It's honestly so embarrassing and damning for HN that drivel like this is getting upvoted. To argue that personalized ads are bad for some kind of privacy argum

It's honestly so embarrassing and damning for HN that drivel like this is getting upvoted. To argue that personalized ads are bad for some kind of privacy argument is all well and good, but to say they're less effective than contextual ads is ridiculous. Some of the commentariate here honestly thinks they've stumbled on something ad tech and marketing companies have never thought of, or worse that there is some grand conspiracy to cover it all up. Meanwhile the people who actually work in ad tech know that there are armies of data scientists poring over every facet they can to get any 1% improvement possible. If contextual ads were actually better Google and Meta et al would instantly switch to it. But they're not.