As to the topic, let's be clear credit card data mining has been going on since before the web was born. I've explained this to people for decades, that and "customer loyalty" programs are amazing sources of data while being very scary at the same time.
What google is doing here is not any different than 100's of other vendors and companies in advertising technology. Their advantage is the retention of all your search data, clicks when it's a google ad etc. Facebook has comparable data as do many companies. Both these companies enjoy a duopoly that is massive and in some markets, they capture more than 70% of all advertising spend. Those resources combined with offline techniques creates a white-hot spot light that ignites a dialog that most likely should have happened before the web was born.
Advertisers want to know the money they spend is effective and works. We can all debate for eons about the effectiveness of advertising, but let me tell you de facto that it works. These types of systems are designed to help them optimize the spend.
Sadly, meanwhile you have perfectly good outlets like this newspaper where that optimization has led to downward pressure combined with user habit changes. They are desperate to stay in business and allow their digital offerings to be turned into graffiti pages in hopes to make up for lost revenues in the physical business. This leads to turning users off (157 trackers now as I write this) and they stop coming to the site. The leads to a vicious cycle where the users stop coming, the advertisers notice and stop spending or start discounting the money they're willing to pay. Digital death is horrific, rapid and all automated.
I don't know the answer to all these things, what I do know is people do want to have intelligent dialogs with other people who are offering something of interest. But advertising has always in the past been about injecting itself into people's lives in unwanted ways, from the kid screaming on the street corner "Come and get it, hot off the press" to a page on latimes.com with now 158 trackers and more ad space than content.
I dream of a world where I can have intelligent dialogs with people offering things that could enhance my life in some way. I spend every day of my life thinking about how to do this, and I'm building technology and products to address this idea. I would love nothing better than a single ad on a site like this, the right one, the one you wouldn't mind hearing from and one that pays the site owner 20x what they get now with their graffiti strategy. I can tell you advertisers also want this, they don’t want to be on a page with 158 trackers, and a graffiti layout where their message is diluted by all the noise.
It’s a real problem, it will get much worse before it gets better, but those who say advertising is evil are missing the point. Effective advertising is about communication, and should be person to person. The most powerful advertisement is a friend telling another friend about something new and exciting they discovered. However, to have that dialog you must have the first experience, the discovery, the friend of a friend had to learn about this amazing new product and advertising sets out to do that.