Agreed. The only advertising I stand is one I personally seek out. To me the pinnacle of this were product catalogs. I want to buy a computer, so I subscribe to "Computer Shopper Monthly", and get a magazine with nothing but computer ads. Those were always fun to browse, since I was interested in the product in the first place. E-commerce started as a digital implementation of product catalogs, but as companies got greedier, that just wasn't enough.
The key culprit is that user data is used not just for advertising products that the user might be interested in _today_. But to create a profile of their interests so that companies can predict what they might be interested in at any point in the future, which can then be used to design more effective advertising campaigns tailored to the type of products they're most susceptible to be manipulated into buying.
Furthermore, this profile is also generally useful to anyone who wishes to psychologically manipulate a group of people into thinking or acting a certain way. Since advertising is a branch of propaganda, governments and political agencies are particularly interested in this use case. It's pretty obvious that the current global sociopolitical instability is largely a product of this type of manipulation.
So considering that both governments and companies have an interest in user data, this genie is never going back in the bottle. The best we can hope for is for the exploitation to be contained via regulation by governments that haven't been fully corrupted yet.
The key culprit is that user data is used not just for advertising products that the user might be interested in _today_. But to create a profile of their interests so that companies can predict what they might be interested in at any point in the future, which can then be used to design more effective advertising campaigns tailored to the type of products they're most susceptible to be manipulated into buying.
Furthermore, this profile is also generally useful to anyone who wishes to psychologically manipulate a group of people into thinking or acting a certain way. Since advertising is a branch of propaganda, governments and political agencies are particularly interested in this use case. It's pretty obvious that the current global sociopolitical instability is largely a product of this type of manipulation.
So considering that both governments and companies have an interest in user data, this genie is never going back in the bottle. The best we can hope for is for the exploitation to be contained via regulation by governments that haven't been fully corrupted yet.