I don't think it is a good sign.
I think it shows that, even if your personal information is quietly being abused, individual businesses will still prioritise spamming you.
So, even if you willingly give up your personal information in exchange for personalised ads, you will never see the claimed benefit to you.
One side of the contract is broken.
Targetted ads are considerably more effective, even if they are annoying.
When you 'buy' something, generally you get the 'benefit' of the surplus.
The ads very effectiveness is a rough measure of their economic benefit, even to you.
How we 'emotional feel' about ads that seem to track is is not really a measure of that. It's just annoying.
How effective is spam? From the perspective of the spammer, it's effective enough.
In both cases, these forms of "business" are certainly effective in annoying a large number of people, a tradeoff the operators apparently deem worthy of making.
> advertisers are still unable to develop a perfectly manipulative algorithm that makes you buy things (edit: or they have it, but it's still not found in wider deployment).
Perhaps the expensive processor time or R&D just doesn't worth it...
Yet (But it's coming soon?).
Does it really though? I would expect a successfully manipulative algorithm to be much more subtle than this; just because we don't notice it, doesn't mean it's not there.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
If this is what Target does in 2012, Amazon in 2020 not only inserts plausible deniability to optimize for lack-of-creepiness factor. They're probably running AI bots on forums and social media injecting seamless product placement in commentary you see in your browser.
Assuming you're correct about the technical points of efficacy, we can still turn this around as a social problem and hypothesize that the willingness to use unproven, annoying targeted ads directly correlates to the willingness to use intrusive mass surveillance.
You bought a vacuum here are more vacuums might directly translate to you attended a protest so you're a permanent malcontent. Worse yet, the "metrics" of social monitoring aren't as black-and-white as future purchases, so badly-used surveillance might falsely think itself useful simply through confirmation biases.
Basically, applied sociology.
They can't get that directly with the current state of the Internet, so they have to rely on hacks.
What we're evolving is predators of human state of mind. For every well-understood target audience there is an optimal revenue extraction method. With more data new sub-audiences appear, allowing experiments to find even more effective advertising for maximizing revenue extraction in those subgroups.
A huge fraction of advertising is nothing more than gaslighting us into believing we have a need or desire for a product or service. The other fraction is exploiting biases in our brains to influence our purchasing decisions toward particular brands or markets.
Advertisers want reproducible results backed by science and numbers. And the only way to get that today is with old-fashioned statistics - normal distrubutions, laws of large numbers and carefully controlled sample selection processes.
Nowhere here does the sci-fi of "mind control" factor.
Everyone thinks this problem is really annoying, but to me it's a good sign - it indicates the current technical capabilities on using and abusing personal information is still limited, the predicted machine learning apocalypse is not here yet. In other words: despite the large quantity of personal information collected by advertisers, they still cannot exploit it efficiently enough, so far all they can do mostly is showing you the same things over and over - advertisers are still unable to develop a perfectly manipulative algorithm that makes you buy things (edit: or they have it, but it's still not found in wider deployment).
Effectiveness of targeted ads directly translates to effectiveness of mass surveillance. Perhaps we should enjoy the useless shopping recommendations from Amazon for now. When every single shopping recommendations made by the algorithm is the thing you always wanted (coming soon!), you'll know the cyberpunk dystopia is officially here.
This point of view also reconciles the two different opinions on machine learning in the tech community. The first person tells you that it's nothing but overhyped marketing, while it has some specialized uses, but everything is exaggerated as "AI" to get money from VCs, and in many areas, it's effectiveness is just too limited. The second person warns you that collecting personal information at an industrial scale is extremely dangerous, with the recent progress on "AI", they can use your data against you in ways never possible before. These two are not a contradiction: The first view is where we were previously, and the next view is where we are going to.