Not seeing relevant ads is literally my use case. If you see relevant ads it means at best that somewhere there's a list of all your history and preferences, and at worst your devices are actively listening to you

Or that the ads are relevant to the content. Slashdot in the early 'noughties had ads from companies selling products of interest to a tech-interested audience. Relevant ads without needing any tracking, like magic (because individual tracking wasn't widespread yet). The issue is with broad-interest sites like regular news, where matching the ads to the content is impractical because the content is extremely general.

Keep in mind that when the industry says "relevant ads", it means "more able to influence your actions".

If it results in you buying a T-shirt, it might have been more relevant to you than an ad for something you didn't need. But if it results in you, say, not voting, that would also be considered a success.

I have no idea why people have been convinced targeted advertising is some kind of net good not just for them individually but also for the world at large. The purpose is to find weaknesses in your personality and exploit them to manipulate you using this knowledge. There are some mostly benign uses but even if those are the majority you don't get to pick and choose, its an all or nothing affair.

I understand that's the popular narrative, but that's not really the main point of targeted ads.

There's an old saying in advertising: "I know I'm wasting half of my advertising dollars. I just don't know which half".

The main point of targeted advertising is to avoid wasting money showing ads to people who will almost certainly not purchase your product, and redirect the money to ads shown to people who are more predisposed to purchasing your product.

Examples of the former include showing ads for Depends to teenagers, or for McDonalds happy meals to the elderly. Examples of the latter would be gaming PCs for people who own lots of video games.

I think you're both saying the same thing. Ads are manipulative and by targeting they are only more effective at said manipulation. Because most of the people who it would not work on are excluded.

LineageOS with MicroG is really not much effort nowadays as long as you

- get an officially supported phone with easily unlocked bootloader (which usually means: Pixel or OnePlus)

- get the LineageOS&MicroG bundle from https://download.lineage.microg.org, which should really be more advertised

- don't root your phone, because that'll definitely require more effort fuzzing around with Magisk and Zygote deny lists etc.

There are of course apps that won't work with MicroG, period. Anything requiring hard DRM (Netflix EDIT: according to below list, it's actually working now, but I cannot test), games (Pokemon Go for instance), also quite a few banking apps, so if you can't live without some of those, check beforehand for instance on

https://community.e.foundation/t/list-apps-that-work-or-do-n...

just so you can see more irrelevant ads?

No, just because I find the default Google experience in Android annoying, and I don't see why they should know everything about me. Thanks to ublock, adaway and pi.hole I don't see ads anyway.

It can be looked at as cognitive defense. I don't want a hostile ad/surveillance system to charm me with relevance.

What a disingenous question, yuck. No, whether ads are relevant or not was never the core issue, so that alone wasn't the cause of his actions (btw, doesn't sound like much effort tbh). The relevance of ads is just a symptom of underlying cause.

It actually makes me feel good when I see irrelevant ads. Because it means the advertisers don't have a clue who I am so my measures work.

Not that I see many ads because I block them of course. I even use a pihole to filter all my android phone traffic and it's very effective against in-app ads on android. In most cases even the whole bar where the ads would have appeared is gone so the app uses the full screen space.

Newer builds of LineageOS support signature spoofing now, so no need for LineageOS4microg anymore. Just download the official microg APK.

You also get the benefit of weekly security updates over the rather irregular ones with LOS4microg.

If you use network locations, unfortunately that still requires LOS4microg or the microg installer for Magisk module.

What are "network locations" in this context?

I'm referring to the location based on wifi and lte information. This location is less accurate than GPS, but also much faster to acquire.

Usually, Google would determine this location based on its database of networks and there's no way to set another location provider without installing microg as a system app or patching Android.

The microg installer I mentioned [1] does this configuration so you can use microg as your network locations provider.

https://github.com/nift4/microg_installer_revived?tab=readme...

Irrelevant ads are better for my wallet (and for me) than seemingly relevant ads meant to exploit my weaknesses

Ad relevance is just an ad's ability to manipulate you.