@Em0nM4stodon

Friend worked for an ad tech place. Said that moment a user hit a website, there were only milliseconds for his company to figure out whether to bid on placing an ad into user's browser.

So they knew a whole lot about individual users.

He reassured me, "Don't worry. It's anonymized."

But. Was it?

Was?

It?

It makes sense to me that ad tech's evil incentive would be to know absolutely everything.

Then a lot more than just advertising starts happening.

@Em0nM4stodon

It’s also just not that good. When Google AdWords launched, they had plain-text ads that were clearly ads and were related to the content of the page. I clicked on a load of them because, when I’m looking for information about X, I might be interested in companies offering products or services related to X. The ads were short and easy to read the one sentence that told me what they were.

Then they moved to profiling. Profiling is always a trailing indicator. Their ads started showing me things that were related to things I bought last month (I have one now. I don’t need another!) or things where it’s model of me had been confused by some random search based on something someone said. I can’t remember the last time I clicked on an ad, because the profiling stopped me seeing relevant ones.

EDIT: It’s worth noting that a large part of the business model for things like Google Ads revolves around making it very hard to independently audit the success of the ad campaign. And it often falls back on the ‘increasing brand awareness’ line that traditional ad companies pushed, ignoring the fact that building a subconscious association between your brand and annoyance in the mind of potential customers doesn’t actually help.

@Em0nM4stodon
It's not even good advertising! Content-based advertising works better -- you want to advertise your $widget on a page talking about $widgets, to a person plausibly in the market for a $widget, rather than to a person with a recent history of having already bought a $widget.

@Em0nM4stodon when I think back 20 years ago, there was the option to advertise on a page that talked about a topic (e.g. orchids or house plants). The only information needed was the public content of the page, no need to know anything about the visitors. A much more ethical model. (I have stopped advertising my company at all and now rely on search only)