Imagine processing petabytes at costs of millions to try to determine (often incorrectly) demographics and interests, then completely ignoring the more directly

Imagine processing petabytes at costs of millions to try to determine (often incorrectly) demographics and interests, then completely ignoring the more directly provided feedback for “not relevant for me”. Some day it will be obvious that geo targeting for stuff like elections was the only effective usage that we ever found, and that was of course pretty unethical. Hopefully in retrospect we’ll say that it was a sordid affair but the ends justified the means in terms of general advancement of computing, which after all we do still need for curing cancer and fixing climate change, but only time will tell.