For users? Probably not. For ad companies? Absolutely. I don't mean this maliciously towards you or advertisers, but you need to understand that advertisers se

For users? Probably not. For ad companies? Absolutely. I don't mean this maliciously towards you or advertisers, but you need to understand that advertisers see the world through ad-tinted glasses - you can tell it based on how they try to sell physical ad-space. A billboard will gleefully tick away with "number of people who would have seen your ad". Placards above urinals or in stalls in bathrooms will talk to you about "now this is captive audience". A person isn't a person, they're a demographic of set {male, gay, republican, gunowner, iphoneuser} or any series of fields. I do agree, it's annoying and as a person, insulting to have companies prying away at my privacy just to try to sell me stuff I don't want or need, or sometimes already have. (just looknig at skype right now on my work machine, it's trying to sell me Office 365 when we're married to the Windows Environment already) But I'm not an advertiser - I don't see the world through their eyes, and they would make far less money if they saw the world through my eyes. A good advertiser isn't really congruent with respecting privacy or letting things be, and sometimes the difference that jumping on a trend like this can make is "selling [100] good burgers" a day versus "selling [500] good burgers" a day. Even if your burgers stand on merit, if you had the metrics to show that you could quintuple sales, wouldn't you try at least? Even if you fell as short as 1.5(burgers_sold) compared to 5(burgers_sold), you'd still likely make more than you spent on the ad. It sucks, but as much as they're jerks for doing it, we're suckers that keep on buying and making it work, or at least we make it look like it works.