It's data ownership laws and adequate monitoring (including whistle blower laws with adequate rewards) and enforcement that is necessary. Replace "Google" with any unknown or known bad actor that can be taken over by a bad actor, and we return to the same problem.

At the end of the day you're right, but look at it from the perspective of a healthcare decision maker.

What if something questionable happens, even if it's legal, and you're found to have handed over patient data to Google, the largest ad targeting firm on the planet?

Pointing at legalities will not save your reputation or your job in the face of glaring misalignment of interests.

It's like letting your dog guard your employer's sausages after giving it state of the art training in self control.

I understand that monitoring and keeping people in check, and perhaps you're right that there should be a physical barrier between certain systems, however there's still nothing stopping bad actors from infiltrating in these systems. I personally think ads should be obliterated, as they're simply shallow and cheap methods of manipulating people; Presidential candidate Andrew Yang's plan is to tax ads higher in his VAT strategy than other things, progressively increase it over time, basically as a mechanism similar to a carbon tax countering pollution that's bad for us. Tesla spends no money on advertising, the word of mouth and media attention they get is all earned - meanwhile other vehicle manufacturers compete through emotional ads spend money which increases the cost of the vehicles, perpetuates the ad industrial complex, and to some degree limits people's depth of critical thinking for their buying decisions re: the emotional manipulation of ads bombarding them to build a good, relatable feeling, familiarizing them with specific products to make it feel like a safe, good choice.

I don't think ads should be obliterated. People will always try to influence other people and ads are just one way of doing that. In my opinion, there are far more nefarious, manipulative and intransparent ways of pursuing the same goal.

Also, ads are currently indispensible for privacy as weird as that may sound. There is currently no widespread, privacy preserving form of electronic payment, and I very much doubt that there will ever be one.

What we should do is regulate/restrict ad targeting and make sure that advertising is as transparent as possible.

But none of that has anything to do with Google's reputation issues and conflict of interest. Google should split off its ad business from all other activities. Otherwise they will always remain an advertising company and distrust in everything else they do will only grow.

How about an "ad system" that people actively engage with when they're wanting to discover vs. being bombarded everywhere - perhaps not understanding the implications of manipulation of ads have on them? At minimum it changes the user experience greatly.

We can always wish for things to be less annoying, but the difficult question is how to make it happen without causing more unintended consequences than intended ones.

You have to ask yourself what advertisers would do if you ban those in-your-face super annoying ads. Stop spending money on trying to influence our decisions? I don't think so.

Except other methods will certainly cost more, bringing their cost of products up, and so someone's products who are better and known as such through word of mouth will have a competitive advantage on price.

I'm not so sure about that. Ad spending has remained roughly the same as a share of GDP for over a century.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisi...

I think transparency is more important than fighting annoyances.