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> for all the complaining about ads,

There are couple of main complaints about ads:

1. Too many of them plastered all over in least expected places.

2. All that is done to privacy in the name of accurate profiling and targeting.

3. Malicious and misleading ads.

Should we accept that ad based industry can't survive without resorting to any of the above ?




You're asking the wrong question. Maybe we should be asking whether the ad industry deserves to survive if they have to (or choose to) resort to stalking and surveillance that would have made Stasi jealous.

It may not be possible to do anything about ads being misleading - marketing is just another word for lying and deception, after all.[ß]

For everything else you listed, I put together a tolerable set of behaviours a ~decade ago: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html ; and if that makes online advertising a lot more expensive, well... have you considered that maybe the obnoxious, intrusive, scummy and/or malicious ads are everywhere because advertising is too cheap?

ß: fine, maybe some miniscule fraction (< 0.01%) are factual. I consider numbers of that magnitude rounding errors.


> have you considered that maybe the obnoxious, intrusive, scummy and/or malicious ads are everywhere because advertising is too cheap?

On contrary, probably the ads became so expensive that only scam can afford it.


So as a third-order effect, advertising industry would immolate themselves into extinction when having ads out would immediately telegraph to everyone "I am not to be trusted, stay away"?

I think I could live with that.




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