Because of GDPR, consent to cookies must be freely given, specific, informed, and based on an explicit affirmative action. On a webpage, it's pretty clear that action must be a click. The regulation does require it if you want to use cookies, and it's near impossible to code any useful page without storing state (cookies). What percent of websites use zero cookies?

You can have a session cookie without popup, but an analytics cookie or a personalized ads cookie requires consent.

Ah yes. "Companies are willingly flaunting the law, so the law is bad"

> Because of GDPR, consent to cookies must be freely given, specific, informed, and based on an explicit affirmative action.

Indeed. So if you do ask for consent, there have to be two explicitly labeled buttons: "Agree", and "Disagree". How many of the greedy leeches siphoning user data are providing that? And how many are instead waiting how long they can get away with it before the regulators get to them?

> The regulation does require it if you want to use cookies, and it's near impossible to code any useful page without storing state (cookies).

Nope. This is a lie that has been sold to you buy the same greedy leeches that have sold you the lie that it is the GDPR that is bad, the GDPR that is requiring these bad cookie popups etc.

First thing you could do is open the law (it's not that long and is not that complex) and try to find where cookies are mentioned. Hint: they are mentioned nowhere in the main body of text, and are only mentioned in one of the Recitals.

However, you rely on the industry to tell you that the law is bad even if the industry is extremely interested in painting the law in a bad light.

So.

If the data you get/process/store is strictly required for the functioning of your business (whether it's for storing login info or a shopping cart, or because other laws say so as they do in the case of banks), consent is not required.

If you get/process/store that data for any other reason, you must get a specific informed consent from the users. And no, pre-selected checkboxes, hiding "disagree/reject" behind fifteen clicks etc. is not it.

>If the data you get/process/store is strictly required for the functioning of your business

This is also quite the oversimplification, by this logic Facebook/Google don't need any consent as that user data and ability to serve targeted ads is required for the business to function.

It's also telling that the GDPR.EU website itself seems to flaunt the law with this: "We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it"

Because cookies are just one piece of data, and GDPR is, suprise, General Data Protection Regulation

> This is also quite the oversimplification, by this logic Facebook/Google don't need any consent as that user data and ability to serve targeted ads is required for the business to function.

It is an oversimplification that works in the vast majority of cases. Even if targeted ads are required, protection of user data is still required. And when pressed Meta and Google have to prove that they actually need, say, a full facial profile of every person on the planet to sell someone a haemorrhoids cream.

> It's also telling that the GDPR.EU website itself seems to flaunt the law with this

This is a good catch. I think they changed that in not-so-distant past. Things like this need to be called out and fixed.

And not swept under the rug with a shrug and "the law is bad". That's exactly what happened before GDPR but without any visibility: every country had its own version of data protection laws, and all tech companies couldn't care less. Suddenly they care (and try to blame the law).

This is just about user choice and freedom from dark patterns.

If you want tracking and targeted ads you are still free to enable that option.

All others are asking for is a chance to opt out of targeting. I don't see why having that as an option is so bad.

If ad targeting was such a great thing for users Facebook/Meta wouldn't have to fight tooth and nail to prevent people having nothing more than an opt out.

2.) My cookie autodelete + adblocking setup means I have to click the "reject cookies" consent on YT once per session. Except one of my filters break the form and it's invisible. My lazy workaround is to disable ublock, click reject and reenable it so the video actually plays. During this ritual I catch a 1-2 second glimpse of a YT ad.

This site explains better than I could.

Otherwise, it's just like every other form of advertising ever, yes. Rather than have ad companies know everything about me, I gladly choose more generalized ads.

Remember that in total no more diapers are sold regardless of these commercials, they just cause consumers to buy a specific brand. If advertising diapers no longer works, they’ll all just stop advertising and be better off.

> Max Schrems: "The penalty will go to Ireland - the State that has taken Meta's side and delayed enforcement for more than four years. This case will likely be appealed by Meta, leading to more costs for noyb."

So: No, the money does not go to the ominous "EU leadership", but rather to Ireland, the country which already profits from being a tax and law heaven for Meta and other companies. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_as_a_tax_haven

The EU don't get the fine money.

It goes to the Irish state. The same Irish state whose DPA has been trying to shield Meta through all this.

That's a hell of a claim to just casually throw out.

To be honest, good riddance. If it is no longer possible to offer users a "free" service in exchange for extremely invasive spying and psychological manipulation (without explicit consent [0]), it forces companies to 1) innovate in order to offer such services for a sustainable price, and 2) encourages competition from new entrants.

[0] By the way, one can imagine a scenario where users are somehow compensated for the permission to use their personal data. For example, let's say Facebook now costs 20€ per year. If you allow Facebook to use your personal data for ad targeting, now it costs 5€ per year.

Europe already endured centuries of this when the majority Christian ethos was that usury & banking were an evil to be banned. This, among other things of course, helped sentence millions of people to poor and deprived lives for centuries.

I think you're giving "the media" too much credit here, it's also very possible that the business models are actually unpopular and people are upset after learning about them. I think in general that's the basis for all the laws we have - a bunch of people thought there should be a law against something and made it.

The only alternative to this is someone doing top-down laws based on what they personally think is right or wrong, and I'd argue that's much more what was happening in Christian-ruled Europe. The church was making laws - they weren't coming from a democratic government.

> it's also very possible that the business models are actually unpopular and people are upset after learning about them.

I am 100% convinced - from people around me - that those who use FB and IG don't give a damn about privacy and would rather it be free of charge. This is clearly a small group of "elite people in the know" (which in this case I consider myself and yourself a part of) deciding this.

“Do you want us to use [extensive list of all of the kinds of information we have meticulously gathered about you] to show you more relevant ads? Yes/no”

I have a personal belief on what most people will answer to that question. You may disagree. But it doesn’t really matter - the key is that people will be given the chance to make an informed decision.

Ads shown in Gmail are not based on the contents of the emails, rather on other characteristics inferred from the associated Google account [0]. It's a bit of a "splitting hairs" thing, but it's not an apples-to-apples comparison in this case.

I'm not familiar with Hulu.

> How many people are flocking to use a paid privacy focused search engine like Neeva? Hell even DDG hasn’t taken over and it’s free!

Those search engines are not as good as Google. All things being equal, I posit that people would prefer products that respect their privacy.

> You don’t have to guess.

Again, that's beside the point. The point is that people should be given the opportunity to make an informed choice about whether a company is allowed to process their personal data for the purpose of showing "more relevant" advertisements, and that is a Good Thing.

[0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en

I do pay for Youtube premium, because without that, the amount of ads really annoys me. I usually buy ad-free versions of freemium Android apps. There must be some value to pay for; making the free version annoying subtracts enough value that paying for the uncrippled version becomes a reasonable choice. (I usually buy paid versions of open-source apps to keep them open-source; that's also a value.)

Also, a lot of people are very much not well off. They often don't have that extra $5; I remember being in that state myself as a student. So they will put up with free shit, even if it has a noticeable shit component :(

When Apple forced apps to implement App Tracking Transparency which asks a neutral, OS-provided question to the user, only 4% opted in.

Furthermore, people generally don't care about privacy because they don't understand the ramifications of that decision (which is exactly why the GDPR was enacted instead of letting consumers and "the market" decide), but they do freak out when the tracking ends up backfiring on them.

Every single time I point that out, I get told to show proof of such "ramifications". They just don't think they'll be impacted by this tracking, which is ridiculous. Even more strange is the position of "I have nothing to hide." - privacy != secrecy.

Wealth inequality is much worse in the US than Europe, so relatively speaking, "poor" in EU is still much better than "poor" in the US.

Besides the questionable practice of lumping all of European countries into a single "Europe" block for debates like this, a single metric like wealth inequality, for instance, isn't useful to compare how countries or regimes are faring.

For instance, by that metric, the following countries are better than Sweden: Belarus, Moldova, UAE, Algeria, Iraq. And places like Myanmar and Poland are better than Austria.

source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-in...

Obviously this is not the end alm be all of how good life is, but there are numerous studies indicating the average of goods and services provided to the poorest 20% in the US is higher than the amount of goods and services provided to the median EU citizen.

- Europe: 21.7% (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...)

- US: 11.6% (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/poverty-awareness-mo...)

So a very very generous adjustment would put them at roughly similar poverty rates?

So I would assume poverty rates are roughly similar, indeed.

Post-transfer median income is higher in the US than in Europe.

[1] https://mises.org/library/legalize-drunk-driving

That said, it is of course possible I overstated my case - the provenance of sources I am finding is not as strong as I would have expected.

[1] https://mises.org/wire/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class-much-...

Note: I appreciate your calm responses and engagement of the arguments. I concede that I should have included some refutation or concession based on the merits of the article themselves in my original reply.

Edit: to add another source refuting the Mises thesis, stating that income inequality is highest in the US among G-7 countries (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mises_Institute

Even if they got the numbers right, which I doubt, they completely miss that US income has to pay for a lot more than in most of Europe, healthcare and education just as the most prominent examples, also lack of public transit etc.

And of course anyone who has ever lived both in the US and in one or more European countries knows that this "analysis" is BS.

> And of course anyone who has ever lived both in the US and in one or more European countries knows that this "analysis" is BS.

mm. if we are going by anecdata, my dad grew up in Europe in latter 20th century and they could not afford shoes or electricity. his siblings were put up for adoption. things have certainly changed, but that is intense material deprivation relative to latter 20th century US.

Take a tour of rural Alabama or Appalachia today and you will see plenty of extreme poverty like that. We have a whole industry of NGOs and bin manufacturers [1] just to supply them with used clothes and shoes, massive subsidies to provide them with internet and electricity, and so on.

Once you get out of the big cities, especially in "fly over" states, the poverty in the US can be downright staggering.

[1] https://d2jald4mo73t7v.cloudfront.net/banners/_1200x630_crop...

They claim to account for them. Whether they actually did so in any way that makes sense is not documented. Given the credibility of the source... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also, their claim is "social benefits paid to households". That wording strongly suggests that they only took into account those social benefits that result in a payment, of money, from the government to the households, such as social security payments or unemployment benefits.

Which would miss the vast majority of benefits, including all the ones I mentioned, because those benefits don't work that way.

Generally I find this rhetoric is popular when people are making decisions for other people rather than those people articulating their desires.

For example, I voted with my feet. I used to live in the US, but I moved (back) to Germany, because despite the fact that I could make tons more in the Bay Area, my standard of living is much higher here.

This obviously doesn't mean that any wealth inequality dominates any absolute level (quick: everyone gets nothing!), and getting the balance right is tricky.

But looking at the world happiness index, it is obvious that European countries are doing a pretty good job.

https://dmerharyana.org/world-happiness-index/

    1 Finland 7.842 7.809 5,554,960
    2 Denmark 7.62 7.646 5,834,950
    3 Switzerland 7.571 7.56 8,773,637
    4 Iceland 7.554 7.504 345,393
    5 Netherlands 7.464 7.449 17,211,447
    6 Norway 7.392 7.488 5,511,370
    7 Sweden 7.363 7.353 10,218,971
    8 Luxembourg 7.324 7.238 642,371
    9 New Zealand 7.277 7.3 4,898,203
   10 Austria 7.268 7.294 9,066,710
   11 Australia 7.183 7.223 26,068,792
   12 Israel 7.157 7.129 8,922,892
   13 Germany 7.155 7.076 83,883,596
   14 Canada 7.103 7.232 38,388,419
   15 Ireland 7.085 7.129 5,020,199
   16 Costa Rica 7.069 7.121 5,182,354
   17 United Kingdom 7.064 7.165 68,497,907
   18 Czech Republic 6.965 6.911 10,736,784
   19 United States 6.951 6.94 334,805,269
   20 Belgium 6.834 6.864 11,668,278
   21 France 6.69 6.664 65,584,518

This isn’t good or bad. It’s just the way humans are.

Even more so, given the societal unrest seen in the USA. Just baffling.

To be fair, the social unrest of the US fueled by social media & advertising is now exporting itself to other countries - starting with the English-speaking ones (since the content can be reused as-is) but it's just a matter of time before it consumes other countries too.

German and swedish machining/mechanical engineering industry is essentially powerong the world's manufacturing. The biotech companies that gave us RNA vaccines are based in Europe. Where Europe is lagging is large supernational social media, software companies (although Spotify is Swedish). Hardly a museum. Also in comparison to the US or China the European market is quite open (the whole US defence is essentially a large government subsidy scheme).

I find it interesting that free market maximalists are always pointing to FANG companies as examples how the US unregulated market is so much better. The irony is that these companies are so big that they are largely outside free market pressures and competition and I would argue are a good example how the US dropped the ball on regulating industry to keep competition alive.

I doubt that anyone from the EU would like to migrate to the USA to do blue collar work.

This is literally the system the US built since WWII and what globalization is all about after the Iron Curtain fell.

Of course, the US being at the center of all this trade as the military guardian of naval trade routes and financier of specialized production capabilities all across the globe.

It was and still is a smart as hell play.

But that's exactly why anyone hitting on any one part of that web of trade as being irrelevant is so... unimaginative: The fact is that it's NOT a zero sum game, but a system where everyone benefits if trade happens.

There are some EU companies that can produce tech in some domains without much or any competition in the US (or think of semiconductors of Taiwan) and the same is true for companies in the US.

This is literally Econ 101.

And if your implied suggestion was that the business model of company X (and whatever benefit they may provide through this model) is a more important vote than the basic value of privacy, or that the issue of cost was not brought to the table enough times for people to understand the trade-offs, then I guess my understanding of how democracy works is different than yours.

That's a great analogy.

The issue isn't what we personally like or prefer for ourselves -- it's more about when we think it's legitimate to take away the right of businesses to experiment with business models, and of consumers to be free to enter into the tradeoffs they prefer.

Why shouldn't a consumer be allowed to agree to what you call "extremely invasive spying" in exchange for a free product, if they want to? As long as you're not signing away rights (e.g. you can't agree to sell yourself into slavery) or engaging in physical harm (e.g. food and safety regulations), then what's the moral basis for taking away choice?

After all, what you call "extremely invasive spying" other people might consider no big deal at all, in terms of their own personal data.

That's how we get food safety laws, employment laws, waste disposal laws, etc. With regards to food safety for example, the vast majority of people don't have the equipment nor knowledge to be able to test whether the food they just bought isn't contaminated, so it's better for everyone if the law just uses the threat of significant penalties to force companies to produce safe food and that people can buy and eat food and be 99% confident there is nothing nasty in there.

The same can apply for data protection - very few people have the skills and resources to reverse-engineer every single binary they run and inspect network traffic, so it's better if significant penalties just force all companies to not misuse personal data by default.

Back in the late 1800's and early 1900's food companies actually tried to convince people that this was the right thing, instead of, you know, just selling unadulterated food. The argument was literally "if we just put 'borax' on some sort of ingredients list people can choose for themselves." Women's magazine and cookbooks explained to house wives how to chemically check their food for contaminates (which required a lot of interesting acids) which included fun things like formaldehyde and liquified cows brains (to simulate "cream" on top of really water-downed milk).

Just to be clear, this only helped the companies and in certain circles ~1850-1906 (when the pure food act was passed) is called "the great stomach ache" because people were essentially eating poisons in every meal.

People are awful at understanding their own risk profiles, especially in the face of advertising.

Advertising is also regulated, by the government. The same one that regulates what goes inside of food. If the public is vulnerable to manipulation by advertising, the government is also vulnerable to manipulation by lobbying (remember the USDA "food pyramid" that put grains at the bottom due to industry lobbying?). Your argument is inconsistent because it implies that the government is somehow both simultaneously going to allow the public to be deceived by advertising, but correctly regulate the contents of food itself.

Yes, and we also have food labeling laws that require companies to truthfully warn consumers about some mildly-unhealthy things (sugar, trans fats) on the nutrition facts label - but, crucially, these laws do not ban those things.

That's the argument being made - that companies should be able to run on business models that aren't extremely bad (putting yourself into slavery, physical harm) as long as they clearly communicate to consumers exactly what they're doing (which, to be clear, is not happening now - a 30-page privacy policy in legalese with lots of "mays" is nowhere close to the "privacy nutrition label" that we deserve).

> The same can apply for data protection - very few people have the skills and resources to reverse-engineer every single binary they run and inspect network traffic, so it's better if significant penalties just force all companies to not misuse personal data by default.

That's a crazy invalid argument. The fact that very few people can reverse-engineer binaries doesn't actually matter. The government also isn't going to reverse-engineer every binary in existence, nor do they test every single product that is sold for banned substances, because that's not the way that (e.g. food safety) laws work.

The way that food safety laws actually work is that the government says "here are the rules for labelling, and here are a list of things that absolutely cannot go into your product at all" and then may occasionally test for compliance. That's exactly how both (a) labelling (but allowing) and (b) banning sale/(mis)use of personal information would work.

Your (invalid) argument has nothing to do with the argument about whether it's better for companies to not do thing x vs do thing x but clearly warn customers about it, because the enforcement/detection mechanism is exactly the same, whereas you're (falsely) implying that it somehow differs.

> Yes, and we also have food labeling laws that require companies to truthfully warn consumers about some mildly-unhealthy things (sugar, trans fats) on the nutrition facts label - but, crucially, these laws do not ban those things.

The US is pretty big in the war on drugs, so yes they ban things. Moreover they use their military and economic power to pressure others to do the same.

> That's the argument being made - that companies should be able to run on business models that aren't extremely bad (putting yourself into slavery, physical harm) as long as they clearly communicate to consumers exactly what they're doing (which, to be clear, is not happening now - a 30-page privacy policy in legalese with lots of "mays" is nowhere close to the "privacy nutrition label" that we deserve).

So in principle you are agreeing companies should be regulated. You just disagree on the extend.

> > The same can apply for data protection - very few people have the skills and resources to reverse-engineer every single binary they run and inspect network traffic, so it's better if significant penalties just force all companies to not misuse personal data by default.

> That's a crazy invalid argument. The fact that very few people can reverse-engineer binaries doesn't actually matter. The government also isn't going to reverse-engineer every binary in existence, nor do they test every single product that is sold for banned substances, because that's not the way that (e.g. food safety) laws work.

> The way that food safety laws actually work is that the government says "here are the rules for labelling, and here are a list of things that absolutely cannot go into your product at all" and then may occasionally test for compliance. That's exactly how both (a) labelling (but allowing) and (b) banning sale/(mis)use of personal information would work.

> Your (invalid) argument has nothing to do with the argument about whether it's better for companies to not do thing x vs do thing x but clearly warn customers about it, because the enforcement/detection mechanism is exactly the same, whereas you're (falsely) implying that it somehow differs.

I think the main argument is actually not about how easy it is to understand the implications of certain labels, but an argument about power balances. The power imbalance of a single consumer compared to a company like Facebook is immense. Facebook is employing many psychologist to make their product as addictive as possible ( the notion that we are rational beings that are immune to psychological manipulation has long been proven false), moreover even if the overstep some lines, their many lawyers will ensure that as a consumer you still only have a small chance for regress.

Democracy is fundamentally a tool to balance power and that's exactly what is happening in this case, people want Facebook et al to be regulated to balance the power. Admittedly there are problems, i.e. voters are also subject to psychological manipulation, but it's still much better than anything else we have.

Not everybody believes that individual, consumer-level choice is such a sacred cow. Why is a "moral basis" needed to prohibit choices that the broader society deems bad to offer? For example, I would be quite happy to see pyramid schemes regulated out of existence despite the fact that all participants are making reasonably informed choices to join up (certainly, much more well-informed than people who click agree on the Facebook ToS). Hopefully I don't need to offer a "moral basis" on why I think that's a good idea.

The solving of information asymmetry is a necessary precondition to that choice, but after you've solved it, why shouldn't you have that choice?

Meta is still allowed to do this, so consumers still get a choice. Meta is just now forced to ask consumers for their explicit consent.

Now, if Meta can’t make a viable business model without denying users the choice, doesn’t that mean that their model is flawed? The thing is, for users to understand what they are choosing, they need to understand their right to privacy and why it matters. It took the EU at least a decade (possibly more) to reach the point where they are starting to apply this legislation.

If companies are hiding or downplaying what their true business models are, then consumers can not be expected to make an educated or informed choice about which companies to support or use.

When large companies with massive amounts of resources are also using them to spread propaganda, it becomes even harder for people to make informed choices.

Given the current status quo, it's pretty clear that "the market" isn't solving this problem. Legislation is needed because "the market" has failed to regulate itself.

"the market" does not work for consumers, it's shaped for and by sellers.

Left to its own devices, capitalism creates conditions that are explicitly harmful to the population. Look at the sheer amount of labor protections we have. "the market" didn't stop employers from enforcing 80 hour work weeks and child labor, and it absolutely would not have without legislation.

Capitalism isn't magic. "the market" doesn't solve problems on its own.

Have you considered that it isn't being solved because consumers don't actually mind the extra tracking? All the tracking does is attempt to give them better ads. Better ads provide a better user experience. Personalized ads are a win win for both the company and the user.

This is an interesting hypothesis, but there's no evidence for it.

Here's how we can test it: enact regulation requiring companies to disclose what personal information they collect, how they use it, and what third parties they disclose it to, and put that information in an equally prominent place as the price (e.g. "$10/month plus we collect your name, phone number, email address, and mailing address and sell it to 16 third-parties[link to list] for advertising purposes).

Then we'll see how many people are willing to pay for services with their data.

That said: The personalisation of the adverts is, at least in my case, pretty terrible — FB and Twitter categorised me as being interested in sports I've never watched, languages I've not learned, and politics of countries I've never lived in.

As someone else replied to me here, it's good that they're bad, because bad ads are easier to ignore.

Part of the reason for the push for opaquely-personalised ads could also be because advertising platforms can effectively defraud their advertisers by serving their ads to people who have no interest in them, which would be impossible in a world where people explicitly choose which types/categories of ads they're interested in.

Why would a platform ever do this intentionally? This will just result in lower CPM and advertisers pulling out.

>which would be impossible in a world where people explicitly choose which types/categories of ads they're interested in.

It's possible. You can still make an ad model to give people the worst ads and ignore their preferences.

Privacy and data mining by corporations is a huge topic of discussion these days. Because the conversation doesn't enter your bubble, it doesn't mean it's not happening. You should look around more, find some diverse news outlets and actually get a sense of public opinion before making claims about it.

Because there is a vocal minority who does care and the media makes the collection of data sound scarier than it really is.

>There is little monetary benefit to a government to unilaterally enact this kind of legislation

Except for all of the fines that you can collect under it?

>get a sense of public opinion before making claims about it.

I have and most people do not care until you start using loaded words that make people think people are actually spying on them and people who can look at their data when in actuality their data is drop in a pond and it is only processed by computers and is never looked at by another human.

Consumers can opt in to the tracking.

When Apple required opt-in, 10% opted in, 90% opted out.

I see a lot of debate about market forces vs regulation. In my view, neither one of them will solve every problem; that's why we have both.

As others have mentioned, an issue with Facebook is that the consent was not informed and explicit.

Another group of related issues, and this is where I think the balance needs to tip to regulation, is the network effect/walled garden/near monopoly: choosing another platform doesn't just require signing up to another business model or UX, it also involves being able to communicate with a different group of people. This is compounded by their takeover of Instagram and WhatsApp.

As Facebook only offers one model (pay for the service by sacrificing personal data) it's an all or none proposition. This might satisfy the US market better than European ones.

It is easier to understand this with health, as compared to privacy, I think. The meat packing industry used to use substances such as formaldehyde to preserve meat longer. This wasn't transparent to the end customers and the health issues lead to lower productivity of the population as a whole. Soldiers eating this meat lead to lower fighting capabilities and higher illness. The meat packing industry fought against any transparency here knowing that it would hurt their profits. After an enormous amount of advocacy over decades, there was regulation added. There is a balance here - some substances are outright banned and some are just required to be documented on the food. This makes sense, in my opinion, because we can't expect every person to be a food chemist and know what's good and not good. Market makers have relatively large amounts of money to spend to confuse customers with misinformation, if given the option.

Applying this to privacy, the question that governments have to find out is what is fair for end users to be allowed to make a choice on and what is outright harmful such that a rational, informed person wouldn't make that choice. It is a tricky thing to get right and this bill may be overreach, but that is the nature of government and any policy - iteration. But there is always a place for a government to be in the market. Otherwise the market will be dictated by the powerful, not the people. Without perfect information transparency and the ability to interpret that information, there is no such thing as a free market.

Isn't that the exact point of legislation? Consumers had no choice in the matter, because Meta collected and sold user data even if you had no facebook / instagram account.

You paint a rosy libertarian picture about choice, but choice is not an inherently good. I don't want to live in a society that allows the use of consumer data to be used adversarially against consumers to defraud and manipulate them. It is good when laws prohibit fundamentally immoral behavior.

> It is good when laws prohibit fundamentally immoral behavior.

Sure, but that's not relevant, because people don't agree on what "fundamentally immoral behavior" is to begin with (for instance - I see nothing wrong with voluntarily trading some of your personal data away for a product, subject to lots of terms and conditions).

However, even if people agreed on what "immoral behavior" was, you couldn't regulate it away, because you don't have the ability to directly affect laws.

Regulation is by definition a very coarse instrument. Regulation is necessary because people are evil. But who puts laws and regulations into place? Also people, who are evil. The very fact that you can have greedy CEOs who destroy the environment for profit means that you also get corrupt regulators who write twisted laws for a bit of extra money. So, regulation is inherently subject to corruption - that's exactly how you get regulatory capture[1].

So, given this fundamental truth about humanity, the only reasonable thing to do is to design a system that acknowledges the truth about corruption and is designed to resist it. In this particular case, that means putting labelling and transparency regulation into place, which is much simpler and harder to corrupt and depends far less heavily on the moral frameworks of individuals.

Your proposal to regulate the market to conform to your personal moral code is highly authoritarian and in denial of a basic truth about human nature.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

In 70 years, I suspect people will view the ad/consumer surveillance industry much like we view the 1950s tobacco industry today.

I never said anything about "regulation being inherently bad" or "all regulation should be abolished". I certainly never said or implied anything remotely along the lines of "slavery-adjacent things should be legal".

Please make sure that your comments actually have a connection to the thing you're commenting on before posting them.