Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. So advertisements you get are even sleazier than non-targeted advertising because they have by definition more information about the reader. So instead of generically exploiting people's self esteem, it exploits people's self esteem armed with much more information about the users.
Targeting and tracking is a plague and should be discouraged and blocked to oblivion.
Advertising doesn't help the advertiser unless it helps you. Showing you an ad for something you don't want, can't use, and would never buy, benefits nobody.
If the ad results in the viewer getting an eating disorder, for example, that's fine for the advertiser if it also results in a sale.
Exactly this.
Often it doesn't even require a sale. A lot of Facebook & Google advertising is for bullshit sites which push increasingly sketchy content backed by even sketchier advertising. Sometimes the goal isn't even profit, the Russians paid for advertising to influence politics.
If I an a potential buyer of, say, a book... and my interests include AI, multi-agent systems, and operating systems, then an ad for Barnes & Noble offering the new title OS Development for AI and Multi-Agent Systems is probably going to be mutually beneficial, because it will help me find a book I would want, and it helps B&N sell said book. OTOH, an ad for the new title Necrophilia And Cemetery Porn Of The Deep South is not beneficial to either party (if it's displayed to me) because it's not something I'd ever be remotely interested in. Frankly, I'd much prefer the (accurately) targeted ad.
If it resulted in a sale, then that means by definition it helped me find a product or service I wanted. If I made a bad decision in making that purchase, that's an orthogonal issue.
This is nonsense. History is littered with cases of advertising abuse and misuse. Everything from literal snake oil salesmen to modern day shysters profiting from selling conspiracy theories and anti-tax bullshit is enabled and propagated by advertising.
Also, FYI, I'm not the one who down-voted you. In fact, have an upvote to counter-balance that.
That's incredibly naive. You've failed to consider the wide class of products which are tempting but harmful.
I, personally, have no issues with these platforms collecting my data and making money off it in exchange for their services that I use. But when they do the same even when Im not using their services or explicility expressing my disagreement, I'm not cool with that.
On average yes. Just as there is a gradient in non-targeted advertising of 'basically benign' to 'scum of the earth', I think there is a gradient in targeted advertising too.
On the basically benign end of the gradient you have the "You recently bought book X from author Y, perhaps you'd be interested in Book Z from author Y." (I don't like that stuff, I still block it, but it doesn't quite get me incensed if you know what I mean.) But the potential for harm from targetted ads can be truly extreme.