RIP Online Ads? Proposed Bill Would Ban 'Surveillance Advertising'

pcmag.com:

A new bill would stop ads around this story from knowing you too well.

The Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, introduced Tuesday by Democratic Reps. Anna G. Eshoo of California and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, along with Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, would limit online advertisers to targeting audiences by approximate location, while allowing contextual ads keyed to the bulk of a page.

A brief summary of the bill slams targeted advertising for its “unseemly data collection and tracking” that fuels “disinformation, discrimination, and privacy abuses.” 

The bill would ban any attempt by advertisers and ad platforms to “target the dissemination of an advertisement,” defined as using “data inferred or derived about the individual or connected device” from such data as “contents of communications,” “browsing history and online activity,” and customer lists.

The bill would allow some geographic targeting–an advertiser could focus on a local jurisdiction such as a “city, town, township, village, borough, or similar,” as well as a Congressional district, but not a ZIP code or subsection of one of those places.

The text and a section-by-section outline reveal no exclusion for political advertising and include both nonprofits and telecommunications “common carriers”—read: internet providers and wireless carriers–in the targeting ban.  

Contextual ads placed to match the rest of the page—in the print world, also called just “advertising”—would still be fine. The outline says that would preserve the business viability of ads, citing a 2019 study that found targeting ads only increased publisher income by 4%. 

This sweeping ban on targeting would, however, nuke most of the advertising business of Facebook and Google. And it