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This is deplorable and hopefully some day grounds for prosecution by the people who were targeted and manipulated.

Wouldn’t that give cause to sue every single advertiser who attempts to target and manipulate potential customers?

Aka all of them? I agree this is despicable, but I’m curious how you make this illegal and not all of advertising.

Just make it illegal to target ads based on the people viewing them. You can still target to things like contexts, venues, areas, etc. but it would rule this out and it would eliminate the justification to farm so much personal info.

Ha! Twitter can target based on email. As soon as I signup for some services, I immediately get ads. Same with LinkedIn.

Banning targeting via email address, birth date, name and other personal identifiers would go a really really long way.

I work for a tracking company and I know how much power marketing folks have nowadays. It’s scary precise.

I too am in favor of bankrupting Google and returning to the old model of advertising where you put the car ads on car magazines and computer ads on computer magazines.

I see no problem with making all of advertising illegal as well. Good fucking riddance.

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