The EU's war on behavioral advertising

Smaller companies aren't somehow inherently virtuous, if they can only exist by violating user privacy even more so than large companies, I'd rather deal with large companies. Small companies aren't an end in itself. Banking is another good example of this. Canada has five big, heavily regulated banks and has not had one bank failure in a century. In the US tax payers bail out SV bank

As someone who spent five years doing advertising market research, and whose parents each spent 30+ years doing the same prior to ubiquitous internet use, I call bullshit on that statement.

While there certainly were efforts (with millions spent collecting data) to identify market segments and emotional triggers to better target market products/services (cf. BSB GlobalScan as an example), the idea that it was the right of ad sellers to monitor everyone's activities as their right in order to "target" advertising was never an option, nor was there ever any push to do so.

Convincing folks to participate in telephone/mall intercept/door-to-door surveys was used to identify consumer preferences and advertising efficacy.

No one ever asked (or did so without asking) to go through a consumer's mail, personal communications or effects as a method to determine how to target ads.

Since all those things are pretty much de rigueur these days, I'd say that's not a just difference of degree, but a completely different mechanism for gathering information about consumers.

And just because it wasn't possible to snoop through (without a potential breaking/entering and/or burglary charge) the private documents and communications of consumers, doesn't mean those folks would have done so if they could.

So yes, there's a big difference between the market research (surveys, focus groups, etc.) done in the past and the blatant spying/snooping on people's private documents and communications we see now.

You're making an assertion which doesn't match the facts.

Feel free to disagree, but I was there, and that business paid for my housing, food, clothes and everything else for more than twenty-five years -- both as the child of marketers and as a marketer myself.

I'd also point out that the Advertising Market Research industry was a very small group of people (perhaps a thousand employed by ad agencies/large corporations and a few thousand more employed by market research supply houses and interviewing/focus group companies.) and, as such, if there was a market for breaking into people's houses and rifling through their papers/mail, wiretapping their phones, etc., I'd know about it.

The Superbowl is a classic example here - some meaningful fraction of those watching are doing so for the ads vs any interest in football! But YouTube, TikTok, etc have all seen great success in organic/viral campaigns (Old Spice comes to mind).

To answer your question - how might a superapp make advertisement "good" would probably be not only showing you an ad that you're likely to commercially engage (to purchase the good/service) based on your observed interests but also where the ad itself is something you're likely to find interesting/educational/amusing and not annoying, because in the latter case you'll like/comment/reshare to percolate it "for free" and amplify their campaign. And the interestingness can be judged based on your history of interactions.

2. Advertisement match-making isn't perfect (which is why I wrote "in an ideal world"). There is some time and signal buffer till we get enough signal to show the right ad to the user (if ever). The intentions of the ad platform also have to be taken into consideration (Often not the case for Big Tech but even here).

3. Advertisements do have negative consequences. We can also target drugs, cults, gambling etc more effectively as well. Often the law has to play catch-up with the more controversial categories. Advertisers can also dupe/defraud buyers with false/misleading advertisements.