So far as I can tell, the article also ignores one extremely important distinction: that between "advertising" and "targeted advertising".
The ads that funded newspapers for decades were not targeted. They had no specific information about the individual readers' buying habits (as opposed to aggregate data). They had to put ads in that they felt would be the most broadly relevant to all the people reading that newspaper.
So, too, with the early internet ads: they were "targeted" based on the content they were served next to. They had no information about the individual people browsing those websites.
Ban targeted advertising, and the mass data collection loses almost all of its monetary incentive.
One codicil to your argument. Magazine advertising was very much targeted, just not at the individual level and specialty internet sites can do the same. Vogue did not run the same ads as Byte.
> Ban targeted advertising, and the mass data collection loses almost all of its monetary incentive.
Sadly I don't think this is true, there's still money to made by nefarious actors selling your data to other companies.
For example car companies selling your behavioral data to insurance companies to increase your rates, messaging platforms and financial institutions selling your profile to airlines and ecommerce businesses to adjust their prices based on how much they think you're willing to pay, etc.
The only way to stop this behavior is to make it illegal to do anything with personal data without explicit, revocable and completely optional consent. GDPR does this right, though it suffers from lack of enforcement.
I hope that some day we'll look at these abuses of personal data the same way we'd look at our banks if they decided to send some of our money to insurance companies outright.
That's true—there are still some places where such data can be used, even without targeted advertising.
However, from everything I can see, targeted advertising is massively broader, and if it is eliminated, a large percentage of the companies currently collecting the data will lose their primary reasons for doing so. The car, air, and insurance companies that might still want to buy it will not be enough to sustain nearly the kind of industry around collecting it that exists now.
It is even very possible that the precipitous drop of money in the system will cause its collapse, even if those few industries might still prefer to have access to the data.
The ads that funded newspapers for decades were not targeted. They had no specific information about the individual readers' buying habits (as opposed to aggregate data). They had to put ads in that they felt would be the most broadly relevant to all the people reading that newspaper.
So, too, with the early internet ads: they were "targeted" based on the content they were served next to. They had no information about the individual people browsing those websites.
Ban targeted advertising, and the mass data collection loses almost all of its monetary incentive.