Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m in adtech and we manage to do ads in a completely user respecting way within the retail space. We monetize on search traffic without user data, cookies, local storage. The only browser feature we leverage are click events and img tags. Though I appreciate your frustration, your aggression is a little off target. :)
> The only browser feature we leverage are click events Do the users want their click events fed into an advertising engine? Did you ask them? If you made this opt-in, how many would say, yes, please track my clicks in order to advertise to me? Even if its anonymized/aggregated. A huge amount of advertising is enabled by tracking users against their will, exploiting the fact that many users aren't aware of what's goi…
You are right in that a huge amount of ads leverage user data at the expense of the user.
The point I’m trying to make is that not all involved in the advertising technology are exploitive. We do zero ad targeting based on user data. You make a search for specific products, we take the response and shuffle the order a bit based on vendor campaigns. That’s it. Nothing is associated or even collected from the user. It’s all system metrics.
The greatest harm that my team does is hurting optimized relevancy, which is inherit to advertising but also something we work hard to alleviate.
That misused proverbs quote is a nice touch. Shows a lot of self awareness.