Norway wants Facebook behavioral advertising banned across Europe
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I think about ads and the whole industry in general, especially in the digital space, as inherently harmful.
Thought experiment: what would the humanity miss if we removed the concept of ads entirely?
for one you wouldn't be posting on this site since it's literally a marketing device.
without targeting advertising you effectively only allow large companies to advertise.
I'd say you lose anything you're not paying for explicitly, which is most of the internet.
The internet existed before ads and would continue to exist after ads. Trillion dollar companies built on ads served to the internet would not exist, but the internet would.
Putting your fingers in your ears and wishing away the problem is not a solution.
Ads and SEO killed lot of community driven internet. I was active in several of those.
We can live without ads.
Oh no. Anyway.
With how critical the crowd here is, you have to be careful about advertising products here. The Digital Ocean post goes to show how badly you can be eviscerated.
I think the public has no clue what it wants/doesn’t want. They are currently trying to legislate that services are effectively provided to them without any profit-seeking activity. We will see if that works
devil's advocate says that everything you consume online without a subscription or other purchase price.
What does "the concept of ads" mean? Is it advertising if I say "I bought a really great hammer from place, you should also get one if you want a great hammer" to a friend? I literally cannot think of a world in which you can only remove ads and not blow up literally every paradigm of how we deal with resources and their distribution.
And if you are getting a subscription to get rid of the ads, then you are actually paying twice - not only directly with your subscription but you are also still paying into all the ad budgets when you buy stuff.
Are you a champion of privacy if you advocate for this? How will you implement this without a centralized tracking?
Hilarious.
That everything is pooled together and not individually tracked is a feature. If you could track everything, why would you pay for content consumed by people contributing little or nothing to the ad budgets? All the tracking for targeted ads is an attempt to move into that direction, only spend money for ads on people who are likely to pay it back in the future. If you have no money, then there will be no ads for you and it turn no money for the websites you visit.
I'd very happily move us off GitHub to our own git hosting if the rest of our devs would let me. ;)
Moreover, ads would be replaced by something worse. Without ads, companies would still market their products, but in more covert and potentially deceptive ways. This could lead to less transparency and potentially more manipulative tactics, making it harder for consumers to discern genuine content from promotional material. Journalists would be given free stuff, get invited to parties, there would be product placement everywhere, endorsements, etc.
Not if it is regulated.
Maybe there would be less online platforms but there would be some community driven as they were before. This mindset that ads are necessary sounds like Stockholm syndrome at best, gaslighting at worst.
Community driven platforms exist today. We don't even need to ban the ad-supported platforms to have them.
By the way, I think you may be looking at the past with rosy glass or perhaps didn't live through it. Because advertising on the web used to be a lot more distracting and distasteful. There were popups all over the place, full page animated banner ads, etc.
The mechanism for why the less affluent would be gated off the platform makes sense to me. Your rejoinder that actually there would be “community driven” platforms seems lacking in a mechanism.
Tracking between websites is a different question altogether.
They are not in the EU proper though.
Advertising is just business owners saying "My product exists, look at it, you might find it useful!". Without it, product discovery has to be be a top down directory which means relying on someone's judgement instead of the market, which has basically been shown to be inferior at scale everywhere it's been tried.
Fundamentally, ad markets can't hide from enforcement, so long as whoever's buying the ads is a commercial entity interacting with the financial system. Which it usually is: the primary reason to buy ads is to boost sales of something that's being sold on the open marketspace, overtly and conspicuously. (If it's being advertised, it must be conspicuous, right?)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Whistleblower_Office?usesk...
[late edit]: In short—if society wants to ban ads, that's a thing that's enforceable and difficult to evade.
I don't like advertising, but this sounds awful.
What counts as "advertising"?
Why can't groups of people climb up an attention gradient and build things?
Lots of useful things could not exist without advertising.
- "Why can't groups of people climb up an attention gradient and build things?"
Why should the attention gradient be an auction market?
How would you enforce laws against shills? Doesn't many influencer work for free samples etc? I am way more worried for misuse of such laws than shills in the first place. I'd rather people just don't trust celebrities for consumer advice.
By the letter of the law, that's a form of remuneration, and is mandatory to disclose.
- "A “material connection” to the brand includes a personal, family, or employment relationship or a financial relationship – such as the brand paying you or giving you free or discounted products or services."
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/disclosures-... ("Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers")
How do developed countries stop people cutting their products with cheaper alternatives?
How do we enforce weights and measures legislation so every shop visit doesn't require you to lug along your own standard weights and scales?
How do we stop investments being all scams (ok so this one has failed a bit in the US.)
The answer is competent regulation with active enforcement. Tie reviews to a government issued ID. Enforce stiff penalties for any company found to be pissing in the communal data pool.
"How do you get legislation passed to regulate advertising when it controls almost every media and social media platform through which voters can get informed on the topic?"
And if you have an answer to that I'd dearly love to hear it - I work at a campaign for electoral reform in the UK and we have near enough the exact same problem.
I'm not saying that's the answer. I'm not saying it's not the answer.
We do not need tech innovators, corporations or pioneering extroverted CEOs to market-innovate solutions to the problems we have. We can simply lean on expertise and scientific consensus and mandate that it apply to various industries and our world as a whole, and drive society forward. The legal pen has power too and we can use it for more than just ensuring Disney has infinite copyrights, and in fact, should.
It's not going to fix everything, of course. But a lot of major issues could see huge improvements if we simply used our Governmental processes to demand them. We KNOW how to make vehicles more efficient. We KNOW how to reduce other emissions. We KNOW that certain building practices and city policies are making numerous social ills worse. We know all of these things and we know how to stop them, but our politicians are content to ride out the collapse and cash their checks in the meantime and retire before the world falls apart.
None of these problems are really new and have been looked for millennia by now.
"Let's ban advertising" "How?" "Laws" "It's depressing people can't think of this" "Enlightened dictatorship isn't going to help"
…suggests thinking in a false dichotomy. We don't need a dictatorship, enlightened or otherwise, to have laws.
(No Brexit jokes allowed :P)
(Whether they care about the risk or see it as an opportunity for enriching themselves, that's a separate matter).
Ads appeal to the lowest of the low of human animalistic desires to buy the "cheapest" shit shipped all the way across the world while their neighbors struggle to make a living producing the same kind of product.
I totally agree, advertising is antisocial and unethical by definition.
That said: I don't think of "public information campaigns" as advertising, yet also I mention this specifically because I can see the poorly defined boundary between awareness and manipulation — most advertising feels to me like government propaganda, just from a different master, and propaganda can be information as well as disinformation.
Get off this internet. Go get a meetup, buy an island. build some buildings. build your own super anti-social internet on your island. View webpages made by your neighbors on the "east side" of the island.
oh, and stop using products that exist because advertising has allowed the funding to make them exist. or - just move to n korea.
But to your point I guess in the near future with AR.
On a more whimsical level brick-n-mortars could have signage on the non-visible light spectrum and opting in could be using some wearable to enable visibility.
edit clarity
The person you responded to even alluded to other more consumer friendly modes of advertising that could be tolerated and encouraged.
You'll have a much better time of you adjust your expectations to meet the likely reality rather than beating your head against it.
I’d love to ban ads from public spaces and most of the internet.
That is authoritarian. Let people decide for themselves. I promise they are capable of making the right choices.
Who is making which choice, exactly?
I don't get to decide which adverts are presented to me. Best I can do is install ad blockers and get almost all of them… or campaign for laws.
Governments already have some rules about what is and isn't allowed in advertising, and block certain categories entirely — for example, the UK bans all cigarette advertising everywhere.
I don't know about the USA; I assume liquor and gambling have some rules, but that's just an assumption.
Anyway, the industry so far imo just brings >95% harm and bad and unnecessary stuff over humanity, and grabs my attention unasked everywhere, even where I kind of didn't opt in.
What btw about laws where certain advertisements were forbidden, e.g. alcohol or tobacco, or lottery, also in western countries.. that's not authoritarian but protecting children, right at least?
"Familiarity" and "Familial" share the same root. Our children resemble ourselves and our relatives. When I see my son's smile, I see my father's. When he giggles, I hear my wife's laugh. In history, our villages and regions are more self-similar than any two random people in the world. Inwardly, these similarities and recognitions trigger love and care, and outwardly they play a role in sustaining familial and cultural trust. We should always question and challenge that role, and increase our circle of empathy, it is repugnant to justify racism as some do with this line of reasoning. But the effects are there and it is counterproductive that by selling prominence and placement which even our own families can't match, we allow brands to purchase a kind of kinship.
It's more important to understand how democracies, governments, and business work than to understand long division.
The reality is we need advertising to enable discoverability. No advertising = no new businesses = back to medieval, pre-growth times.
If you like earning a living and ensuring your physical safety using your mind rather than physical bulk, you need to understand that this is only possible in an economy that is partially idea-based. How can this work if ideas and information aren't allowed to spread? How can new ideas and new information enter the fray if things like advertising is banned?
That is a little bit absurd.
Maybe the person you're talking about is on to something. Why not ban advertising? We could just list products and services in directories as is done with small business. It'd let startups compete more effectively by placing them next to the offerings of behemoths, with no presentational difference between the two. It'd be an amazing leveller between capital intensive enterprises and the rest.
(That's also probably why it won't happen)
We could simply list each plan for how society must function along with it's cost in taxes and then pick which plan we'd like to pay for / obey.
Or we could do away with the sinister notion that there is someone with the natural authority to ban things like this.
Because we can’t ban everything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t earnestly try. It’s not a viable option, but the lesson must be relearned every generation or so. It’s always self-nullifying. People want safety, but need freedom.
no we don't. i live a near advertisement free life, and its great.
no radio or tv, block all internet ads. the one ads i see are the ones in the physical world like billboards.
never once has an ad been the reason i "discovered" something, and i discover all sorts of new products/services naturally in my life.
if anything ads make actually make it so hard because they never can be trusted, often full of lies, and wading through all that to find the truth can be hard and is often why i don't actually go out and buy a new product cataogry.
I've taken both.
maybe MAYBE 1% of the ads I see on any given day are for discoverability.
But lets be real tracking cookies aren't there to figure out if you already know about a service. Advertising isn't about discoverability.
> How can new ideas and new information enter the fray if things like advertising is banned?
You're asking "if people can't pay to force other people to see things, how would anyone ever find anything?" The answer is that most "finding" is done because someone wants something, not because they are made to want it. When someone wants something, they usually start by looking for where that thing is. There are numerous resources for achieving this outside of advertisements. Of course companies will optimise these avenues, the old call-your-company-acme-to-be-at-front-of-phone-book or whatever. That's fine, so long as they aren't paying to put stuff in places other than where im literally searching for the service they offer.
In other news, this amazingly staggerly large buisness, literally the biggest economy sector in the world, is laughably ineffective. Ask most people about the companies in any given sector and they can name only one or two.
Like, there's nothing wrong with advertising to let people know "I'm here, I do/sell a thing. Here's why I'm objectively different than where you get that thing now"
The problem in my mind is we start lying, we manipulate, we use each others weakness and vulnerability against each other, and we want infinite growth/results. Surely in business and society there's a sort of happy medium where you serve a need to your community and the community pays a fair price that enables a reasonable living at minimum?
But to me it seems you achieve that not by banning, but in a perfect world by creating a culture that doesn't abuse itself, and in a more realistic world I suppose attempting to legislate rules and guidelines that protect the general public from the money addicted.
The way I see it it's a consenting relationship between sellers and consumers; good for companies/artisans, good for consumers, good for the economy, good for the spread of new technology, good for the environment (second hand marketplaces).
This is so outlandish that I feel you almost must be trolling. It's explicitly not consentual. I don't want to see ads. Any ads. Any ads at all. Never. I would be perfectly happy never seeing a single ad in my life and I am 100% confident that I would never regret that choice. I go to great lengths to make myself as annoying as possible to advertisers, making gdpr requests, using browsers that refuse all cookies even when it means I have to constantly sign in and/or automate consent forms, asking for breakdowns of all data stored on me etc.
Despite all this, I still see at least two or three dozen ads every day.
However it's fairly consistent that on my short walk to work ill see two or three ads plastered on busses (well usually several per bus but we'll be kind and count them as one), and maybe a dozen adverts on the side of buildings, billboards, adverts and bus stops, random advert screens on the pavement, and more. I'll also often see posters for upcoming concerts and stickers for local shops and venues attached to lampposts, electrical boxes, walls, the floor, any surface. Often they are layered on top of older ones several deep.
The posters are fine, honestly even a little charming by their lack of permanence and by comparison to the offensive eyesore digital screens exhorting me to buy junk food I have already heard of pretty much every day for my entire life. But I wouldn't miss them. I can find lists of all upcoming concerts in my area with no effort at all.
I'm in an airport right now and can easily count a dozen ads in my field of view, even counting the two large ad carousel displays as one apiece. I'm sure I encountered hundreds on my way to this gate.
I did however mostly speak about ads on the internet, because that's what I thought the OP was talking about.
I'd see that number of ads in a single 100m walk downtown.
However I mainly spoke about online ads because that's what I thought OP was talking about.
The idea that ogling even the most innocuous forms of advertising reduces your quality of life to the point the government has to step in and prevent everyone else from benefiting from them sounds excessive.
we've gone from "a consentual and loving relationship which is useful for society" to "well some parts of it aren't THAT painful, so why complain?" real fast...
> prevent everyone else to benefiting
nobody benefits. Not even companies. It's a zero sum game. Spend more than your competitor to get an edge.
I've not yet found out how to withdraw my consent for seeing ads when I'm walking in the street.
PS to answer your question:
>What's wrong with advertising in general exactly?
Have a look at the psychological techniques that are used in ads. Many many ads are based on inciting fear, so even if they "don't work" on you in the sense of getting you to buy a product, they might still work on you in the sense of inciting fear. They even managed to sell candy bars based on fear: if you're hungry you might get grumpy and will be socially ostracized. Air fresheners are sold with the message that people will dislike you if your house stinks. Ads for gambling usually target sad and lonely people in a pretty obvious way ("if you win the lottery you'll have friends").
There are other techniques too. Teenage body image issues resulting from ads have been well documented. Etc.. etc.. etc. There's armies of well-paid psychologists working on getting under your skin every which way, using focus groups, sociological research, brain scans...
The goal of advertising is to induce a feeling of dissatisfaction which can be relieved by giving money to the advertiser. Making a profit by encouraging people to experience the suffering of unfulfilled desire does not strike me as an especially virtuous practice.
> it's a consenting relationship
Not hardly, not most of the time! Perhaps one could argue that I have consented to advertising if I have picked up a trade magazine, but public advertising is intrusive and always unwanted, as far as I'm concerned. I block it when I can, ignore it when I must, avoid it always, and I applaud those who vandalize billboards.
Modern advertising is about manipulating emotions on a global scale.
Dear god, please save us from having clear, concise, and honest product information to inform our purchasing decisions. In this hellish existence, I might not even be able to know by default which toothbrush will make people think highly of me.
How would you know where a restaurant is or what it serves if they did not have a logo or a menu located outside on their window? All of this is advertising.
What is immoral is advertising that holds your attention hostage. Advertising should be able to be rejected, or skipped.
I don't have to read a billboard. I don't want to stare at it for 5 seconds before saying "Skip Billboard". I just don't look at it.
Instagram does a great job of this with Reels. I can just swipe past a reel that's an ad. I can't even tell you what the last ad I saw on Instagram was, period.
In my opinion, advertising should be an inefficient way of communicating your services / products. Commercials, in-stream ads, popups, anything that forces you to interact with an advertisement should be banned, and any personalization of advertisements should also be banned.
Samsung should hire me to design their next smart city, imo.
Look in the mirror bud. You joined a site that’s a marketing/advertising campaign for a VC firm 10 years ago and have commented dozens (perhaps hundreds) of times.
There’s a range of good and bad but we should celebrate the push and pull forces.
I like Apple now has USB-C, or Tech companies now have to have download portals of all user data, and delete the data after deactivation.
Because EU makes the laws for EU, those benefits spread elsewhere.
And same with California’s CCPA laws.
Good regulation is when there are multiple players competing to provide the highest quality services and goods at the lowest prices, while maintaining a minimum bar of transparency, safety and long term sustainability.
Corporations want to make maximum profit. Capture the highest demand at highest prices while spending the least.
So govt regulation and corporations are wonderful push and pull forces if well balanced.
When prices go down, quality goes up, and total human comfort increases, that’s a wonderful future.
It’s simply rebranded protectionism.
So the sales guy lays out a bunch of the "low end" phones price wise. This one has 4 cameras, but this is better for low light conditions, and this one is better for video stabilization etc etc. I must have seen 10 phones and each one, he is talking about features grandma doesn't need. So I am standing there wondering what am I even paying for? Does no one who builds phones have grandmoms?
I start asking him that. His boss shows up and 2 other sales guys join the debate. And everyone agrees the marketers and advertisors love to Target that part of the population who is willing to shell out the most. And when all of the marketers, target the most lucrative group and forget the rest, this is where we end up.
Something is really wrong about that.
I dont understand how we get to a place where resources are allocated to build things that people dont actually need?
Actually, this is a market failure. Greed would mean building a phone for grandma. Instead we have complacent mediocrity.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s [video][4 hours][996 MB]
Resources are allocated to build things that can be sold to people.
In an ideal world, that's the very things they need.
But we don't live in an ideal world, need can be manufactured, and that's precisely what the entire industry of marketing is all about.
Then there's the industrial argument to consider. You build a factory to satisfy a need. After the need is satisfied for everyone, you still have a factory that's tooled in specific ways to produce specific products... and if you can make minimal changes and re-sell the same product with a new coat of paint, you make more money. Retooling is expensive.
We love using all of this scare language “manufactured”, “attention held hostage”, etc. etc. because what is actually happening is so innocuous we have to exaggerate to make it sound bad.
“Manufacturing need” is just making people aware of a product that they need. I could “manufacture need” for a new diabetes drug simply by making more people aware of it. I do not see what is bad about this at all.
> Play before 1 Nov to become a Founder and get exclusive benefits in EA SPORTS FC™ 24
isn't "manufacturing need".
Grandmoms may have shaky hands and take a lot of pictures and videos of their grandchilds. Old homes are dark and need automatic high iso and powerful noise reduction. The picture engine will help auto balance the highlights. Zoom lenses help better framing without having to walk a lot, and is nice to read distant text.
All you're describing seems to be a godsend to most grandmas. Perhaps just not yours.
https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/set-...
Amazon has unlocked bar/flip phones for just over $20.
How would we regret not letting US tech giants misuse our private data? How would letting them do that improve our economy?
Innovations and technology means a lot more than targeted ad-based spy-ware where the US is king and the EU is not even competing.
We should be competing who gets to provide a better standard of living for it's citizens not who's country's corporations Fe to exploit everyone to enrich a select few.
Also, let me get back from my year long paid parental leave, to tell you why having the strongest economy is not the most important thing in life.
From my experience, the experience of the US and EU companies is dramatically different. EU companies are at a dramatic disadvantage when it comes to promoting their products. It's much harder to track what's working and what's not, and more than that, there's a huge state of uncertainty. Dev teams don't know, for instance, whether this pixel or that server to server integration might get them in trouble for sure, so it just delays everything. So EU tech start-ups tend to languish in obscurity to a far greater degree, which means less of a feedback loop to improve the product, which overall means less tech wins in europe.
Start-ups follow a power law where most fail, but 5% succeed. This means you need a lot of shots on goal. When every shot on goal takes 3x the effort and cost...
It's not just tech privacy regulations by any means, but all of this together means that the gap between the US and EU continues to accelerate. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/bbotjc/eu_vs_us_gdp...
And no, I think the "privacy" gains are basically meaningless and not worth the trade-off. And I would bet $100 any time that by 2030 that gap will continue to grow at the same rate.
I've also worked at startups both side of the Atlantic and I slept a lot better following EU regs, without the dirty feeling of having written scripts to creep on vulnerable people for the benefit of the company that was increasing their cost of living and treating them like statistical cattle.
It's not just privacy regulations hurting EU, those are easier to defend, it's the general deep rooted nature which makes that the automatic solution to every single problem without regard for the bigger picture. And those policies are always a one way street whether it benefited every one or not in retrospect.
What's the end goal? A perfectly regulated, moral economy that never grows and relies on immigrants to stabilize GDP numbers?
If these new regs also came at the same pace as reforms for previous ones that actively hurt these countries it'd be way easier to agree with as a general rule. Instead it's just another one thrown on the pile and the only new jobs are for administrators to enforce them.
It's also often of questionable value. Attacking cookie banners on HN was taboo for years but while they allegedly helped protect our privacy, targeted advertising immediately adapted - and yet in 2023 - every user continues to be burdened with the casino of modal boxes (they are never the same place or colours or labels) on every website (not just EU users), hoping they get one with a clear "reject all" button so it goes away the fastest, rarely because they care about the implications.
The GDPR says refusing non essential cookies should be as easy as accepting them.
Enforcement is happening for cases like this, but it is very slow....
Gaining escape velocity is just not possible in the EU where every member state still has full legal sovereignty, a different language, different governing and business laws, different governing body, different economy, sometimes different currency, different legal framework, different military and different consumer habits. The EU has unified some items like the currency for most members and some common laws, but still too few compared to the US which is a full-on country, not a membership of sovereign nations.
Also, while the US has undoubtably won the tech war financially speaking, due to it being unscrupulous at any level including privacy and justifying it to itself as "well China does it anyway so we should do it too otherwise we loose", but if you were to ask the average American on the street, and especially those queuing at the blood-bank to donate blood the second time this month to afford to pay bills, what would they prefer to have, either Europe's social benefits or the US winning the tech superiority and having the most tech billionaires, I think the answer would be clear and not the one you'd like to hear.
Say you want to target HR decision makers using Facebook ads. The most efficient and cutting edge way (that we do in the USA) is make a broad, master audience to target, and use "conversion events" (something that happens on your website that correlations to revenue later, like a qualified lead coming) to train the Meta algorithm to find more of them.
In Europe you used to be able do this across the entire EU, the Meta would target efficiently and could automatically use different language ads. Because FB's targeting algorithm is such a powerful AI, it could find qualified leads.
Now, many EU companies feel they can't or shouldn't use the tags or server to server integrations needed to power conversion events. Which means they have to do manual campaigns by country which is much less efficient.
This is just one solid example of many I've run into.
But such limitations are not all due to GDPR, and EU's economy is not stagnating just because you can't target all EU citizens with fakebook ads.
I am very skeptical that the issue is about Europe's linguistic, cultural or economic diversity. We are debating whether the regulations can have an economic impact and it's clear they do. Some modern AI tools are getting a late release in Europe because of regulation, some major apps like Threads are not even released here.
And for what? Some of our governments are still part of mass surveillance initiatives. Spying apps like TikTok and Facebook are able to hoover up data because people simply want to give it to them. I just don't see this future where Europeans have data privacy, I see a future where regulatory efforts are sparse, selective and harmful.
Sure, but how much of EU's economy is negatively impacted by Threads not launching here earlier?
And regarding AI tools, I too want them regulated in the sense that they must prove the models are trained exclusively on non-copyrighted material, or material they own the license for.
Sorry, I don't want to live an a wild-west where unscrupulous trillion dollar mega-corporations can just train their models on content without the owners' permission, and us citizens should just back off and support that blatant IP theft, because otherwise that poor trillion dollar corporation will not dominate the world and loose the AI wars.
Yeah and then maybe die early of cancer because you don’t even have resources for medical treatment. (Cancer mortality is considerably higher in Europe than the US due to less sophisticated treatment/medical care)
Meanwhile I could take a year of parental leave just by quitting and using my excess savings from my higher wage. The kicker? Afterwards I could find a new full time non-contractor job, something notoriously difficult in Europe due to your at will labor laws.
You need resources to pay for social amenities as the collapse of the NHS is rapidly showing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway%E2%80%93European_Union_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/mnk1gp/eu_euro_area...
All the tech companies that have buoyed the USA economy are basically a balance of trade issue for the EU, with all the money spent double Irish departing the EU and making its way to the USA.
Seriously, why would anyone in their right mind ever invest in tech creation in Europe? That’s right - they don’t. And it makes Europe poorer and less dynamic.
Let's be serious now, not even the biggest ad industry proponents really believe that line.
If you want to talk about destroying the world, think about how much comparative press coverage and regulation tech is getting right now compared to big oil/gas (still subsidized heavily), big ag, etc. - things that are actually destroying the world.
No targeted advertising based on data scooped up by browsers, ISPs, etc. Only if the user opts in and specifically says I want to be advertised on the following categories from which they can opt out or modify at whim.
(I am being entirely sarcastic, in case it isn't obvious)
Call me selfish, but my concern is not for businesses of any size. I don't want to be followed around the Internet any more than I want to be followed around in my “real” daily life.
I'm fine with adverts based on what I am currently looking at and/or where I am (the latter at a granular level: country/region/city, not more precise). Anything more than that involves tracking and storing data that I consider an intrusion. Some might disagree with the granular location even, though without that you can't simulate something like posters in local shop windows advertising local events (which to me feels valid).
If I'm looking at technical things¹, by all means advertise technical things¹ at me. Heck, feel free to blanket advertise your technical things¹ more widely. But I don't want targetted advertising for technical things to stalk me when I'm booking a holiday or doing my weekly shop online, any more than I'd want someone following me into the travel agent or supermarket, tapping me on the shoulder and saying “I hear you've been looking at laptops, could I interest you in …”.
Small or not, I don't want a business following me around.
--
[1] replace “technical things” with anything else I might have looked at or been shopping for: running shoes, martial arts equipment, groceries, recipes, scifi books, books in general, TV listings, etc.
Say a "surveillance ad" costs X and a "basic ad" (no tracking, just common sense placement) costs Y. How much more is X worth to you than Y?
There does not seem to be much data on this, but last I looked the value of surveillance ranged from worthless for all the effort (3Y at most) to utterly worthless (like 1.1Y).