I agree those are bad, but those don't seem to be unique to user targeting? You would have the same thing with contextual ads (since what page someone is on is still pretty correlated with generic demographics like "is a kid" or "is a radicalized individual")
The insanely annoying thing that I have seen for a long time is that despite the fact that you have more information on me than anyone else the ads have been either useless or even insulting for years.
I remember bothering to click through the microscopic x in tve corner and select not relevant or something on Thai mail order brides. What did I get next? Filipino mail orders brides. Out of curiosity I marked a number of them as not relevant and I think I also saw:
- Polish
- Ukrainian
- Chinese
- and possibly a couple of more nationalities
- later I got ads for older women near me
- and then gay cruises
This went on for years.
Last year I finally started seing ads for electronics etc but now I feel no remorse for blocking ads anymore.
I'm just fed up.
Meanwhile Facebook, for all their faults and despite me blocking them for far longer than Google actually has had interesting ads.
Edit: I've nothing against Filipino or Thais or gay people or anyone, but I have something against scantily clad women etc showing up on my monitor both at work and at home and I think it says something about Google that they think this was the most relevant ads they could show me for years.
That gets tricky. But at the least it would help me not see radicalized ads when I am generally searching. And that doesn't mean ads based on my search either.
Yes it doesn't drive as much engagement, but that's the point. Over-optimizing for engagement is a bad thing. We have seen repeated evidence of this.
There should be general overarching categories: News site, food site, movie site, game site. But not "news site for radical right-wingers who believe in tucker carlson and think gun control is communism" which doesn't really require user tracking, but I think still falls on the bad side of things.
"Is a kid" is interesting. There's literally laws to prevent children from receiving too much advertising on TV _for good reasons_ their brains aren't developed enough to counter it. But on the internet? ANYTHING GOES!
