> That's for consumers to decide. > But for the vast majority of people, their educated decision is to use free services in exchange for personalized ads. They

> That's for consumers to decide. > But for the vast majority of people, their educated decision is to use free services in exchange for personalized ads. They see it as a deal or else they wouldn't be doing it. Again, these decisions need to be based on knowledge which they don't have. > Are 99% of consumers suffering any actual harm? They see better personalized ads, and yes, people are mostly aware of how internet ads "follow" you because we've all shopped for something and then seen a billion ads for it. Yes, Cambridge Analytica or Brexit are perfect examples of that. Adtech, incl. programmatic advertising not only enables but incentivises sensationalist, emotion-driven and biased content. This is due to the systemic issues within the industry and in itself is a wicked problem: different actors in the pipeline are motivated by different incentives. Think of the sales teams in adtech companies, publishers, publisher sales teams, brands, users... What motivates them how are they rewarded for their work? Sales people talk in terms of budgets ("We just closed $X.000000!"). What do brands care about? How do you translate the budget into campaign effectiveness? There's so much lost in the process, which is not a secret. Now, publishers don't like advertising but rely on it as a revenue stream. Different ways of monetising publishing content are possible but this would render the sales people working for publishers redundant and those people not only have mortgages to pay, kids to send to school, but generally are fairly influential within their orgs. Finally we have the users who have... their lives to live. We have the elderly people falling into scams fueled by retargeting (if we're looking for extreme cases). How well informed/educated are they? I don't need to understand the every single part of my car to drive it. I trust that it won't randomly explode when I start it. Why? The points I'm trying to convey (poorly) are products of the conversations with people ranging from entry to CXO level at ad networks, publishers, non-profits, then readers/consumers. I worked on several sides of the problem (publishing, ad tech, privacy). My opinion is that you grossly underestimate the impact of advertising on our society. We've grown used to it and learned to accept the current situation as a norm. Bear in mind that advertising in its modern form has its root in behaviourism and that's for a reason. https://twitter.com/HKingaby https://twitter.com/HKingaby https://twitter.com/ka_iwanska https://twitter.com/ka_iwanska https://twitter.com/DrRESmith https://twitter.com/DrRESmith explains how complex networks of actors, including the algorithmic ones (i.e. social media), can be used to increase polarisation. https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/