&gt;&gt; that&#x27;s certainly part of the business they conduct (and frankly, they&#x27;d be more expensive if they didn&#x27;t do that, so there&#x27;s easy arguments that it&#x27;d be harder to do business if they didn&#x27;t). Your birthday ... same. They spam you harder on your birthday ... also part of their business.<p>Perhaps then I should have said to conduct transactions.<p>There is a substantive difference between holding information enough to allow people to buy stuff from you, and holding it to advertise, which usually requires extra permissions.<p>&gt;&gt; Laws like this won&#x27;t protect anything.<p>This is too early to say. They may well protect lots of things, and they certainly can (for instance) be used as a place to start attacking ubiquitous tracking and tracing from.<p>&gt;&gt; The simple fact is you can&#x27;t have easy to use sites like google, facebook, amazon and the many millions of easy webshops and have protection of private data, it just wouldn&#x27;t work as well.<p>Then perhaps that&#x27;s OK, because some things are actually more important than commerce. This stuff might have to be hard to get right.