It’s possible that consumers are happy to have the most minute details of their lives surveilled and monetized in return for seeing ads they might want to click on. This is a hard theory to test, because very few people even know they’re making the trade. However, one organization recently tried to find out. After the European Union’s landmark privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, went into effect in 2018, a Dutch public broadcasting agency started prompting all visitors to its website to choose, in a clear and straightforward manner, whether they wanted their data shared with advertisers. The result? Ninety percent opted out, and the agency abandoned behavioral advertising altogether. (A Google spokesperson notes that all users can opt out of personalized ads, and that Google has long prohibited personalized advertising based on sensitive information.)
I did say “at present”.
You can install LineageOS (assuming you have a reflashable piece of hardware) and run it in airplane mode, it’s true, although that itself is slowly getting more difficult as everything gets app-ified. Just doing stuff the boomer way is easier in practice, in my experience - which, again, is at present.
If we’re allowed completely changing the way the telecom and tech sectors operate ahead of time, yeah, I guess we can get rid of physical signs and just look at the world through our phone screens. That’s obviously a taller order than adding a single regulation, though.