There is no such thing as privacy focused ad tech. The purpose of ads is to know you and influence your future.
I think there’s a need for a business to let customers know they exist. I’m not against ads per se, but certainly against tracking and poorly integrated and over-stuffing of ads into content. And at times I’ve wished there was a non-tracking, “tasteful” ad company.
The spying is evil. The actual messages delivered are evil. The entire industry is rotten to the core.
> The entire industry is rotten to the core.
I tend to agree.
... but isn't a search engine's response basically a pull? You've explicitly stated that you're interested in X by searching for it. "An x" vs "The x" is of course relevant, but you can't reliably infer that.
Or do you mean that the difference is whether you're looking in advertising-focused places? Like having a dedicated "include ads" option on search or something.
There are other issues but not so much privacy. For example a self-hosted ad platform which offers to run ads based on internal browsing profile would be let through at this site at least. In reasonable amount, bandwidth overhead and annoyance to the human. The issue currently is that there seems to be much more money in selling all the data outright - and that gets a sharp no.