Though I appreciate your frustration, your aggression is a little off target. :)
Do the users want their click events fed into an advertising engine? Did you ask them? If you made this opt-in, how many would say, yes, please track my clicks in order to advertise to me? Even if its anonymized/aggregated.
A huge amount of advertising is enabled by tracking users against their will, exploiting the fact that many users aren't aware of what's going on, don't know how to stop it, or aren't as invested in their preference as the adtech companies are in their revenue. "A man is always right in his own eyes". If you're smart it's easy to justify this stuff to yourself because you're getting paid, but that doesn't make it right.
You are right in that a huge amount of ads leverage user data at the expense of the user.
The point I’m trying to make is that not all involved in the advertising technology are exploitive. We do zero ad targeting based on user data. You make a search for specific products, we take the response and shuffle the order a bit based on vendor campaigns. That’s it. Nothing is associated or even collected from the user. It’s all system metrics.
The greatest harm that my team does is hurting optimized relevancy, which is inherit to advertising but also something we work hard to alleviate.
That misused proverbs quote is a nice touch. Shows a lot of self awareness.
I don't doubt that you're being truthful here. The problem is that the vast majority of adtech is extremely exploitive, and there is no way for a user to tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys". So all adtech must be treated as hostile.
Ads by definition try to influence the user to do things they would not have don on their own. They cannot ever be user respecting.