I think criddell is right. I think the amount of money makes people gloss over some of the ethics, as cynical as that probably sounds. I didn't say it in the article specifically because of it sounding so cynical (even though the article is very cynical).

I think you're right, that a lot of the people going into AdTech, and just marketing in general, aren't philosophical. But, you saying that made me chuckle, because I have a BA in Philosophy, and no computing qualification.

A lot of the people I work with are looking for cheap wins. So they bend the rules and ignore ethics. Many retailers for example are data rich on the aggregate level. And could very likely achieve great results without trying to spearfish customers further. But the analytics insights required to do that take time and work. And marketers don’t like to do that. So they’d rather “enrich” crm data with Experian or some other service. When really they can’t handle they data they have and adding to it will just make it worse.