Fundamentally, advertisers just want good ad<->user alignment and the zeitgeist is to accomplish this with invasive tracking. However, it needn't (I think) necessarily be this way. What if, instead, we looked at the material on the page and said, "This is a blog post about Linux. Let's put our advertisements about sysadmin books/seminars here." Or provide the content creator with a library of ads that they can choose from (they will typically be incentivized to select the most effective ads by performance-based compensation). Maybe prioritize the sorting of those ads against keywords in the content.

Essentially, as opposed to profiling the user, profile the content. And give content creators more control over the user experience to discourage sleazy ads and encourage ads creators actually want on their site.

There's some optimism wrapped into this, so I look forward to someone popping my optimism bubble.

You can't run a capitalist economy like that because everything is decentralized, requires growth, and advertising is an accelerant of consumer spending. However, if production is publicly owned and planned, advertising is mostly unnecessary. No market economy = no adverts.

Within capitalism, some regulations can make it slightly less invasive but the imperatives of the system will over time break down those regulations.

I don't think the problem is with ads. It's with personalised ads (or more specifically how they go about showing us personalised ads).

A model where a site shows you a notice asking to opt in for personalised ads (otherwise show generic ads anyway) would be fine. But this means no site, no third party service should be allowed to track the user or collect data unless opted in.