My first instinct was to be pretty happy about these laws, which surprised me quite a bit. I generally identify on the libertarian/pro-capitalist side of things and "as a general rule" subscribe to the belief that government regulations are often more problematic than problem solving[0]. So I had to take a moment to analyse why I felt this way.

Here's the problem as I see it: I know all of the things that are collected, how they're collected, what shady practices are used[1] and I'm completely aware that there is no anonymity left on the internet. The old "when the product is free, you're the product" isn't lost on me. In reading this, though, I was still finding myself a little outraged[2]. I look at it this way: if yesterday, we had an web with plain old "dumb advertising" techniques limited in sophistication in the manner of television advertising in the 90s, and today we ended up with this, there would be rioting (in the USA, anyway[3]). This didn't necessarily happen slowly but it happened gradually and quietly. I remember when Facebook announced that it was adding the ability to track you on other sites that you visited while you were logged out -- that was announced and it was met with criticism (briefly, though I quit the platform about a month later in a quiet, personal, revolt).

Here's the thing - if you ask an average non-technical individual if they understand that they're being tracked on the internet, they'll shrug and say "yes". If you dig a little deeper, you'll discover that they haven't the faintest idea how deeply they're being tracked and that they don't even have an analogy in their own lives to equate that tracking to. I couldn't come up with anything to describe the extent of tracking short of extremely lengthy explanations of what's being done and used[4].

And then there's me - I understand I'm being tracked and have basically chosen the head-in-the-sand approach. I use adblock, and a few extensions that supposedly "limit tracking" (doubtful) but I know they're worthless. Here's the thing, though, what choice do we have? And that's where I concluded how I was able to land in favor of some form of regulation on this behavior[5]. It is becoming increasingly impossible to avoid interacting with companies like Google and Facebook[6]. I look at it this way -- a company that becomes a monopoly in such an important industry can exert as much, if not more, control over the citizenry than their own government[7] but without the limitations imposed by democracy.

What should be done? I'm not sure. Self-regulation isn't working. I have zero faith in government crafting any kind of law related to technology that won't be some combination of horribly ineffective, worse than what we have today, utterly breaks something really important, or is used as a means to insert something horrible (watch them try to pop in a line-item around key-escrow). I'm kind of surprised to find myself thinking that approach that looks the best, out of the options, is probably forced-competition through breaking up the companies involved and I hate that idea in principal and in practice -- it's worked just-about as well in the past.

[0] I don't want this to devolve into a flame-war of whether regulating is "good or not", though I fear I may have just stoked that flame, I'm simply providing background for contextual purposes.

[1] I half- admire the creative uses of WebRTC with STUN on what are otherwise regarded as highly reputable major news sites. It's difficult for me to not see that practice as poking a hole in my firewall and I feel no less outrage when I see that happening than I do when a piece of malware does the same thing.

[2] Part of me had forgotten the idea that when GMail was "scanning e-mails for advertising purposes", they were scanning e-mails that were coming inbound from non-GMail users who couldn't have possibly consented to that. I'm sure there's a really good counter argument, but I'd have a hard time not feeling a little violated by that practice if I weren't a GMail user, already.

[3] Probably elsewhere, but my experience is that some European countries' citizens (particularly the UK, where I have the most experience outside of the US) are more tolerant to this sort of thing whereas when I was a child, you'd have seen people gathering in militias the moment the government tried to propose something like Real ID.

[4] I can only speak anecdotally since I had this conversation with family members who are non-technical and after about two hours, had them quite disgusted -- asking how is that legal ... and these are some of the most government-skeptical conservative people you'd ever meet.

[5] And I have zero faith in the US government being able to craft a law that works. Minimally the "they must still offer the service if the user opts out" will be removed, entirely, turning the "agree to be tracked" button into the moral equivalent of the "Cookie Warning" -- something you click because you have to. And philosophically, if we weren't talking about monopolies or near-monopolies here, I'd agree with that approach.

[6] Yes, DuckDuckGo is my default search engine, everywhere. And I've now trained myself to use the shortcut to get to google for the 60-70% of searches that DDG returns unworkable results. I think it's my search patterns, which tend to be very narrow in results, causing Bing/DDG to "broaden" and ignore terms (or when used with parameters, simply yield nothing). My parents (both retired) use DDG and rarely anything else since I switched all of their browsers around (they didn't even realize I had changed it -- they don't think of Google as a company, they think of search as something "the internet just has ..."). They are perfectly happy with it.

[7] Or can work in concert with it. Requirements to hand over Facebook credentials at the border are becoming common. I'm waiting for the day when I say "yeah, I don't use that" and end up back in a little room with an angry looking man asking me a bunch of (the same; slightly rephrased) questions and responding to them with the assumption that I'm lying (personal experience on that one; not fun). I mean, after all, I'm a programmer/live on the internet/et. al., surely I must use Facebook and I'm trying to hide something! /s