I really love the GDPR for just making the life for such business models way harder.
Implementing data, analytics, tracking and stuff in a way that is compliant with GDPR (or its local equivalents) is doable and from an architectural point of view even interesting imho.
I love building GDPR conforming data architectures with my clients right now.
As I am still having 7 days to go and that is just a personal blog, I plan on using my free time to do that (would just take 3 - 5 minutes to disable everything if I wanted to by removing GTM and redeploying).
So removing everything is quite easy. It is way more difficult to selectively remove singular features - in this case the DoubleClick integration. As I am not doing that exact step all day (even being a data analyst with a focus on web data), I would have to look, where to configure that exactly. That would take longer.
So be snarky - I don't care, as I am already preparing for GDPR compliance and will have my house in order come May, 25th.
[Edit] Took 12 minutes in the end. Will take some time until caching catches up. Using a incognito instance all good to go regarding the trackers. "Only" the update for the privacy page remains for the weekend to do.
Think of all the free apps: I was in a conference with startup founders bragging about the business they make selling the location data of app users by incorporating some third party libraries in their apps without the users knowing. Of course, everything is anonymized, is it?
Add-supported websites on the other hand have only to document what is going on and get the consent of the user. That's a simple notification bar with a button, like the cookie notice, plus a page detailing the privacy policy. The GDPR even mentions legitime reasons for collecting, storing and transmitting personal identifiable data like technical or business needs. And in addition, almost all ad networks are going to anonymize IP addresses by stripping some bits and have opt-out features for being profiled.
Internet advertising is a viper pit of privacy invasion. They didn't get their house in order, and let it turn into the horrible mess it is today, so they shouldn't be surprised that the regulators stepped in.
