Europe's new data privacy law has put a small army of tech firms that track people online in jeopardy and is strengthening the hand of giants such as Google and Facebook in the $200 billion global digital advertising industry.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) brought in by the European Union in May is designed to protect personal information in the age of the internet and requires websites to seek consent to use personal data, among other measures.
The ability to track internet users has attracted hundreds of companies that harvest and crunch user data from websites — with or without the consent of the site owner — to form very specific individual consumer profiles.