Any ad provider that is going to serve up scams to anyone is an ad provider I don’t trust. Giving more information to an untrustworthy company seems like a losing plan. Those more target ads also mean more effective manipulation to get people to buy things they likely don’t need.

That's why you block ALL ads. Starve the beast. If an app has ads, I do not use it, end of story.

> When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots.

I have looked what interests for example Google stores about me

> http://google.com/ads/preferences

I am very certain that these don't describe me well, or I am classified wrong in some categories (without using any tracking/privacy protection! But I won't actively correct this misclassification).

My experience is rather that some people have very niche interests (among hacker-minded people, the proportion of these people is in my experience much higher than in the general population), and are hard to target using ads, so advertising networks and companies don't make the effort to target these users.

Also, when I google about prices for some product category, I often have other reasons than a buying wish. For example I recently googled about the prices of products in some category because some work colleague claimed that someone else bought a product of a specific vendor for a specific price, but I really felt that the claimed price was off; to substantiate my claims, I did some googling.

Or I google about products in a specific category because I am exactly not satisfied with what some established players that love to advertise have to offer.

I consider even "legitimate" ads scams. My products are more expensive (the marketing budget doesn't fall out of the sky, after all), and I am rewarded by being forced to view extremely annoying content in my day-to-day life? As a consumer, that sounds like a horrible deal to me!

On top of that, most ads provide no value whatsoever. Take the classic Coca-Cola vs Pepsi: they are fishing from the same pool so ads are primarily going to steal customers away from the other brand. Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing, so the ads are a net negative for society.

There is also of course advertising in order to inform your potential market that your product exists at all. But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already? And if two products seem to have the same features for the same price, the one which isn't heavily advertised is probably the better choice: it is likely already more popular for a reason, and there's a decent possibility that the money they aren't spending on advertising is going towards useful things like quality and customer support.

I completely understand why companies in a heavily capitalist society are spending money on ads, but you can't convince me that the world wouldn't be a more pleasant place without them.

This sounds brilliant, makes too much sense, and suggests a new kind of ad blocker to escalate and reflect retribution back.

Unrelated: Once upon a time it was believed ads should pair with content, not with users. It's been proven to still be more effective. Problem (for advertisers) is reach vs. cost of producing ads that content-align. In any case, Apple has enough reach they could easily bring ad sales in-house. Plenty TV shows, the show owner retains rights to ad slots partly to ensure no brand damage to show and partly to make more money per slot.

In my case I was kinda OK with Google ads until around 2010 and IIRC only began blocking them actively after they had been feeding me trash ads for years.

Maybe you are right in most cases and I was the victim of a fluke.

But from what I have seen from Google after that I don't think so.

Facebook however, a company I disliked then and dislike now are scary good with their ads and have often been even even when I actively tried to avoid them.

All this to say that your theory sounds interesting but I am convinced it is far from the whole story.

Alternative POV: the better they profile, you the better they can slip the scams past your defenses

Why would a less legitimate company not pay more money to give you a worse deal with better margins? The intuitive dynamics to me would be that any way to trick consumers will be applied, and the bulk of the resulting spread will be captured by the ad companies via their auction systems. So we all get worse products with worse deals, and the difference goes into spying on people and convincing them to become more consumptive, i.e. to turn them into worse versions of themselves.

Never allow ads in your life. They're malicious in every way.

Having a strong profile makes one vulnerable to more convincing scams, which is much more dangerous.

I'm pretty sure the only ad that would work on me would be an ad for an indie game, but indie game developers don't buy ads, they buy blue checkmarks on twitter then they try to game the algorithm. Even if I did see an ad for an indie game, I would probably not click on it, but just google its name instead.

What I mean to say is that there is a type of person that will never click on an ad, even if they want to buy the product. Worse yet, most of the time I do click on an ad, it's a misclick.

But I don't see this as a failure of the ad industry. I just think I'm the edge case.

In theory user behavior to serve you ads you want to see for stuff you might be interested in is a feature. The problem comes because the same technology to power that can also power the—much more lucrative—industry of serving ads that are optimally designed to fry your brain and scam you. And then on top of that, it creates a business incentive for you to use a lot of psychological tricks and dark patterns to foster increasingly addictive and anti-social behavior to keep people stuck in a feedback loop of doomscrolling.

Such a terrible take...