Also as I just wrote on twitter it kills innovation. All the ad revenue is supporting some of the most cutting edge machine learning work in the world. The data itself enables this too. The algorithms and learnings that come out of this can be applied in many spheres of interest and now all that is lost. It is a massive loss for innovation and humanity just as articles 11 & 13 will be.
People like GDPR because they have a kneejerk emotional reaction to it and they never consider the second and third+ order effects which are disastrous at best.
So what? What if instead of ad revenue it was financial fraud supporting some field of innovation, should we suddenly start being OK with it?
https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1012592046102720512?s=21
Note: there are over a hundred advertisers and trackers in advertising cookies on top of "performance" cookies. On a website about a tech stack.
It's considerably worse on other sites.
I also find it implausible that online advertising is a major contributor to machine learning (ML). In the literature I've read, online advertising doesn't usually appear near the top of the list of ML applications. I can see that authors might want to avoid mentioning something that everyone hates, but most of the articles do mention the military applications, which aren't likely to make most people feel enthusiastic about ML either.
