Browsing the Internet has never been free, but are Online ads set to get less creepy?

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Browsing the internet has never really been free. Each time you visit a website, a silent auction for your eyeballs is conducted to show you an ad that effectively makes you pay with your personal information. Location, birthday, browsing data and more are broadcast to hundreds of vendors within a millisecond. The practice has flourished even in Europe, which has the world’s strictest privacy laws. The reason: Internet users here click a special “consent” button on most sites; they’re everywhere and slightly annoying in a system designed two years ago by an ad association based in Brussels to help advertisers comply with Europe’s privacy laws. Now Belgium’s data protection authority, together with 27 European Union agencies, has officially ruled the tactic illegal. The data these buttons helped collect should also be deleted.(1)

That is great news for privacy campaigners, assuming the decision is upheld in court upon the probable challenge by the ad group. It could spell an eventual end to companies sharing your personal data in these creepy auctions, or at least sharing less of it. But it also poses a brand new dilemma for advertisers already scrambling to deal with privacy changes from Apple Inc., and others in the pipeline from Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

Privacy advocates have argued for years that consent buttons give a pretense of legality to what is, effectively, a gateway to surveillance advertising. So-called real-time bidding for our personal data makes up most of Europe’s 64 billion-euro ($73 billion) ad market, according to the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the trade body that made the consent tool.

Here’s an example of how the tool works: visit the main website for Formula 1 racing and