This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the Union or not.
Targeted advertising will require explicit user consent under gdpr since pii is collected. It's fair to assume that there is no big incentive for a user of a website to consent to targeted ads. Targeted ads are usually way way more profitable that contextual ads. If you are a large publisher, would you really want to have your company in the EU in future?
For sure if you have 5$ of budget per sale, if it takes 1000 views to get a sale or 1 views, you won't pay the same for views in both situation depending on the efficiency of the ad.
Advertising often can have a very negative and destructive effect, we shouldn't base our societies around how best to sell stuff.
Web companies and web advertising companies have been building huge, secret dossiers on all their visitors, unexpectedly selling, sharing and distributing sensitive data about their customers with totally unrelated third parties.
Now society's saying, that's not cool. Here are the new rules. We'll heavily punish your companies if you do it again.
What he meant is that right now, because targeted ads exist, non-targeted ads sell far worse. Once targeted ads are not an option anymore, non-targeted ads will get more attention again, because the demand for advertising will not go away.
There will be somewhat of a drop in demand, because advertising might be less effective, so it makes more sense for companies to invest into developing their products instead. But you can hardly justify unethical behaviour with some industry making money off of it. Drug dealing, slavery, forced prostitution etc. are also illegal, even though there's a hugely profitable market for those.
You have to draw the line somewhere. Governments are supposed to draw the line there, where the effect of doing something results in a net negative for this society by given values that this society considers important.
But even assuming a society only cares about its overall profit, I would be surprised if there's not some effects going on, due to targeted advertising being sharp enough of a tool to psychologically influence people to buy useless crap they don't need. And people buying useless crap they don't need is not good for the overall profit of a society. They could be buying useful crap that they can use to make more of a profit instead.
This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data of data subjects who are in the Union by a controller or processor not established in the Union, where the processing activities are related to:
- the offering of goods or services, irrespective of whether a payment of the data subject is required, to such data subjects in the Union; or
- the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union.