Personalized ad targeting and personalized pricing are both predicated on mass surveillance and then leveraging that for manipulation. Both sides of that toxic combination are compounded in significance due to severe two-way centralization of those markets.

The result is leverage pervasively used to select information competitive with customer value. And also used to drain margins from ad buyers and all upstream economic input.

People complain endlessly about the downside to surveillance and personalized manipulation, but don't seem to have an appetite for more than that.

I view the centralization, surveillance and manipulation as all ethical problems, because they all involve negative externalities (weaponizing unpermissioned or dark-permissioned information, manipulating people based on their past behaviors and characteristics, and bleeding product providers).

Scalable ethical problems that pay, are not resolved by any means that don't resolve the ethics with economics. I.e. law or hard regulation, backed up by considerable fines ensuring risk-reward losses for perpetrators, and criminal charges for serious or repeat offenders.

Given the tremendous centralization and privacy violations, the problem is orders of magnitude worse than normal price fixing.