[humanistbot]

> 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce?

You don't have a right to violate my privacy in exchange for this.

[Barraketh]

I think this is a genuinely interesting point, and I wish that we as a society had a more nuanced discussion about what that right is. AdTech is largely anonymous in the same way that crypto / web3 is anonymous - it shuttles around cookies / identifiers, but largely does NOT care about any information that is actually personally identifying. If the laws were regulating storage / transmission of information that is actually personally-identifying (addresses, emails, names, etc), that would be much more reasonable in my mind.

[JohnFen]

That would be insufficient for a number of reasons, including that even if you only collect non-PII (and don't let's get started on what "PII" actually is), if you collect enough of it and correlate it in databases (like ad companies do), then it's all personally identifying.

But I think that's not the main reason it's not sufficient. The main reason, in my view, is because it's still companies spying on me, my machines, and/or my use of my machines. Even if the data is genuinely anonymous, if you don't have my informed consent then collecting it is spying and unethical.

If we're going to have regulation (and it's increasingly looking like any solution will have to be), then the regulation should be about the collection of the data.