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Comment by tomdell | Hacker News Reader

Polling has issues, but it's an extreme exaggeration to say that it's dead and that any statement based on it is fictional. Anecdotally, very few people I know are comfortable with the state of personalized ads. The kind of people who are too paranoid to answer polls are probably not fans of personalized ads either, so I wouldn't be surprised if the real percentage of those who disapprove is higher than the polls in the article show.

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i'd like them more if they had even once shown me something i actually wanted or needed. being forced to sit through the same 3 ads for beer, car insurance and most recently sports betting does not make me want those things at all no matter how loud and obnoxiously repetitive they make the messaging.

when i look through the newspaper or a skate mag, not only is the user experience considerably better but my eyeballs-to-purchase rate is much higher with completely non targeted advertisements that don't flash, pop out or scream at me. this is the most frustrating thing too, advertising does not have to suck. ime pretty much any enthusiast sports publication is about 60+ percent advertising, maybe more depending on if you consider any kind of feature about a team or a brand to be advertising in of itself as well e.g. >https://www.thrashermagazine.com/articles/videos/first-look-...

The problem is that these polls assume the authority of scientific inquiry without any rigor. I could state that 40% of people believe personalized ads are unethical, and that might be accurate, but when I claim it and admit that I pulled it out of hot/thin air, at least you know that it's just that -- hot air. Polling 6,000 self-selected people from 2 different continents and 4 different countries and weighting the responses based on populations in the millions is pseudoscience.

RSA bought this survey. They're an internet security company. They didn't "research" this for any reason other than the fact that this press release is good for their bottom line.

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