As someone who reluctantly works in advertising, I can tell you that advertiser's view themselves as God's gift to the internet and think they're doing great things for it. So many people in the industry have drunk the coolaid and honestly, earnestly think that exploiting anyone they can for information just started to to make an add ever so slightly more (creepily) personalised is a good thing.

They need to be put back in their box and have a bunch of their toys taken away. GDPR is a good start.

And that's why I keep repeating that advertisers are enemies of users, and - from the POV of users - malicious actors. They literally benefit from making life difficult for you and wasting the finite amount of time you have on this planet.

This needs to get into people's head - as long as the incentives are so misaligned, there's no chance for peace here.