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Completely incidental to the tragedy and it feels morbid to get something else entirely out of it when this is how it came to my attention, like a moral fruit of the poisonous tree situation I'm babby's-first conflicted over, but...
The passengers in the horrific Learjet crash in Palm Beach yesterday were the founder and his family of a wildly evil startup I was previously unaware of called RB2B (do not click that link without reading the following):
Beware that this exists and is apparently already in broad use. It obviously always could have and you would be foolish to not have it in the back of your mind, but I would have thought something so straightforwardly this would be restricted to (and require!) the darker corners of things and be somehow illegal. No:
This is the price that we pay for freedom. Nothing like this would be possible in Europe under the GDPR.
Small aircraft incidents are a surprisingly common cause of death for rich people. Commercial airlines are signifigantly safer per passenger-mile than driving. Private jets are not. It's not no-big-deal to jump in a Gulfstream or helicopter every weekend. Don't be like Kobe.
As a German, I am happy to give up my god-given right to collect any data of my neighbor if in turn it constrains others (realistically big tech) from tracking me.
(My real pet peeve with the GDPR is that unsolicited consent requests are terrible UX, and the sane default would be to tell websites that they have to use HTTP headers instead which the user can once configure in their browser. Oh, and IP addresses being personal data is also a bit silly. A sane compromise would be that you can keep your logfiles, but are not allowed to do data mining based on IP addresses.)
Generally, I am fine with conceptions of rights evolving alongside with tech, and privacy/data protection is one such right. I guess the US conception of rights is that because the founding fathers did not envision the tech to send messages into peoples brains, if the tech gets developed everyone has the natural right to spam other people with ads in their sleep. But at least you don't have to house soldiers!
I'm pretty sure this is how GDPR legally works already. Security enforcement and such is considered a legitimate use.
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But how does the government (or anyone) prevent you from spying on your neighbor, without spying on you?
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Disclaimer: My opinion is tainted from having worked in this industry.
I'm not bothered at all by this tracking. The decision to display an ad is independent from which ad to display. Why wouldn't I want the ad to be something I might actually like?
Poor ad targeting is far more annoying. In many instances I think the advertiser is choosing to simply target all men and that's how I get served up ads for boner pills. About every ad on X for the past week has been Megan Fox advertising erectile dysfunction meds, and hitting the 'I'm not interested' button doesn't make it stop.
I would expect the ads at best to increase chance of conversion, not to actually be selling me something that solves a problem I have and/or makes my life better.
Stop buying things that don't make your life better, and the problem solves itself.
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They build up a profile of you which can be used in many ways, not just to serve you ads. The data can be sold on to third parties. It's also not just websites that track you. E.g. car manufacturers have been caught collecting driving data and selling it to insurers. Web stores (even places like Amazon) have been caught adjusting prices on the fly depending on what they think they can get away with charging the kind of person they think you are. More and more we're living in a panopticon.
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It's not a thing you may actually like, it's a thing calculated to deceive you specifically.
Also, the information can be sold to someone else who may use it for non-ad purposes. It would be bad if someone finds out that I believe <insert disfavored political position>.
This is one of those rumors I frequently hear but really doubt. There's no way to disprove that advertisers are playing 5D chess, but on the other hand, there are companies that have advertised to me that I'm certain I will never buy from (barring circumstances that have nothing to do with the ad being delivered to me).
I think it's far more likely that companies heavily optimize ads to deliver the most revenue, but most of this comes from whales. Some comes from influencing others (e.g. I had Coke when I was young because it was served at my classmate's birthday party). Ads have a lot in common with scam spam emails, such as, they're cheap enough that it's worth bothering thousands of people who won't buy for one who will.
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If the political ads I get are any indication, and it seems clear they've split "ads for fundraising from clear supporters" from "if you're on the fence, you should vote for me", the politicians have no clue how I vote.
Incorrectly determining your political beliefs and selling the information can be as bad or even worse than correctly doing so and selling it. Imagine advertisers incorrectly determining that you're a Nazi (or just that you support Trump) and some employer getting ahold of it.
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