If you want to not be tracked, turn off JavaScript for a start.
Then why are the ads that _do_ sneak through my adblockers or onto Instagram, etc., such hot, moist garbage? Is it just a lack of people wanting to advertise at my demographic?
You can check your BlueKai profile here https://datacloudoptout.oracle.com/registry/
Many large, higher quality ad buyers (agencies and direct sold) can get enough return from non-greyarea inventory like this. There's no point in them taking (even a small) perceived risk of buying this grey market inventory.
However, they likely do use this tracking data second or third hand via their third party data providers brokering and including it in larger data sets they use for cross site targeting via DMPs.
Finally, there's simple economics: people who go through enough effort to block trackers and other things are (perceived) to be less likely to engage with ads (e.g. they see it as you do, when one 'slips through'). So there's no point in paying $$$ for those eyeballs.
All of this in combination means you get low quality, barrel bottoms ads.
It’s pretty shitty and unethical, but welcome to to add tech!
I don't feel like I am unusual in any way, as in I can't see how I have any natural, dumb-luck defense against any of this tracking. If companies like Google, Amazon, FB, etc, are in any way really trying to use what they think they know about me to get me to buy stuff or influence my thoughts or behaviour, then they seem to be doing a really, really bad job of it.
As far as privacy goes, my concern is far more focused on apps/programs stealing my photos of my kids, or tracking me around town, or knowing who I meet and talk to.
As far as predicting my future behaviour, I have not been impressed so far.
I went to a great Google Fireside Chat with Michal Kosinski on data privacy. He said that the only way to get around big data is to spread misinformation. Chose the opposite of your tastes, search for things you don't like, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUwBcTgzbtU
https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data/twitter_inter...
I just checked now and it's better than it was but there's still a "DIY" category containing one DIY video, a Japanese cooking tutorial and a video of somebody putting iPads in a bucket of slime. I'm not sure I have very much faith in their ability to deeply infer things about me from a limited dataset when they can't identify videos with ingredients in the description or sort music into genres given the set of all music (and millions of comments on it) to work with.
the only time these are ever close is when they are based on users' previous search terms
There's human effort involved in planning a micro targeting campaign. Way easier (and short-term cheaper) to do some broad strokes ads with a couple ok-ish proxies for your target market than pay people that know what they're doing. So your conversion rates are garbage and CAC higher than it could be, but your spending is on the action instead of front-loaded on salaries/agency fees.
Missing component here is "when compared against massive existing data sets". That info alone isn't very powerful.