See, other than the personal attack (thank you for that), we agree! Contextual, relevant ads work great! There's no reason for targeting and collecting data on users, except that it provides justification for these companies to exist. Just about anyone can provide contextual ads, you need Google or Facebook scale adtech to stalk 7 billion people on the planet.
Around the announcement of Chrome's "Privacy Sandbox" effort, Google lied about the effectiveness of targeting advertising (claiming it was 52% more effective, despite independent studies settling for somewhere around a 4% difference), because it can't survive in a world where we realize it isn't necessary for ad revenue.
Apologies if I made it personal, or misread comments as advocating dumping advertising altogether, sounds like we generally agree - I personally suspect Google, Facebook etc. would do fine without the privacy-invading targeting stuff - they still have hugely popular near-monopolies on which to display ads of whatever kind - Google search, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds etc.
Curious to look into the true effectiveness of this personalized stuff too, even my mom seems creeped out by it. Fingers crossed there's enough backlash and adblock-boycotting that they drop it.
I actually used to strongly crusade against ad blockers. I think advertising is an important avenue for funding free content online. Between privacy violations and the amount of malware and scams distributed via large ad platforms, I've leaned towards ad blocking now, but I'm not fundamentally against seeing ads with my content.
Around the announcement of Chrome's "Privacy Sandbox" effort, Google lied about the effectiveness of targeting advertising (claiming it was 52% more effective, despite independent studies settling for somewhere around a 4% difference), because it can't survive in a world where we realize it isn't necessary for ad revenue.