty much a marketer's ideal channel. I don't know the operators of most of the sites I use personally, of course, but a few of those I do know get guaranteed rates from specialist advertisers based on real contracts that would make the average CPM-based ad-networked blogger cry.
Larger-scale sites tend to have more options open to them anyway once their user base has reached critical mass. You get to the scale of corporate sponsorship, serious donation volumes, and eventually the kind of mainstream advertising campaigns you see with mass media, major sports events, etc.
Obviously there are lots of other kinds of sites, but mostly run by people or organisations for their own reasons that don't necessarily involve profit.
What's left? Small-scale sites that need to make a significant amount of money yet have no particular speciality nor offer any particularly original and valuable content that others aren't contributing for free?
By the way, I don't accept your analogy between this situation and taxes at all, but I have no interest in getting into a superficial political debate that I don't think is particularly relevant.
Also by the way, I don't have much problem with prohibiting this kind of tracking outright either. Privacy laws are, IMNSHO, not nearly strong enough in most jurisdictions today. Far too many people wind up suffering significant harm in one form or another as a result, and if the trend for tracking everyone all the time continues along its current path, things will surely become much worse. If a few minor web sites have to be lost for preventing massive, organised surveillance of everyone's private lives, then I'm sorry but I consider that a small price to pay.
I would genuinely be interested in seeing examples of significant harm from web analytics or behaviorally-targeted advertising. Right now the most common (and frequently made) argument against FTC regulation of these fields is that no one has been able to bring forward an individual that's actually suffered harm, so your comment about "far too many people wind up suffering significant harm in one form or another" makes me cock an eyebrow.
'Mainstream advertising campaigns' for larger publishers are absolutely and completely reliant on third-party tracking and targeting - for frequency capping, serving verification, and demographic targeting. If these tools go away, the branded ad spend stays on television.
The New York Times is the most obvious example of a publisher (and journalism the most obvious sector) that'd be negatively impacted by Do Not Track. They're making significant revenue from their online business right now, but they also have very significant expenses. It costs money to run a news organization capable of international reporting and investigative journalism. 'Minor websites' are not the issue here - it's the major websites that are concerned.
I'm calling it a night, but I'll wrap up with a couple of quotes from the Online Publishers Association (which includes the NYT and every other major American news organizations) comment on the FTC's "Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change" preliminary report:
Online publishers should have the right to offer their content and services on any lawful terms that are explicitly communicated to consumers and withhold access from those who do not agree to such terms. To require otherwise would burden publishers’ First Amendment speech with free riders who enjoy the benefits of access to valuable content without
providing fair value in exchange.
[D]efault rules that prevent fair value exchanges of digital content for user data could harm consumer welfare by reducing incentives for some publishers to invest in the production of content and/or creating incentives for publishers to charge or charge more for content that they would otherwise make available for free or at a lower cost.
> I would genuinely be interested in seeing examples of significant harm from web analytics or behaviorally-targeted advertising.
I think advertising itself is more of an annoyance than a serious harm in most cases, though I would certainly regard targeting certain profiles with advertising for certain products as abuse. That is mainly where the target is unlikely or unable to make sound judgements, for example where children, adults with learning difficulties, those suffering from a recent emotional trauma, or those who are recognisably not well-informed about things like legal, medical or financial matters are involved.
However, what really worries me is that it's not only advertising that can be driven by this kind of personal profiling, and the effects in other cases can be far greater than the irritation of seeing yet another toy advert because you just uploaded some baby photos.
For example, here in the UK, there was a lot of media attention a couple of days ago, because it looks like car insurers are going to be forced to stop offering different prices to male and female customers just because of their gender. The insurers, of course, have been profiling, and argue that on average young male drivers are more expensive in terms of the accidents they have and the resulting cost. However, while there may be some correlation there, that doesn't imply a causative effect in any individual case, and it doesn't change the fact that there are many safe male drivers who are paying more and many dangerous female drivers who are paying less. Since all drivers are required by law to have insurance in my country, this sort of profiling has effectively meant that many good male drivers have been charged thousands of pounds of basically unescapable tax, just for fitting a naively constructed risk profile.
Is it such a leap to wonder what would happen if health insurance companies were able to start profiling on grounds that were not directly clinically relevant, particularly in countries where private health insurance is the norm?
What about profiling and employer blacklists: sorry, we can't give you the job, because even though you appear on the surface to be an excellent and highly qualified candidate, we've analysed your friendship network and several of your regular contacts have photos up on Facebook that our automated analysis software thinks show them being excessively drunk, which means that statistically there is a relatively high chance of you also having your work performance impaired for alcohol-related reasons. Oh, and just to save you some time, don't bother applying for any other jobs where your hard-earned specialist skills and useful experience would be relevant, because we know that the other four big name employers all check the same databases we do.
> I'm calling it a night, but I'll wrap up with a couple of quotes from the Online Publishers Association
As far as I'm aware, no-one is saying that publishers can't offer content on their own terms. The publishers will simply have to be transparent and up-front about what those terms really are now, and compete accordingly. Moreover, where there are monopolies or essential services involved, consumer protection regulation may be warranted in the same way that state-sanctioned monopolies, such as our railway and postal networks, are sometimes subject to pricing constraints dictated to them other than by market forces.
I've yet to see a 'fully informed' sample from anyone. While people don't like getting tracked, they don't like getting tracked in contrast to an imaginary situation where they can access all the same content with no tracking whatsoever, which simply isn't possible.
Whenever people complain about ad targeting, you should think of the guy who spends all his time grousing about taxes while still wanting the government to pay his for roads and his Medicare and his Social Security. Same thing.
Ultimately, businesses do not have carte blanche to engage in whatever shady practices they like in the interests of increasing profits.
Of course. This is why online businesses will end up doing what, for example, a credit card provider or a magazine publisher does - they'll tell you that they're going to sell your information six ways as a condition of receiving the service, and the public will say 'well, I want the service, so what choice do I have?' Unless, of course, the government makes the very practice of ad targeting illegal, in which case the content goes behind a paywall where the poor don't get to read it.
If publishers who want to spy on everyone make opt-in mandatory in response to measures like this, they will just create a market for publishers who are willing to share their content with ads based on that content alone...
Now this argument is like the guy who thinks the government can balance its budget and lower taxes just by getting rid of some sort of vague unspecified 'waste'.
You are more than welcome to try to make real money through contextual advertising alone. Unless you own a search engine or are churning out made-for-AdSense content tailored specifically to search queries, you will fail. Brand advertisers doesn't do much contextual, so say goodbye to agency CPMs. The contextual stuff itself performs horribly when users aren't explicitly in 'search' mode. Why do you think those 'three weird tips to losing belly fat' ads are everywhere instead of Google AdSense? Yes, even that spray-and-pray CPA stuff outperforms contextual. Now picture all your brand advertising going away and trying to subsist solely on the pittance you get from education loan and car insurance ads. Now picture doing this while trying to produce quality content. Good luck.
I get that people don't like advertising, and I get that they don't like analytics. People expect the web to be like a backlit newspaper, and when they find out that their reading material is reading them back, they're disconcerted. However, they're just going to have to get over it, because that's the real price of 'free'. The alternative is paying for it, which helps turn the internet into a place for the privileged.
I've yet to see a scenario that's going to end up better than the muddling-through we're doing now. You can effectively opt-out just by installing an extension, as can anyone else who really, truly cares about a website knowing they're a college-educated male between the ages of 25 and 34. Stop trying to fix the world, you're simply going to make it worse.