> He starts with one of his greatest hits: “People consistently tell us that if they’re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant.” This perpetuates the ad industry’s favorite false dichotomy: either consumers can have “relevant” ads—targeted using huge collections of sensitive behavioral data—or they can be bombarded by spam for knock-off Viagra and weight-loss supplements. The truth is that ads can be made “relevant” and profitable based on the context in which they’re shown, like putting ads for outdoor gear in a nature magazine.

I disagree, it's not a false dichotomy, it's a real one.

Most Internet content isn't nearly as "contextual" as a nature magazine. Probably 99% of the content I read won't help target ads much at all, because it's mostly NYT news articles and the like.

I'm probably in a tiny minority here on HN, but I accept that ads are currently necessary to fund companies (even though I wish it weren't true), and I genuinely prefer ads targeted towards my interests (I've gone so far as to customize my interests on Google to help it serve me more relevant ads -- most of them were accurate but there were a handful that weren't).

Targeting obviously isn't always perfect -- they still don't have the kink ironed out where I keep seeing ads for something on Amazon even after I bought the thing or a similar thing -- but it really does benefit users, if they've got to put up with ads in the first place.