Then I thank you for the argument! It was engaging to entertain the idea and give it its proper thought.
The question of ‘what ads are acceptable anyways’ has been cropping up recently in this thread-- to be honest, as someone who’s had some experience with advertising, Targeted Ads are somewhat of a money blackhole. We’d done it before because we have to, but the return on them is mostly just vapid KPIs. The more rewarding returns we’d gotten was almost always when we had feet on the ground-- selecting pages we wanted ads on, going to events, word of mouth, whatnot.
And that’s fine, but that’s all very expensive, and the unfortunate reality is that most businesses don’t really have a marketing/advertising department as much as they have… some guy, who handles all of that, and then the bigger ones outsource.
For the vast majority of people advertising, except perhaps the companies that serve millions of dollars in ads to Google, the current ad system is a losing game. The Acceptable Ads system is better than what we had previously, but that doesn’t erase that both users and advertisers don’t get what they want. The only people who benefit are people spamming weight loss ads on every news website, and… do we even want that?
It’s not just data collection-- it’s data collection that very few people relatively even benefit from.