I vote with my conscious, but I work for whoever will pay me the most money.
My question assumes you believe the work your industry is doing is unethical but that seems to be implied by your posts.
Not in capitalist countries. Serving someone an ad that is actually relevant to them is good business.
The government doesn't need web cookies to find you, they can just call your ISP or your phone carrier, or check surveillance cameras, ask your bank, so-on. No one from these private companies has the time to look at the data, you are just a number to them.
Though it might feel like it, you aren't being spied on in any meaningful sense. You are just being profiled, as a tax to use all of the free services you have access to.
Paid services that don't sell your data are the way to go, if that kind of thing scares you. But the ads you see online are going to suck.
Even with all the profiling the ads still suck.
It amazes me how little insight all this profiling actually gives advertisers. Sure they advertise stuff to me that I'm already searching for, but advertising is supposed to be about brining in new customers. Not advertising a product to me after I've already decided what I want, searched for it, and bought it (or decided I don't want it).
I get ads for weeks after that are a complete waste of the advertiser's money, LOL. I don't think I've EVER bought something online that I didn't know I wanted until I saw an ad...
It seems silly to me as well. But when it comes down to it, they serve the ads that pay the most, right? So perhaps all the fancy machine learning and all the other garbage is just a way to say to their customers, "Hey, advertise with us, look at all this fancy stuff!"
and then someone comes along and says, "hey, we'll pay more than any other relevant ad..." and POOF. All of it doesn't matter anymore. At the end of the day, it's about getting the dimes in the right pockets.
Yet the government collects[1] them [2] in[3] bulk[4].
> Though it might feel like it, you aren't being spied on in any meaningful sense.
Not[5] true[6]. There are real harms done.
> Paid services that don't sell your data are the way to go
It's hard for paid services to compete with free ones, so they're incentivized to sell your data anyways.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism...
[2]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-in...
[3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/12/11/googl...
[4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/25/tech-su...
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/catholic-priest-...
[6]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/grindr-and-okcupid-sel...
My point being most people aren't being hunted by anyone in particular like the US Government or the Catholic Church. It's expensive to set up these honeypot apps, and to buy this data, and spend the time to de-anonymize it. Frankly that church story is kind of insane.
Your second example is not really relevant IMO.
The problem is that the current economics make it more profitable to operate an ad-supported product than a paid product.
Regulation that would make ads less profitable would allow paid products to actually compete on price.
For the record, "capitalist" countries can and do regulate businesses. Those that are democracies do so based on the general interest of the citizenry. Unless you consider anything beyond absolute libertarianism to be "not capitalist". I find these semantic arguments often confuse the issue at hand.
I would love to pay for services that don't track me. You mentioned in another comment it's becoming hard to own a car, have a bank account, insurance, without tracking being baked in. I'm interested in ways we can work to change this. I don't subscribe to your belief that there is no solution, or that the level of tracking involved in the status quo is not "meaningful".
Your voting record, vehicle ownership, and household income, depending on what state you live in, are sold by your state government itself! We have a long way to go when it comes to ethical capitalism in the United States. Too far, actually.
You have a strong reading of the level of citizen constituency at play in these neoliberal corporate welfare states