New Proposed Regulations for Digital Advertising

https://martech.org/google-and-marketing-industry-predictably-hostile-to-proposed-surveillance-advertising-ban/

The article above begins to explore the implications and corporate response to the introduction of the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act in Congress.  Should this specific bill be passed and implemented, advertisers would no longer be able to target consumers based on digitally collected personal information, except for contextual advertising based on what the user is interacting with, and general location advertising at the city or state level (note: these additional details came from a similar article here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/18/banning-surveillance-advertising-act/)

The privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has used this opportunity to praise the bill for promoting principles which emphasize user privacy.  The article further describes that the bill does not offer leniency in the event the personal information is provided by the user voluntarily. Industry experts comment that while they appreciate the motivates of the bill, the suggested actions are too restrictive, would not necessarily produce the outcomes congress seeks, and would have detrimental consequences for marketers.

Google describes that the bill would actually limit the following functionality for it's search engine:

Showing directions from Google Maps in its search results. 

Providing answers to urgent questions.

Highlighting business information when someone searches for a local business.

Integrating its products (e.g., Gmail, Calendar, Docs). 

I tend to have mixed feelings on this issue, but ultimately lean towards permitting advertisers to continue leveraging my data. Organizations like google have been able to effectively target me in a way that I don’t find too frustrating, and each feature listed in the bullet points above is one that I value. Furthermore, if I were the proprietor of a website, I don’t necessarily feel that tracking information about the user is necessarily immoral. Those individuals presumably didn’t have to visit my website, provided they had options. The challenge with a firm like google is that there really is no comparable site that’s as effective, although DuckDuckGo has received some impressive reviews from the tech industry based on my own cursory searches in google (lol). I therefore find myself revisiting a much bigger question continually asked in our society, which is the extent to which we are willing to tolerate the market power of big tech?