Keep in mind that capitalists have all the power and a lot of time and incentive to rationalize the status quo.
The assumption in this argument is that consumers are able to observe and quantify the harm of tracking more effectively than regulators could create laws against data collection.
Personally I think the success of either one comes down to cultural factors that are currently stacked in favor of advertisers.
> The assumption in this argument is that consumers are able to observe and quantify the harm of tracking more effectively than regulators could create laws against data collection.
Not necessarily, because creating laws isn't enough to regulate. You also need to enforce such regulation, and that's where the challenge lies. The argument assumes that in the long run consumers are more effective at rationalizing their choices than the government is able to appropriately enforce regulation.
Alternatively, it assumes the cumulative harm created by the disconnect between current customer behavior and rationalized customer behavior (i.e. prior to their rationalizing the status quo) is less than the cumulative harm caused by inefficient regulation, including the defector's problem mentioned earlier but also other negative externalities such as encouraging corruption / fraud (which itself requires further enforcement)
Yes, my choice of words was hasty and suboptimal. I meant addressing data collection practices via regulation as a whole vs consumer choice as whole.
The way you are framing this serves only to reinforce talking points from those who are benefitting from the current situation. For instance, you're basically stating a priori that regulation is expensive and ineffective, and as evidence you talk about long tail of enforcement and defectors. But the ad revenue market is so consolidated you only need to enforce on a handful of players (Google and Facebook basically). The idea that defectors would then swoop in and create a massive enforcement problem is not substantiated. There have always been fly-by-night operations in all types of business, and they don't gain a huge advantage that catapults them to overnight success just because others play by the rules. No one is saying enforcement is easy, but to assume that it will be fatally flawed if it can't be perfectly applied to everyone plays right into the hands of those who are profiting from abuse of our data.
Now on the other side framing this as a "customer value" problem that will be sorted out by the hand of the market is just pure capitalist oligarch koolaid. How do you expect customers to have any sense of what data practices are behind their every day digital product choices, let alone quantify that into a dollar value? And even assuming they do all that, where are the market choices when everyone behaves this way? Even where there is theoretically a choice, many services have a huge network effect that makes a consumer's choice all but pre-ordained.
We need to have a reality check here. Markets are great when they work, but they are not magic and can not solve all problems.
The assumption in this argument is that consumers are able to observe and quantify the harm of tracking more effectively than regulators could create laws against data collection.
Personally I think the success of either one comes down to cultural factors that are currently stacked in favor of advertisers.