Because it has value, both to the advertiser and to the target, compared to un-targeted advertising. Advertising is an attempt to transfer information. Targeted ads means that the information is more likely to be relevant, whatever its other downsides. Let's not throw out that baby with the bath water.

"Advertising is an attempt to transfer information" is deeply misguided unless you adjust that to say "transfer very biased information". Advertising is an attempt to influence one party to give their money to another party, generally through manipulation and guile.

Targeted advertising is like the difference between spam and spear phising. The person being advertised to rarely (if ever) benefits.

> The person being advertised to rarely (if ever) benefits.

Instagram has gotten so good at targeting me that I probably click on at least 1/2 the ads because I find them interesting. I've purchased things because of those clicks too, and have enjoyed the purchases. Things I would have never known about were it not for the ads.

I benefit if Youtube shows me advertisements for desk chairs and lathes instead of beauty products and kids toys. Targeted advertisements help me discover new products and product categories, while untargeted advertising just wastes my time. This is in essence no different than companies buying advertising time in specific TV shows with a known audience.

Of course the abuses are also plentiful and dangerous. We probably do need a lot of regulation. But in general targeted advertisement is a useful thing to have.

The equivalent of buying advertising time in specific TV shows with a known audience is... buying adverts on specific Youtube channels with a known audience. Funnily, a lot of Youtubers now perform advertising of this sort - I'm sure you've seen the VPN ads.

This, like TV, doesn't require tracking of individual people who haven't consented to such.

> This, like TV, doesn't require tracking of individual people who haven't consented to such.

That's a stretch. How do you think they determine any information about the "known" audience? Obviously, they do all sorts of research to determine more about the audiences watching certain shows and channels, likely by sifting through social media, show reviews (IMDB, etc), and elsewhere to determine who's watching what shows, then looking into their profiles to determine their interests. Aggregate that data, find what they all have mostly in common, and cater to those interests. It's just a more generalized and difficult process of the same thing, and eventually it's going to become more narrowed and specific to individual targets.

The difference is that if I don’t want to let anyone know that I watch My Little Pony... I don’t have to! There’s no little black box connected to my TV that tells an advertiser that I’m watching it without asking me.

I can also have a discussion with my friends about My Little Pony and how amazing the last episode was without an algorithm picking that up, unless I publish it to the world or explicitly send it to the advertiser.

I understand your point, and I agree that it's easier to keep your television viewing habits hidden from your internet viewing habits, for obvious reasons, but I'm just pointing out that there are still ways to aggregate data to the point where they are able to determine, with significant accuracy, which ads are the most effective based on demographics, locality, cross-referencing social media, web traffic, consumer surveys, department store sales information, and probably tons of other details.

They benefit when they use valuable services for free, which is paid by targeted ads.

“Targeted advertising” is just a euphemism for the secretive creation and sale of dossiers on unwitting Internet users. It should already be illegal under existing laws.

In most cases, this isn't true. The dossiers and maintained very closely by Facebook, Google, etc in order to leverage their knowledge on a target to produce the most effective targeted ads. If they sold the dossiers, they would lose the continued revenue.

No advertising is really untargeted. Even billboards tend to carry ads for the type of driver that passes by them and broadcast TV has ads for the type of person that watches that show.

Ads targeted to an individual without that individual's consent should probably be banned. In addition, the law should make it clear that when a company does hold data about individuals, the individual should have some rights to that data including the ability to block the sharing or transfer of that data.

So, when Google buys FitBit, every user of FitBit should have to explicitly opt-in to their data being transferred to Google.

Most things has value by some definition. Question is if the sum is positive. I'm not sure that is the case for targeted advertising.

Targeting doesn't work. There is no baby.

I recently bought a set of clamps on Amazon to join two shipping containers together. Since then I've seen a bunch of related ads, such as for shipping container vents, shelving, etc. I clicked on a couple of those ads, and while I didn't buy anything, I did learn some useful information. I probably would have learned less, if anything, from untargeted ads in those same slots.

> while I didn't buy anything

And so targeting didn't work!

Yes, "targeting" can put stuff in front of your eyeballs that may occasionally have marginal utility, but for sales? Nu uh.

In the baby/bathwater metaphor, you saw some ads for strollers. Still no baby.

It didn't work for the advertiser, but it did for me. I learned about options and prices for container accessories, which will help me make future choices. I would not have been better off if those ads had been less interesting to me.

> Advertising is an attempt to transfer information.

If you want to inform me, just give me a website I can visit where I can enter my needs and provide perhaps some context information, and which deletes/forgets this information when I leave. There is no need AT ALL to figure this info out behind my back.

The use-case isn’t advertising, it’s QoS. So you collect the data and give your best customers fast access, or maybe you balance it out: your most complaining customers get preferential treatment and the most reasonable wait a little longer on the line because you know they won’t complain.

Or, framing it more broadly: mass personalization implies a worse deal on average for everyone on the atomized/consumer/low-power (individual) side, because the high-power participants (companies) will optimize their outcomes at the expense of individuals.