In the articles at the time, they mentioned your whole life gets turned upside down when you have a kid. It's an event that changes your routines, and all retailers would love to become the new convenient store you routinely go to. Huge value for them.
www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/
You can live your life just fine. No one is interfering with it. No more than getting a flier in the mail asking if you want to drive for Uber is a big disruption. In fact, enough people find some level advertising useful, and have for literally hundreds of years.
There's no nice way to put this but the world would not be at all affected or a worse place if your company ceased to exist tomorrow. In fact you could argue many would be better off.
I struggle to believe competant software developers can argue "oh but I didn't have a choice". You chose to join this company to put food on your table. There are many ethically good industries you could also work in to do so. Maybe you'd earn slightly less, but you could have a clean conscience.
Let’s examine the naïveté you expressed. I work for Mozilla, which is basically a non-profit, which in turn gets its money from Google, which gets its money from advertising.
Your favorite website? How does it make money? Advertising.
Why? Because it’s about the only way to make money on the Internet. Even if you’re selling a product, how do you think anyone is going to find it it if you don’t advertise it? Even nonprofits have to “dirty” themselves by advertising.
So spare me the holier than thou routine. You’re in the muck just like everyone else.