What if a fat person is trying to lose weight ? Ads have measured that this individual is likely to buy cake and present him with delicious assortiments everywhere he goes. It's beneficial for the companies but what about that individual ?
Conversely, what if the algorithms have decided that the person is a good lead for a local gym, and those ads push him or her into losing weight?
We're all influencing each other, constantly. In a way, banner ads and such are some of the most honest ways of going about it, since they're clearly delineated as such.
The algorithms can only be accurate to who you are, not what you want to become.
If aforementioned fat person searches for "weight loss" and Google starts showing ads for that, haven't the algorithms been accurate to what (s)he wants to become?
I don't think the issue is whether ads should prompt them to lose weight, or they shouldn't. I think the crux of the issue is that we (humans) are ceding this judgment (which have political and societal ramifications) to the ad matching algorithm. Some people (myself included) find that bothersome.
Of course not every example of a targeted ad is going to be controversial (like advertising merchandise of a sports team that I like versus the one that is just popular in my area) but its problematic that we don't have any sort of machinery in place to control/modify the examples that are politically/societally important.
At least if that machinery were in place, then we could transfer the agency of decisions to the humans that run google, rather than the algorithms that are just running in the background.
Conversely, what if the algorithms have decided that the person is a good lead for a local gym, and those ads push him or her into losing weight?
We're all influencing each other, constantly. In a way, banner ads and such are some of the most honest ways of going about it, since they're clearly delineated as such.
The algorithms can only be accurate to who you are, not what you want to become.
If aforementioned fat person searches for "weight loss" and Google starts showing ads for that, haven't the algorithms been accurate to what (s)he wants to become?