There are so many ways to abuse micro-targeting. Say hypothetically you’re a private investigator and you have a target that you want to get into their email. You could look at their Facebook page to find their favorite band, food, and travel destination. With that info plus their zip code you could make ads that will just target them personally. Offer free tickets to their favorite band on a landing page with registration, then store their commonly reused password in plain text-done.

This type of ‘nano-targeting’ was the strategy that Cambridge Analytica used to discourage millions of Hillary Clinton supporters from voting. Its been used for countless forms of abuse, manipulation, and data gathering, where even impression counts can be revealing, no clicks needed.