> That a company is required to provide a service even at a loss. No. The company is required to provide any services it provides without breaking the law, whi

> That a company is required to provide a service even at a loss. No. The company is required to provide any services it provides without breaking the law, which includes privacy legislation. If they can't operate without making a loss without breaking the law, then they are not forced to make a loss, they can always just stop service. > A company should have every right to deny service. They do, but not on the basis of refusing to consent to a reduction of your privacy rights as defined and protected by the law. If they should be able to break piracy laws in order to be able to provide service, what other laws / human rights / other should they be able to break too? If a delivery company can't turn a profit without being faster by ignoring road safety laws, should we allow them to break those laws in order to keep offering their services? > Untargeted advertising pays 90+% less than targeted advertising. If stalky advertising did not exist, non-stalky advertising would attract higher prices. The difference in success rate between targetted and untargeted advertising is incredibly small (the difference is orders of magnitude smaller than that pricing differential) in real terms so those doing the advertising would not miss out much. Advertising as a whole, targetted or not, is not nearly as successful as the industry would have us believe. This is why so much effort is made to try make some adverts seem as much as possible like personal recommendations instead of paid promotions, and so much effort goes into other forms of astroturfing (fake reviews, paying to have bad ratings dropped, etc.). The advertising industry is conning its own customers to an extent as well as us, cleverly abusing statistics to make their services look as worth paying for as possible. This is not unlike parts of the spam industry: those buying access to send to mailing lists are conned into believing a higher rate of return is possible than is actually likely. The advertising/spam industry gets paid, the advertiser pays in money, we “pay” in irritation.