Fortunately I don't live in a place where WhatsApp is completely pervasive. I personally had luck saying "if you want to contact me use Signal, iMessage or at the very least SMS" and when people asked why, I would cite Cambridge Analytica.
I have had smart, educated people say "I got an iphone so I wouldn't be left out of group chats". Because downloading an app is too much work. I'm not sure how asking people to take 5 seconds to do something to improve their life and society became such a taboo.
Everyone on HN switches between “ads don’t work and targeting is BS” to “ads are manipulating our entire country by taking our data”
> There are lots of contradictions in people’s strongly held beliefs. Someone might preach self-sufficiency in politics, but coddle their children. An individual might oppose abortion on the grounds that human life is sacred and may still support the death penalty for convicted murders. A person might argue for the freedom of individual expression in the arts but want hateful speech to be regulated.
from https://www.fastcompany.com/3067169/how-your-brain-makes-you...
I think ads can work, but don't in many cases (based on recent stories that cancelling certain kinds of ad spend has no effect on outcomes). In some cases, like Uber advertising to get users, this seems entirely plausible.
So I largely think ads themselves are kind of harmless. But ad-backed business models are dangerous, because they optimize for "engagement", which tends to promote content that is divisive over more thoughtful, nuanced content. Sadly, it also seems to require gathering huge amounts of information about users in a centralized spot, which seems risky for a variety of reasons.
The whole thing reminds me of a call I got about 10 years ago to participate in a survey about smoking, and one of the questions they asked was "Do you believe nicotine causes cancer?" I paused because my understanding is that nicotine itself doesn't cause cancer, but the common delivery mechanisms at the time (smoking, dipping) do increase the risk of cancer. They forced me to answer yes/no, so I said "no", but obviously a decade later, I still remember it. Do ads cause harm? Probably not much, taken on their own. But everything _around_ them seems to.