Would be interesting to find out whether the people responsible for these systems participate in the economy they've built?
From a moral side, it doesn't feel right to make money from something that I can turn off, but many people can't. Also, if I'm not seeing the ads, I'm not experiencing my product how the majority of my users do. I also have avoided getting an expensive phone, and I do most of my home browsing from inexpensive computers; partly because I'm cheap, but also because so many of my users don't have nice phones, so using nice phones means I'm disconnected from my users (my current phone is probably too nice, but it was cheap; and my work laptop is rather overpowered, but I didn't pick that)
If ad companies' employees think their ads are dangerous or annoying, how do they justify pushing that product onto users?
It's like if a vitamin company's employees refused to take their own vitamins on the grounds that they're unhealthy...
Google is the TV channel. The employees in question aren't content producers -- they're the salespeople who sell the ads and the engineers who air them.
It's like if those people then went home and used a special device that removed ads from the TV show.