EDIT: For those who want to downvote, consider that the vast majority of Google's revenue comes from the use of your personal information to target you with ads, and that most of the advances in ad targeting using personal data have been made by Google.
If I decide that I want to purchase a new jacket, for example because I'm traveling to a much colder climate, I want to be able to seek out (ideally unbiased) information about jackets and make my own decision.
Some of that might be in the form of advertising, but I will have made the decision to seek it out, rather than my plane ticket purchase being mined and then targeted with a clothing company ad.
I consider it to be equivalent to someone unexpectedly spooning food into my mouth, then arguing "Well, you have to eat anyway, why are you complaining?" It violates my sense of agency.
Perhaps I have a higher desire for agency than most?
I personally have a pretty strong desire for agency. I’m also conscious that my understanding of the world is entirely constructed by the sum of my interactions with said world, and advertising is only a tiny part of it. I’m thankful for the sensory input this world provides me - without them my brain would have nothing to do and my agency wouldn’t be very useful.
It sounds like you are suffering a lot because your experience of advertising in the world is incompatible with your opinions about advertising. I can see two ways to solve this problem:
1) Adjust your opinions about advertising, so that you think of them as part of your voluntary engagement with the world around you, not something that is being forced on you.
2) Remove advertising from your life.
I’m all in for the former, but the latter should be made illegal.
You've been trained to buy things and don't even realise it. What would happen if you didn't see that ad for the jacket, would you go without clothes? Heck, maybe you'd go visit a store and meet new people. Or you'd save more money.
The whole premise that we need advertising to make us happy is ridiculous.
/rant
That said, given that ads are a psychological trick to get you to purchase something (often something that you don't need in the first place), you're right: I do consider ads to be inherently bad.
"But mah blog isn't sustainable without ads" - If your blog depends on collecting a heap of pennies generated by psychological manipulation of your viewer base, your blog provides a net negative value to your viewers.
/end rant
As with all things, it scales with technological advancements, which also includes new responsibilities (that this article is mentioning).
Claims that they are equivalent feel like an attempt to normalize such invasive ad targeting.
I spent over a decade in adtech. I have several patents from > 8 years ago for metadata-based ad targeting.
While I agree with you that it is better to see relevant ads over irrelevant ads, the datastores that enable fine-grained behavioral targeting is, simply put, just too much power for any corporation (or government) to wield.
Corporations directly profit from larger data stores. The more invasive the data extraction, and the more available it is to their true customers, which are advertisers, the more they profit. The advertiser dashboards and ability to explore potential audiences based on targeting, both on G and FB, are astoundingly detailed.
I try to convince everyone in my life to run an adblocker and stay off FB.
One of the richest sources of metadata about you and your loved ones are your photos. I quit my day job to build a self-hosted, life-scale photo store, partly as a passion project, partly driven by disgust and penance from prior adtech work.
This sounds interesting. Do you have any links you can share?
Yeah, me too. The difference is that nowadays all the platforms, services, devices, and tracking are being used intrude into every single corner of life. They are constantly tracking you, analyzing you, studying your every move. And they are trying to interpose into every waking moment of your life.
The day that my guitar tuner app for Android showed me an ad in the middle of tuning my guitar (which usually takes 20 seconds), intruding to the very thing that I need most to unplug from this shit show, I just about lost my mind.
Fuck advertisers. I hope that whole ecosystem implodes.
The vast majority of the revenue comes from search ads, which are intent-based on the keywords in the query.
What you're talking about are display ads / adsense, which is not even close to the majority of their revenue.