As bad as advertising in old media was, at least it wasn't a platform of targeted surveillance and psychological manipulation. An advertisement was just an advertisement, you could pay attention to it or not, and your attention if it was noted at all was only noted in aggregate. Your radio or tv didn't know who you are, know where you live, develop complex behavioral profiles on you, record all of your browsing, shopping and communication data, listen in on your with microphones or watch you with cameras.

Google didn't expose the corruption of old media, rather it supplanted it with even deeper and more insidious corruption.

I wouldn't underestimate the psychological manipulation of old media, but you're right there's a whole industry around gathering and leveraging metrics, it still feels primitive but my imagination always wanders into how you can tie data points together. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of the fence.

The article is about behavioral advertising, which was not feasible with old media technologies.

The problem isn’t the ads. The problem is the ad targeting.

> We should be thanking Google for exposing the corruption that was the old media advertising empire

But they (and the rest of the industry) have replaced it with an even more egregious and abusive advertising system.

Google gets no thanks from me.