You're arguing with a straw man. I never said ads don't influence behaviour. Obviously they do. My point is they don't exert the kind of scary mind control power that some people like to pretend they do - adverts increase sales, but so does having a shop window with your goods on display, so does putting your products in specialised parts catalogues, whatever. There are lots of things you can do to increase sales and which can count as marketing of some kind.

My point is to claim poor people are exploited by advertising is nuts. It's the other way around. Advertising is why poor people can have exactly the same gmail account with all the same features as a rich guy can. Nuke advertising and you evict poor people into a ghetto web. These people at Mozilla don't seem to be thinking these things through at all and that's a problem ..... there was a time that I had a lot of technical respect for Mozilla and Firefox, but it seems every time I read about the projects these days they're doing something that I find to be kind of dumb.