If you ask me, the latter are infinitely more important than the first thing.

Now, I will grant that Google also does a lot more to complain about.

Your life is essentially a compilation of what captures your attention. Embracing this perspective, any entity auctioning off your attention to the highest bidder is trading away a part of your life.

People don't understand what this means. They also don't understand how cynical this is in the context of a search engine. I don't have a solution to this, but man, its horrible.

This seems too nonspecific. Influence is graded on a curve: early life experiences and childhood are formative, and the job of parents is to raise their children well. I don't think we should be equating the influence of internet ads with big experiences.

The pervasive nature of advertising can subtly dictate the rhythm of our lives, often reducing moments of potential introspection, creativity, or connection with others into opportunities for commercial engagement. It’s a constant auction of our attention at the cost of personal enrichment and depth of experience.

It alters our relationship with ourselves and with the world, as our attention is steadily guided away from personal priorities and towards commercial ones. This is a critical and largely unexamined impact of advertising. We are, effectively, paying the ultimate price, which is life itself. No amount of "taste" in individual ads can compensate for this.

This is not true. This is the excuse used to justify the spying.

Contextual ads work perfectly well for providing information about new or niche products. It the other, much creepier, use case for ads that want the detailed information to target tailored ads at individual users.

It's not even about 'propagandizing genocide and tyranny to make money'. For some people in power, genocide and tyranny are what you spend money ON, and the engine for making that money. Money isn't the goal, ideology is. Advertising connects naturally to that true goal, and nobody's asking where the money is coming from.

I adblock Google in part because some of the people able and willing to pay them Google-sized money to propagandize me are truly evil people that I don't want to hear from.

Influence is a part of life, and that's all advertising is. But at Google scale, and with good enough feedback (something Google and Facebook have really optimized for), influence is too effective- society-damaging levels of effective. And then it comes down to who's amassed the most money and power and also knows how to exploit those resources to work their wills.

(of course it is possible to show advertising without tracking. there's a lot of context to be had in many cases).

then I love the "I dont want my computing resources to run ads", well then dont read the article !!

eyeroll

The only place I actually notice is Amazon, since it seems to often insert things I don't care about

google most def supports CCP since their re-entry into china

apple invented webkit and clang/llvm among others

maybe look at things with a more open perspective. google and apple both do good as well as bad; it’s not a competition in terms of who abuses capitalism, the answer is everyone.

Google isn't an engineering meritocracy anymore, but it's still a great place for engineers overall: wealthy, excellent perks, and some of the best talent anywhere. But, adjusting the culture to be truly market driven and in alignment with a clear purpose has (and is still) taken years, and has created lots of interim pain & suffering [of all kinds, both internally and for customers & consumers]. Google is becoming more like Apple & Microsoft, and if the alternative is "pretend to be like the old Google", this cannot be anything but positive.