It’s absolutely working. About 50% of the population is susceptible to these ads
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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The oligarchs are benefiting from this system because they’re being open about creating a police state with a dictator and a fuedal system
A targeted ad consists of showing you what you just bought from the same exact website you just got it from.
Like, it's just a scam towards the businesses at this point and a waste of my time and bandwidth.
Amazon: I see you just bought one coat rack; would you like to start your coat rack collection with these other coat racks?
ICE is using Palantir data to target neighborhoods, which is purchased directly from "advertising" data brokers. So "advertising" is only part of the story. It's always been about creating a surveillance state, it's just not evenly distributed.
I don't think the websites all started thinking "I'll harvest data for the inevitable surveillance state"
Google actually started with great intentions and hoped to translate the data into revenue via "normal" ads
But... Dogy ass holes paid better than ads, and, like most companies, whenever they get successful/big enough, everything goes out the window in favour of profits
"Knowledge is power" is an expression at least hundreds of years old. Whether these data collectors were specifically thinking of adverts or not, they realised that this information had value, and so they collected it. I don't think we can know the true motivations of the data collectors and brokers, but we can know that there is (and always has been) a market for data.
Yeah exactly. Ultimately they became money machines, and they only exist to make more money now... Some will have willfully amoral motivations (Cambridge analytica, palantir) and others will just persue more money, regardless of the outcome of his they do it, I.E implicily amoral.
And don't forget to use cash, all those credit cards and payment apps are there to spy on you.
I mean, the rich are benefiting from all the ad spending which is all that matters! /s
People really need to remember that you're paying for the ads regardless of if you see them. The only people who lose out are those who show the ads and giving the amount of websites these days that are solely built around showing ads, I really have no sympathy for them.
The bigger question no-one seems to ask is, how much cheaper would products be if they weren't spending trillions on ads in the first place?
Depends on the product, a lot of things exist to be ad bate, and don’t really serve a wider purpose. Tshirts is an example that comes to mind where people just buy dozens of designs they never wear.
The whole premise has become shopping is the fun activity, the product is just the waste from that activity that needs to be discarded.
So I guess sans ads we would see a lot less arbitrary products (and places like Amazon would take a hit [yay])
I would be curious to know how e-commerce would change though as without ads people would likely gravitate to the big box stores
Why do so many advertisers think I own a dog? We have like a private, digital panopticon and they still serve me ads for dogfood for dogs I don't don't have.
I have to use facebook for work every few months. All sandboxed and shit. They seem to think I'm in the market for conceal carry yoga pants. Which I fine with, because that means they have no clue about my gender, hobbies, or political alignment.
I used to have a chrome extension that basically poisoned my data by clicking on every ad in the background while hiding the ads from me. I forgot what it was called. I don't use Chrome anymore.
It also benefitted the websites I visited by improving their click-thru while also hurting the advertisers by costing them money for ads that would never be effective.
I find it so funny how I use Spotify daily*, and the account is linked** to my google account that I use a lot, and in the past I made sure to downvote any ads that don’t fit my interests at all, so basically giving as much aminition to give some good targeted ads to me.
Turns out, after all that, I get rubbish collection ads, face mask ads and wastewater management ads, even though I have truly never thought about any of those nor have shown interest in them, AND I’ve shown tons of interest in only technology.
Asterisks
(*) - I use the iOS mobile app, so I can’t really block ads unfortunately, even though I’d love to :/
(**) - I made the google and Spotify accounts when I was in my early teens, so I didn’t really know or care about digital footprint or tracking, so if I was able to go back, I would’ve at the very least gotten multiple google accounts to sandbox my activities. But hey, better late than never I guess!
At one point, the advertising algorithm for Tinder decided what I needed in my life was a tractor. A massive, eleven tonne tractor intended for work on a large farm.
It probably wouldn't fit up my driveway.
I have a similar account for everything that I expect to have some form of tracking. Yet all of these services that are supposed to spy on me to find out exactly what I'm interested in have not once succeeded in targeted me with advertising for something I have any interest in getting. I've only seen them work for people who have Facebook or something that actively listens for things to make ads about, which I don't have.
i think advertising purposes are just a front. They use it for something, but ads is just an afterthought/excuse for public.
They were the seed that started the surveillance machine, but you're completely right nowadays the real ""value"" is elsewhere
I mean microtargetting the ads would mean they'd get less ad revenue. I think the big ones are
A) they use the data to evaluate markets and target new markets.
B) they sell it to police/intelligence agencies to fluff up their sales with bigger data numbers even though some of the data is "likes popcorn" and "bought a spoon off amazon"
C) corporate espionage type stuff, you collect info on a lot of people but then ID your main competitors or detractors to read their chat logs.
I think it was proctor gamble that zeroed out their $200 million yearly adtech spend and saw zero impact to their sales from it. There's a good possibility we're making everything terrible just so that Zuckerberg and friends can keep getting richer to nobody else's actual benefit.
Yeah, I dare say there's companies that benefit from it, but P&G is one of those companies that exist purely on creatures of habit buying the same big branded boxes every month, because they haven't fallen quite far enough in life to consider supermarket-brand products.
In much the same way as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, no clueless husband ever got told off for bringing home P&G branded fanny pads.
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