Shelves on shops manipulate you. Some products are put in front, some in the back. Back in the day, small companies suffered due to this and big brands used to get more brand placement. Counters have inexpensive candies, so that, instead of giving change money back they can give you candies. On the other hand, that surveillance by Google gives me great Articles in Google Chrome. There are scores of programming related articles which i wouldn't have discovered otherwise. I mean I can't "just go and read an article: when i don't know about that website. To each their own.

One of the things that has had the most profound influence in my life was to apply for and get a fellowship that paid me graduate studies in the US. The only reason I learned of its existence was my mom seeing an ad of it on the newspaper.

Ah, anecdotes. “My grandfather smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, and he lived to be a 110.”

What a ridiculous argument. I didn't get that fellowship despite the ad, unlike your grandfather who reached an old age despite smoking. I got it thanks to the ad.

You got the fellowship from the ad despite the vanishingly small chance that anyone would see it.

You must realize that what you're saying is an argument for better targeted ads. If you don't, I don't know how to help you see it.

Better targeted ads for some truly unequivocally beneficial things like scholarships might be a good thing, all else being equal. But:

1. Targeted ads requires enormous machineries of surveillance and file-keeping. Having too much information in closely related form is akin to having too much uranium in close proximity; it causes problems all of its own almost just by merely existing.

2. Ads in general, even the beneficial ones are, by definition, distracting from whatever content we were trying to read. See: São Paulo’s “Cidade Limpa”.