This is still not very different than TV. Cable channels know what demographics of the people that watch their shows and sell their eyeballs accordingly. Hell, entire shows exist to specifically attract certain types of eyeballs.

If I pay you $5 to show an ad in front of a certain type of person and you come back and tell me that you did it I haven't really learned anything about that person. It seems hard to say that that is the same as selling people's data.

A major difference is that TV doesn't spy on you while online advertisers do. TV targets ads based on the content of the shows, similar to how contextual ads used to work based on the content of the websites they were placed in. They don't try to spy on your each and every move.

This is true but not super relevant to the question of whether paying someone to place an ad in front of certain demographics is selling information.

Because sure, Google knows a lot of people and they have a lot of ad space to fill which means they have a good chance at finding and reaching the demographics I asked for but I don’t get any of that information as part of my transaction with them.

Does it really matter if the data is technically being "sold" or not? The fact that any one entity holds an unprecedented level of information about us is alarming in and of itself. As Snowden said in his first interview, all that data is just sitting there waiting to be abused, and the only thing stopping anyone from doing so yet if they haven't already are policies that can and will change in the future. It doesn't matter who has access to the actual data as long as someone does.

If adtech wants to serve us "relevant" ads, that's fine but the intrusive spying has to stop. Plain old contextual ads should be more than enough for that purpose.

If I target 21-26 year olds with an advertising campaign, and someone clicks on that add. Then Facebook just told me they think the person at the other end of that click is 21-26. From my perspective they just sold that information.

With TV, it’s all vague guess on their part about what kind of content people like. Are the people watching daytime soaps can be 18 or 80, it’s vague topic and time of day based filtering.

If you put an ad, untargetted, with a bikini clad woman in it, you can be confident the person that clicked it is an 18-26 year old male.

Google's guessing of your demographics is amusingly wrong sometimes (you can see the categories it puts you in).

> With TV, it’s all vague guess on their part about what kind of content people like

People with HBO have disposable incomes. People watching Nick or Disney channel are or have children, whose ages and genders can be further refined based on the shows in question. "You have a 8-11 year old daughter" is absolutely trivial to accurately glean from television, and is basically the single most valuable advertising demographic.

Google is not Facebook, and the question is what their selling not that the information is official. Anyway, I think you will find 17- and 27+ year old men also click on bikini clad woman.

As to Disney watchers, my male collage roommate used to love those shows. At the extreme end MLP friendship is magic has a vastly wider following than the original target demographic.

They both correlate with demographic data, TV is swimply wildly inaccurate and not tied to a specific individual.

How is what you described different from TV?

On TV, you can target so many demographics indirectly by buying ads on shows they like. Companies like Nielson have been reporting on the demographics watching shows for decades. You can also target geographically at least down to the county-ish level.

TV stations and Google both know who is watching what and selling access to their customers to advertisers. Google might be a bit more sophisticated than TV, but besides "retargeting" (following you around different sites) they use the same basic techniques and offer the same things to Advertisers