My favorite is when you go on Amazon to buy something, say like a TV. Then you get blasted with ads for TVs for the next month.
Mother fucker, I just bought a TV. I bought it from you. Are you smart enough to start advertising TVs to me before I even search on your site, but not smart enough to know I already bought the fucking thing? From you?
It would be so refreshing to get randomized non tracked ads just like in the ye ol free tv days. This shall be the new norm. But wait, i can't have that, there's a PiHole. :(
You can’t really effectively do that, as every social media platform has to collect user data per definition.
Forbidding selling would be a bit difficult to define, but at least worth the try.
Meanwhile, targeted ads IRL:
We kind of noticed you recently bought LAWNMOWER on Amazon. As a LAWNMOWER aficionado, would you like to buy more LAWNMOWER? Take your pick of these four crappy, overpriced ones. We will bill you like they are gold plated and dropship some junk from China, lol.
Also, you added your neighbor on Facebook and her aunt recently went on an esoteric streak. Would you like to buy some tarot cards to talk to your recently deceased grandmother or some crystals that can heal ass cancer? Doctors hate this one trick! Mostly because they hate seeing their desperate patients getting scammed, but they do hate it.
And while we are talking about your nether regions, as a proud owner of a penis you must have thought about enlarging it before, so here are some options …
I actually tend to agree. I value privacy and I hate the idea of Meg-O-Corp selling my data all over the world but on the other hand, I’ve bought some really cool shit that I love off targeted ads
So are targeted ads better than just ads? Yes for the consumer in me, no for the private person
The issue is not the personalised ad, but how Meta decides who seems them.
Today they take a lazy but effective approach of collecting as much data as possible at user level, to draw correlations between the user data and the content of the ad.
If regulation prohibit them from using this approach they'll be force to innovate or die.