However, adtech companies damage everyone, and fairly significantly. eg concentration problems, addictive behaviours, etc.
That's literally "human race" level damage.
Doesn't seem like a lesser thing to me. :/
They, for years until it was leaked, "targeted" every phone call in the United States:
https://gizmodo.com/this-government-phone-tapping-thing-just...
And 125,000,000,000 globally, along with almost a hundred billion internet requests per month in a time when the Internet was much smaller, years ago, under a program that hasn't stopped:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundless_Informant
This definitely damages everyone, and I think more fundamentally than adtech companies. You can escape adtech companies: use different websites, install an adblocker, block trackers, whatever. There's no obvious way outside of strong encryption and hermitry to avoid NSA getting its paws on every single public or private communication you ever make, given their record. When privacy doesn't and cannot exist, human behavior changes deeply. I think it's the greater of two evils.
Adtech companies definitely aren't good, by any stretch, but I think it's the difference between Ghengis Khan and a common killer: sure, they both want to kill you, but the scale and the level of cruelty is much different.
"NSA staff used spy tools on spouses, ex-lovers"
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...
Optic Nerve ("GCHQ" in title is misleading because the NSA played a very enthusiastic helping role in it):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optic_Nerve_(GCHQ)
ECHELON:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
There's so much they're responsible for that it seems like it'd be excessive to post all of them, and HN has a character limit, anyway. Even the most well-known ones would fill a couple of comments.