I think it's a matter of taking something too far.
As I've mentioned before, my personal Rubicon on all this was when an ad was running featuring me and my wife. One day I was on a completely unrelated site and saw THREE copies of myself on the page. It was jarring and while that ad ran, I realized how aggressively I was tracked everywhere I went on the web.
And then we learned that advertisers could target very small groups of voters and send them ads designed not to make them vote for one candidate or the other, but to make them decide not go to the polls at all, which was a major factor in deciding the 2016 election.
And then I came to realize that we surf the web with one, single, very limited human brain and arrayed against us trying to influence us are thousands of engineers and staff social scientists with some of the world's most powerful supercomputers at their disposal. And we learned that with all that power, they can predict with a high level of accuracy which political party you are likely support simply based on your click patterns, even when all content information is removed (i.e. just based on where and how quickly you click).
Or they can analyze smartphone usage meta data and know your Big Five personality type.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/30/17680When I add all that up, I feel like the level of advertising, the ability to track and follow me and the ability to micro-target ad copy to specific audiences has become toxic. It is a form of mental pollution in the same way as mercury in the water or NOX in the air.
It's not the principle so much as the extent and the asymmetric nature of the battle that troubles me. I think as a society, we accept a certain amount of NOX in the air. We debate how much, but we know the smog of 1970s LA was too much. We have 90% agreement on that now. I think the level of tracking and targeting is polluting our mental environment more to a level of the air pollution in LA prior to the Clean Air Act than to the level in that city today. Even today LA still has about 85 days a year when the air is unhealthy to sensitive groups, but the internet now has 365 days per year when the mental pollution levels are unhealthy to sensitive groups or worse ;-)
