> Are advertisers following you around town?
Yes
> Bothering you at work?
Yes
> Hounding you in the loo?
If I'm taking a shit and open my phone. But also, sometimes at the urinal. I mean they put ads right in front of your face.
> Personally it seems like my data has been stolen from just about every company I've ever given it to EXCEPT for Google.
Google isn't in the business of selling ads, they are in the business of selling data. To make those ads more pervasive, targeted, and effective. A good ad goes unnoticed, it is often "native."
But to me, I just think about it this way. If some dude was following me around and writing down everything I do (maybe no the exact content of my words, but who I talk to, when, where I go, etc -- metadata), I'd be fucking pissed and call law enforcement for stalking. Now I don't understand why this is okay if the dude's name is Mark, Sundar, or Satya. I don't care that they're really good at hiding and that their note taking often goes unnoticed. I think it is creepy and immoral behavior.
And beyond that, I know what that data can do. Yes, it can be used to make a lot of useful things. I work in ML, data is POWERFUL. But a coin is a coin, and it can be spent on good things or bad things. Hell, there are even good ads. But the truth of the matter is that there are far too many abuses. More than I think is acceptable. I worry about growing abuse and the slow boiling of a frog[0]. The temperature (both metaphorical and literal) has risen all my life, I see no reason to think that it will cool down if we just continue business as usual. Each little instance of temperature rise may be small and not uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean that given enough time the temperature doesn't rise to a deadly point. I cannot stress this enough, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Evil is not (exclusively) created by evil men doing evil things. Evil is more often created by good men with good intentions. It is because the world is complex and because what we build and what we create takes on a life of its own, outside our hands, and outside what we imagined it could/would do. Ethan Zuckerman is not an evil man for creating something so universally hated, and he even created it with good intentions. But this is just the nature of the world and it means to be vigilant and careful. To be clear, it does not mean to stop progressing. But it does mean to be aware that the environment changes and that it is easy to get off track.
It's easy to point fingers at specific people, but I think it is more important to recognize the complexity of reality. Because if that isn't considered, you just create a vacuum for the same evil/abuse to rise again. And again, often by people who have no malintent. And that's the issue: the world is too fucking complex and we want it to be simple(er) and we will often try to bend over backwards to make it so, because we humans were not designed for this. But we are capable of processing it. So, will we?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog