Targeted advertising in my lifetime has gone from staging ads for kitchen appliances on daytime TV channels or in magazines for housewives to a bunch of friends getting together with their cell phones, talking about a one off odd topic, and then finding ads pop up on that topic in the next week.

To clarify: we've gone from general audience profiling, to employment of broadband sensors for surreptitious collection of data from which to make ad serving decisions. There also exist patents for installing microphones for responding to user's screaming a brand name at a TV to skip a commercial, and the practice of frame sampling of viewed content from SmartTV's. These intrusions into personal privacy come purely for the benefit of forwarding the interests of these ad servers, which also creates a vulnerability in terms of the fact that your digital footprint is available to anyone else interested in paying or requesting to be able to use it. You can't have that granular ad targeting without implementation of further surveillance capabilities.

Furthermore, there are additional consequences in that filter bubbles are created. Without you being aware, the advertising industry by default will attempt to skew your overall experience toward what they think you want to see rather than what is actually out there, or what you ask for. These algorithms allowed to run unchecked, without instilling an innoculative knowledge of the tendency of these systems to shepherd one right off the reservation given enough time, leads to things where we throw around phrases likening our society to being "post-truth", and have actually recorded multiple instances of widespread population level sentiment engineering.

So we"e garbage binned any semblance of common worldview, and invited Orwellian tiers of data collection into our lives so that other people can stand a chance at maybe serving us an ad we weren't even actively looking for in the hopes of modifying our behavvior to make a purchase happen so that they can generate revenue off of our eyeballs and content creation.

Make no mistake. Targeted advertising is a blight. It's one of those things that sounds reasonable, innocent, and possibly even helpful on the surface; but quickly sours once you start digging into the details that make it happen.

I understand some people may feel they get value out of such an arrangement; that having that ad pop up at that time genuinely makes their life easier. I ask the followi ng, however: has an ad ever taught you anything that dedicated research, and purposeful exercise of your will to purchase couldn't teach you? Has your experience searching and trying to share information online not been adversely effected in that all people's searches of the same terms have no real consistent base anymore? The answer for me in both cases is "no". Throw in the fact that if I don't regularly clean out every last trace of client side state, my wanderings through cyberspace are painstakingly mapped and integrated by an industry hell bent on coaxing Every last shred of potential value out of my mere existence with no regard for the dangers of accumulating all that data in one place.

Nowadays, you have rumblings that we should be using these technical solutions as the basis of social/political policy, and half the people making the assertion one way aren't looking at the whole picture.

I don't want the world to time-freeze at early 2000's technology by a long shot. Let me be clear on that. I do however, believe we need to seriously take a look at our capabilities, and work on creating a cohesive, widespread set of ethic/moral dicta that jive with what we purport our most valued cultural aspects are as a society. Yes, I understand that may mean converging to things I don't agree with; and that's fine. I just want as many people as possible to have the whole picture; and I don't think that right now that is actually the case.

Also, see the information warfare post from a sibling poster. Information, and tactically imposed voids of information are just as weaponizable as any object. Over longer timescales, no doubt. Still viable though.