This is preposterous. You would rather be manipulated better? Seriously... This is not a teneble position. Most people would prefer white noise. What you are espousing are simply the talking points of the advertsing indusrty. This is like a congressman thanking the lobbyist for "educating" him on the issues.
That being said targeted advertising infringes on your privacy. Rail against it for that reason. Don't make false assertions that people would prefer random advertising than advertising that they may actually be able to use.
If we assume that a white noise advertising is less effective than a targeted advertising then it is in the interest of most people to prefer the former because a benevolent advertiser is a rare bird in real life.
I admit, I would rather the information come in a less obnoxious form in many instances, but let's not kid ourselves that ads have no informational content. Given that they produce some level of useful information, increasing the the level of usefulness without reducing privacy seems a laudable goal.
Every piece of knowledge has an opportunity cost.[1] To make this point more explicit, the cost is asymetric. Advertising is no different than a drunk on a subway or a schizophrenic homeless person shouting nonsense to a passerby. Yes, they are communicating information. Let me put a bunch of this "information" in front of an advertsing executive's home in Atherton, and watch him call the police and have his lawyer write a letter to the housing association to change the zoning code. And then, the circle of life (and information, and special interests) will be complete/. =D
[1] To paraphrase Nietzche.
And just like IRL, online advertising is the same way. Who makes the rules is just a matter of people's self-respect. It turns out that wealth white people find it degrading to be subject to advertising, so they put all of those ads for menthol ciggarettes in and alchohol in the black people's neighborhoods.
So what's the online equivalent to wealthy white people keeping large obnoxious advertising out of their neighborhoods, and the advertising dollars being redirected towards less affluent or influential people? Who are the elites in this situation?
The issue about "better targeting" is that the delterious elements of advertising do not go away. This is the reason why sometimes we decline to take a phone call in the middle of the meeting. Its not always the targeting, the content, or the message that it counter-productive. Sometimes it is the time and the context.
So it is not just that privacy is protected, or not. Nor is it sufficient that "better targeting" should be an excuse to increase attack surface for placing adds; or that "more secure" should increase the attack surface for data-intensive surveilance and information gathering.
Part of the art of marketing is reaching people in a constructive way. Advertising is not always the way to do that. No matter how "well targeted" it is. That is why we have PR and lobbying, informal networking, social circles, and country clubs, alumni networks...etc. And why we don't accept advertisments in front of phone calls like we do at the movies. Etc.
I simply have never had my life enhanced by them in the slightest. Curated ads on blogs with content I appreciate are different. But that's editorial curation.
Which is fine, and is in line with my point, which is that given ads, making them more useful without increasing the negatives, is a net win. I'm not arguing that we have seen that, just that if we could, that's a good thing.
Distilled this down to its most basic form, names on the front of shops are advertising. To someone looking for a specific shop, they serve an immediate and useful purpose. To those just trying to enjoy a stroll down the street, they may seem annoying eye-sores. At any future date, those roles could be reversed.
Like most things in life, advertising spans a spectrum, in this case from almost entirely useful with few negative side effects (reasonably represented shop names), to entirely useless (long boring message about a product you couldn't use, event if you wanted to). I see no reason not to try to eliminate as much of the latter as possible.
This is preposterous. You would rather be
manipulated better? Seriously... This is
not a teneble position.
Sometimes I get interesting ads which do things like tell me about the new features I'd get if I upgraded my 10-year-old CAD software to the latest version, or if I brought a newer digital storage oscilloscope. These are things I could conceivably want, and that I'm interested to be told about.
Other times I get videos for "latest horroscopes in hindi, the dynamics of capricorn" which there is no chance of me watching ever.
Is it so hard to believe that, given I am going to see adverts, they might as well be adverts with some relevance to my interests?
This is an interesting concept, subjecting yourself to manipulation as a form of payment for a service. Of course if the ads are genuinely useful some of the time, it might be worth it. Or if you believe that ads don't affect you. And that you are somehow tricking companies to waste money on ads that are ineffective.
But there is an argument to be made that advertisements do affect you without your knowledge and that watching them is a net loss.
I don't know the right answer, but I think there's a balance to be struck.
Now I'm not opposed to advertising, and I think advertising can benefit companies and consumers. But we need to start a debate about the usefulness of advertising to separate good advertising from bad. Please pick apart my example above. I'm sure my argument has weaknesses, and I'd love to know what they are.
There is another way to look at it. "Manipulation" is sometimes necessitated by poor targeting.