Here is the report (pdf).
A joint report published by five rights group from Germany urges the European Union to ban advertising.
The EU has established important cornerstones to protect online users in the shape of the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). At the same time, the reactions of large corporations to this legislation show that a paradigm shift in the online advertising market is still needed, as the advertising industry is persistently undermining efforts to prevent manipulative practices, the rights group Germanwatch writes on its website.
Alternative (e.g. contextual) advertising models create opportunities for reaching people beyond the omnipresent tracking and targeting, and thereby protecting them in data processing operations. To bolster alternative advertising models, the new European Commission should take digital fairness seriously and push for a ban on personalised advertising.
If this is not done, everywhere is going to become a techno fascist dictatorship within the next 2 decades. The data amassed by surveillance capitalism is sold to anyone who’ll pay, including aspiring dictators, authoritarian nation states, criminals, and terrorists. It’s used for everything from scams to — as most of us have seen over the last decade — conducting psychological warfare, spreading disinformation, and inducing mental illness. Mass data collection benefits the most psychopathic, sociopathic, immoral, and unethical criminals, the most … The data economy has only existed for ~15 years, and it’s already being used to destabilise society and overthrow democracy.
They need to go much much further though; banning the sale and sharing of all personalised data, mandatory fines for every data point leaked, and the more personal/unnecessary it is to the business, the greater the fines should be. Amassing and retaining personal data needs to be so risky and expensive that only information vital to very specific and core business functions is collected, and the IT landscape rearchitected for everything else to be E2E encrypted.
Am I the only one waiting for something I actually may like to be advertised to be instead of something completely random? I block most ads via AdGuard home being DNS for all of my WiFi & mobile devices, but those ads that slip through somehow better be something not completely random!
It doesn’t need to be random, it can be contextual. For example, if you are reading a videogame review then an ad for a new GPU or a gaming keyboard are probably relevant to you. Or if you reading a travel guide to Rome, then having ads for restaurants and less know museums can be more relevant than something that followed you across the internet.
