Tracking that makes your life better is useful. If Opendoor knows you are looking for a new house in Arizona, and they can show you just the right house before it's sold to someone else, isn't that fantastic?
That's part of living in a diverse world.
I don't know about you, but I don't want a myopic world for myself. The perfect ad targeting system removes my agency; decides what I want and can afford on my behalf; makes my world significantly smaller.
I'm surprised how much hate there is on HN - the entire future of technology feels like it's heavy on data, personalization, and prediction, but a lot of comments read like a parent or grandparent that was targeted and is loading up their shotgun.
The technology isn't the enemy, some of the use is. And in some cases, we need legislation to catch up, like it gas started to for things like loot boxes / gambling in kid's games.
You don't have to decide between targeted personalized ads and their toxic rats tail, or no ads at all. There's a middle way called contextual ads which is bound to the topic you're consuming.
It's not just a choice between relevant and irrelevant ads, it's that plus many more factors. Even if ads were super accurate, I'd prefer irrelevant ads to having my personal habits finely catalogued in order to subconsciously affect my buying or voting choices. And it is subconscious. Anecdotally, I recently noticed I'd started to want a particular type of personal care accessory. I realized the only reason this happened is because I'd been subjected to dozens of ads for this item over several weeks. I have zero need for this item, zero interest in owning one four weeks ago (even though I already knew the product existed), and nobody would even know the difference if I had one or not!
It is possible to do targeted advertising without surreptitious tracking. I listen to podcasts and often buy through their promo links. I'm happy to tell the advertiser where I heard the ad, because I like the content. And it's all explicit - no spying required.
When you listen to an episode of a podcast, an advertiser can get data from the file download, so at the very least they know your location and your phone profile. Say you download a podcast from a certain location Brooklyn, using iPhone X, an advertiser can profile you to be upper-middle-class and show you a Peloton ad, while same podcast download of an old Android phone is going to get an ad for a short-term loan.
The advertisers are hungry for ways to get more data because right now it's still a black box, you throw money in, and maybe someone buys. They would much rather target with precision, than with banner ads.
I don't actually need any ads, so this is a false choice.
I bought into this reasoning for some years until I realized that I never saw a useful ad (except on Facebook properties, which is ironic since they are the ones who know least about me as far as I can tell.)
Maybe? When I look at a couple houses to help get comps for a family member and I get innudated with real estate listings for somewhere I don't live and don't want to live for months, that's certainly not fantastic. See also car shopping, or really anything where one sale is valuable enough to target me.
Also fun --- when you look at documentation or ratea for a service provider when you're their number 1 customer, and ads for that service provider follow you around for weeks. Yeah, I guess I'm highly likely to buy, cause you put me in your SEC filings as a top customer.