Some things to note, attribution and identity also allow for things like ad suppression or blanketing. If you have already bought the product or made indications you are not interested and will not be converted it is very common practice to suppress you from seeing those specific ads. Its also common to blanket you with relevant ads given shown interest in a product or service.

Maybe it is fine to consider it a tax, another way to look at it is you are being paid on content and access on various sites (including sites where you make a purchase at a price that is fair for the product AND this information) for your information.

Either way, if you want to jump ship from that arrangement -- it should be just as protected that accessing that content is now a violation of TOS or a liability to you that can be resolved with (at the site owners prerogative) hard costs to you for that content or service.

My response is that (And this is a common refrain) adtech companies seem to assume everyone is a collector in waiting.

One time I needed to buy a new washer+dryer. I did so, but I continued to get aggressively targeted washer/dryer ads for months, maybe a year.

Similar for furniture.

I am not a closet deck chair collector, but adtech decided I was.

And for that "pain" you retained access to the content/functionality on those sites that presented those ads. It is super common to suppress users that have seen a certain amount of blanket without interaction) as well so if you were receiving those ads for months it is most likely a poorly performing media team.

Arn't those ads that you will never click on but happen to be related to your browsing context better than the ads you drive by every morning on the street?

Take all those sites you visit over a month, remove the ones you pay for directly from the list. Those remaining ones are the sites that will not be there without either ad support or direct charge.

For the first paragraph: I'm not saying no to ads, I'm saying know to wanton abuse of my privacy to provide mistargeted ads when the whole point of that abuse is to provide correctly targeted ads.

2nd paragraph: those ads leverage their context, better than modern "targeted" ads. An ad for a tech product showing up on a tech site is more applicable than a dishwasher. Likewise an ad for a dishwasher on a homeware review site is better than an ad for a computer. The targeting is not providing anything useful.

Final paragraph: you are making the argument that the abuse of privacy is critical to the ad ecosystem, to the extent that in the absence of tracking then the entire ecosystem collapses. This is demonstrably false: when AdWords started it wasn't built on tracking and other such abuses of the end user, it was based on the context of the page the ad is embedded in.

The problem we've got to now, is that the ad networks started pushing "targeted" ads over non targeted to the extent that they have managed to convince everyone that the tracking abuse is necessary.

I guess I will leave it with this. You are looking at the issue from a certain perspective. The counter perspective is that targeting and attribution were severely lacking in AdWords and many other systems in the early days. The only reason that was acceptable for brands spending 1MM -> 1B dollars on advertising was that it was actively being extended and fixed (and there was a naiveté/blind faith of early adopters). We are years and years into a system that has grown over time to its current level by listening to market needs and adapting.

The days of cast a blind net that can't be attributed or optimized are well over -- those sites I asked you to consider will be very much hurt or gone if marketers can't target specific segments anymore (the blind saturation spend os not coming back).

> on page content (much more useful IMO)

In your opinion? On what grounds can you make this claim, as if there didn't exist a multi-billion dollar industry focused on maximizing ad-targeting usefulness, as if ad companies haven't tried context-based targeting and just decided to do something else that apparently makes them less money by being less useful.

Do you have any serious evidence that "knowing everyone’s intimate details means your random context-free ad will result in someone buying something" is a bizarre belief instead of a fact that a capitalist market has settled on?

Edited for clarity