"Dylan might want to buy this jacket" transmits a lot less information than "Dylan skis, Dylan lives in zip code XYZ where he might not own a jacket naturally, Dylan's household income range is M, and Dylan was looking at ski vacation packages".
What do you think micro targeting means, then? Because I think it means there is a different version of the ski jacket ad for each zip code and income range and for whether someone is a skier. And they're probably only showing it to people that have expressed a relevant interest. So effectively that's the same information.
Giving an advertiser the somewhat opaque output of a totally opaque black box transfer function conveys less reusable information than giving the advertiser all the personalized inputs to that black box.
It's not exactly the same, but the claim was that it's "much" less bad, and in the presence of microtargeting I don't think that holds up. It's not all the information but it's a lot of important parts. Combine several ad outputs and it's way too much.
