Companies were literally using Facebook's ad targeting to discriminate against certain groups of people [1]. There is also the Cambridge Analytica scandal to concern ourselves with too.
1: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/28/707614254/hud-slaps-facebook-...
That's true for advertisers that are discriminatory as well as ones that just want to advertise what they're selling to people most likely to buy it.
The HUD case was a bit unique because there are specific laws about how housing can be advertised.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal is the real jarring one because they were given data normal Facebook advertisers couldn't even dream of getting a hold of.
Current online adverting targets the individual - irrespective of where they are (what site or app) or what they are looking at.
Also, unless you manage your own lead database, targeting to the individual level doesn't really happen in modern marketing systems. You build cohorts like "everyone who downloaded this app and put food as an interest". While it's certainly possible to de-anonymize people occasionally with the advertising data you work with, a) ad platforms never want to give it to you and b) there's an unbelievable amount of noise in the system so you just build programs with the assumption that ~50% of the data is going to be flat out wrong.
You know who was “given” data by Facebook that others couldn’t even dream of? The Obama campaign.
A fact that is very much forgotten by the NYT and every other Cambridge analytica hater.
An advertiser may care about more than one of these things at a time ("interested in baby wipes" + "what culture do they identify with" so I can target things culturally, for instance), but even a very highly-targeted ad will be ignoring all sorts of attributes.
If you are really applying attribute tags to individuals, you are not "grouping" them in the usually-understood meaning of stratifying.
In truth, you are still building an individual profile for each person, but describing it in a disingenuous way.
Under most circumstances this would be a distinction without a difference, but in this specific case it turns out to be important. If advertisers are interested in "groups" than they may still think of themselves as needing identity, and demographic breakdowns, and wanting addresses for those groups, etc... but if you conceive of all they care about as being "in the market for baby wipes" there is no reason to give advertisers anything more than "here is an advertising opportunity for baby wipes", and no other information. Not an aggregation of "individuals", with all the extraneous baggage that comes with, but aggregations of fine slices of attributes that they have no need to correlate to anything else. (Only residual desire because they're probably still used to thinking about "individuals".)
>there is no reason to give advertisers anything more than "here is an advertising opportunity for baby wipes", and no other information.
That's exactly what advertisers are offered. Do you believe otherwise?
People say ‘privacy’ so often that one can lose sight of the fact that advertisers don’t care who you are - they just want to show ads to people that might be interested in them, and not to show ads to people who won’t be interested. They don’t want to ‘violate your privacy’ - they want to show diaper ads to parents, car ads to people who want a car and watch ads to rich people.
I find this to be untrue many times, as advertisers also want to convince people to buy stuff that they do not actually need or want as well.
They are also very concerned about fraud. A great way to ensure a real user saw your ad is to... wait for it... invade your privacy!
I have no sympathy for these parasites. Surveillance capitalism needs to die in a fire.