e2e encryption can be negotiation chip with gov agencies: "we turn off encryption this time, but you'll forget about our shady ads business"
Secondly, please educate yourself about what the government actually thinks about the ad business you’ve described as “shady”. Even if it was “shady” to show ads based on preferences and never reveal or sell those preferences to a third party … the elected representatives in government really like having social media ads as an option in elections.
Here, read this so you can learn how government actually influences social media to do their bidding - https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/jawboned
> The senator’s office told Katie that they really wanted to ban that practice but knew they would never get it through the Senate since so many campaigns relied on the tools for their elections. So instead, they said they were going to pressure tech companies like ours to ban the use of the tool in the hopes that if one of us did so, the others would as well. Although we did not stop using Custom Audiences entirely, Facebook and other platforms did dramatically reduce the targeting options for political advertisers.
That's not how modern ad markets work. Those preferences are indeed revealed to third parties, specifically ad exchanges and DSPs, as part of the bidstream data.
Now, you say, those bidstream data contain no PII! Except that de-anonymizing those data is absolutely key to targeting, and is widely practiced.
Recently in the news: "Patternz", an Israeli spy-tech company, for years hoovered up and stored all the bidstream data across 87 ad exchanges and SSPs including Google, Yahoo, MoPub, AdColony, and OpenX, de-anonymized them, and claims to have profiles on billions of users including their location history, home address, interests, information about 'people nearby', 'co-workers' and 'family members'. (See also: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F-5bA6QW8AAyfSK.jpg )
Please stop spreading dangerous misinformation about the threat programmatic advertising poses to our privacy and national security. Your extremely sensitive data are being passed around willy-nilly and this will not change until RTB is outlawed.