Comment by noduerme

Just to play devil's advocate here... I'm about as extreme a privacy absolutist as you can find. But given that we're all on camera all the time in public spaces, like it or not, I don't consider tracking on digital billboards to be inherently evil. It could be used for evil (like - an authoritarian government tracking who looks at a billboard for an opposition political leader, for instance). But it could just be innocent data gathering. If you ran a plumbing business and paid $10k for a billboard, wouldn't you want to know if it was worth it or not? It's not as if decades of focus groups and hand-wavey feelings about what is or isn't effective advertising didn't already steer us into a society entirely dominated by big loud ads everywhere.

People who make products and sell services need to advertise. They in turn pay taxes. The many layers of parasitism in the advertising world historically relied on conning these people and taking their money in exchange for an unprovable proposition, namely that if you run this ad we tell you to run, right here, your sales will go up - but we'll never be able to actually tell you for sure by how much, or whether it was a good deal for you. From that perspective, more and better viewership data helps undermine the advertising bullshit machine and close the gap between people who run businesses and the people they're trying to sell their services to.