I've blocked ads for so long that I can't remember the last time I saw one. However, if I had to have them, I think I could tolerate ads that were relevant to the content of the page.
If I'm reading an article about gardening, I could understand seeing an ad or two about gardening tools. It's what my mind is focused on, it's relevant, and it's even potentially something I might want to buy. This doesn't require FLoC, cookies, or any other form of tracking.
What I do not want to happen after reading my gardening article, is to be dogged relentlessly for days with ads for gardening tools on every website I visit, and in apps on my phone. It's creepy, it's irrelevant to what I'm currently focused on, and it's creating a negative impression in my mind about the businesses that are appearing in the ads.
If you're going to hold a gun to my head and force me to give you the contents of my wallet, you can at least be polite about it and say please and thank you.
If I have to be on the receiving end of non-consensual sex, I at least want the perpetrator to wear protection and be STD free.
The particular phenomena at play there is an early stage of Stockholm Syndrome/learned helplessness, and it isn't a good thing. It is also a byproduct of intentioned shaping of dialogue and expectation normalization that has been an ongoing effort by Big Tech for decades.
The thing is that I could actually see this working, because advertisers and publishers would have to incentivize people for turning the feature on. If it became widespread known that turning targeting on resulted in seeing relevant 10% discount ads a lot of people would give up privacy for that, probably for less.
You can see this behaviour in the success of browser extensions like Honey which are privacy nightmares to people like us, but totally acceptable to most people.
I think it's pretty simple. drusepth wants targeting on, so of course drusepth also wants default on. It is generally desirable for defaults to match what you want since it saves you effort to configure.
I am okay with targeted ads, and I know others are too. The other day, my Dad said he's happy that Amazon and Google are showing him the products he's been browsing for recently. They bought a mattress and are looking at buying another to replace the other beds.
I'd guess the majority of people don't hold a strong opinion on them one way or the other, and being default-on for more people results in more data that can be used to make ads more relevant for everyone (and likely improve adtech in general), instead of just relying on whatever subset of users actually know to opt in.
I don't understand why isn't this default already. Why do I need to install add-on for google not to track me? Shouldn't it be exactly opposite, install one to allow them to track me?
You do want Google to be able to continue paying $200K+ to fresh college grads, don't you? Or do you want them starving in the streets, you heartless barbarian?
ad targeting is good for economy and small businesses. Imagine all the wealth created by being able to show people ads they might be interested in seeing
It's not really great for small businesses to get their margin eaten by Google.
Without ads users wouldn't stop using small businesses products. They would just go looking for them in places that aren't as monetized. When they do, the small business will get to keep more of the margin.
Part of that was because I used to work for a website that was an ads publishing platform.
And I'm here to tell you: More accurate metrics don't actually generate any kind of wealth. What they do is allow ad buyers to push down the prices they have to offer to publishers for clicks or lower the overall numbers of impressions they are willing to buy, based on the targeting metrics they have for the publisher.
More precise, fine-grained targeting information = fewer and lower value spends to gain the same conversion rate value.
I mean I keep hearing how, as a consumer, I want this.