Well said. I'm also perplexed and frustrated by all the ad-tech apologists I'm hearing lately both here and IRL. There's the soft "no alternatives!" version where ads and enshittification are some kind of obviously necessary force of nature that we should expect and just have to deal with, and the more extreme stance that it's actively good for us somehow.
Anyway like many other humans on the internet, I've been tracked for decades now and somehow the junk thrust on me is still not even close to relevant for my demographic, and it's usually like they don't even know my gender or age group within 20 years. Except of course surely FANG have figured that out, so are they just routinely defrauding people that buy "targeted" ads and throwing them at any random eyeballs they have access to? It sounds paranoid to think that a crime on that scale would exist since it seems hard to pull off or keep quiet, so I guess we just keep listening to self-reported statistics that every dollar spent on ads wins $8 in sales. But.. I'm glad it's not my dollar
Anyway like many other humans on the internet, I've been tracked for decades now and somehow the junk thrust on me is still not even close to relevant for my demographic, and it's usually like they don't even know my gender or age group within 20 years. Except of course surely FANG have figured that out, so are they just routinely defrauding people that buy "targeted" ads and throwing them at any random eyeballs they have access to? It sounds paranoid to think that a crime on that scale would exist since it seems hard to pull off or keep quiet, so I guess we just keep listening to self-reported statistics that every dollar spent on ads wins $8 in sales. But.. I'm glad it's not my dollar