Isn’t this the exact opposite though? Your data being used for targeting will minimize bad ads that you see.
(Facebook employee, never worked on ads or anything similar though)
But it's the truth. e.g. I visit the website of some weird brand of coffee. Suddenly, I get spammed with ads about artisan coffee, even though I could care less. Both intrusive (you took data from somewhere way outside of your domain to guess something about me) and annoying (you guessed wrong).
Moreover, this tends to happen very often for gambling, porn, weight loss, pregnancy, etc. all things which are very private, because they also happen to be stuff people spend a lot of money on. So I want to avoid those sites, not just because the government or insurance could use it against me, but because my ads will get even more annoying.
I bet that if the entire ad industry just binned all people into 16384 groups and hired 65536 specialists to curate these profiles, the industry would be much more succesful, because today it is a complete bullshit with all these pointless hi-tech and surveillance efforts. Modern ads is the stupidest thing ever created (apart from crypto).
I don't think I've ever bought something through a Google or reddit ad, or if I have it was a long time ago and/or with less frequency, and I use both of those much more actively than Facebook. reddit ads will sometimes capture my attention/engagement, though, whereas Google ads tend to be more like noise that I tune out.
This is why "influencer marketing" has an even higher conversion rate than Facebook or Instagram ads, because the distinction between organic content and advertising is removed entirely.
My wife bought me an ooni pizza oven for Christmas. A box showed up at our door labelled ooni and I didn't know what it was because I had never heard of that brand. My wife took it and hid it. Then I started getting ads for ooni pizza ovens on Instagram. So thanks for ruining Christmas, Facebook. Assholes.
Perhaps if it did what it says on the tin, but it usually doesn't, so no.
>(Facebook employee, never worked on ads or anything similar though)
Facebook is ads.
OP gets paid via ads, but does not work on the actual ad team and thus wouldn't know any actual inner workings of the targeting systems.
Expanded in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27759494