Being concerned about how one’s data is being sold is a very “first world problem”, and even in “first worlds” it’s not a very big one for the great majority of the population.
It's really not. Propaganda is very effective in non-FW countries, perhaps even more so because of lower levels of education. Cambridge Analytica had successful campaigns all over Africa and the Middle East, which had a definite effect on the outcome of elections. It can be argued that the 2016 US election result was partially influenced by this, although the tricky thing with information warfare and propaganda is that the effect is very difficult to trace back to a specific cause. It leaves the victim in a state of confusion, with no single and clear source that caused it.
Since this affects society at large, it definitely _should_ be a general concern, and not a FW-only problem.
Framing it that way, it becomes clear how unequal of a trade ads really are.
I'd add that network bandwidth, CPU cycles, storage and RAM are being traded away as well, since the means to capture your data and attention also executes locally and are stored on your systems as well.
Which makes things even more unequal.
It is a battle to explain this to my kids, e.g. in the context of why we scrutinize what apps they use; and one (of several) reason(s) we don't let them use various apps. The monkey-mind obsession with visible cause and effect is for certain one of the cognitive errors that will doom our civilization.
I would love for there to be hard reset in the premises of surveillance capitalism and our industry's starring role in it.
As with e.g. our collective non-response to climate change, glib shrugs in response to the methodical construction of total surveillance in defiance of passionate, funny, relentless criticism (Cory Doctorow comes to mind), give every appearance of being the sort of thing future generations would look back on with perplexity and justified anger. "How could they not just 'let' this happen, but enthusiastically drive it?" How indeed.
Sounds sensible. You need to pay a fee if you want to display an ad on a billboard. But they are pirating the space on our monitors for free. They really should rent it instead.
Both ads and propaganda have the same objective, psychological manipulation, and the difference is that one wants to manipulate you into buying a product, and the other wants to manipulate you into buying into an idea. These are insidious objectives on both a personal, and societal level.
One more thing: once adtech has your personal data, it is sold in perpetuity on shady data broker markets, and any company with access to it can exploit it and get rich from it. As with anything on the internet, once it's out there, it exists forever, except you'll have no control over who it's sold to, under what terms, and, of course, you'll never see a cent of profit.
All adtech companies should be paying users to use their services. "Free" is not only not free, but it's extremely profitable for the company you give your data to.
The fact that most people either don't understand any of this, or don't care, is deeply troubling for the future of our civilization.