No, these are not the same and oughtn't be conflated. I'm perfectly happy seeing ads that aren't targeted to me personally based on my browsing history.
Ads on, say, Stack Overflow or HN or whatever, that target nerds ("great hosting!", "3d printing tech!", "legos!") would be perfectly doable without tracking each of us personally.
It's interesting to think about how these sorts of niche sites which have a narrow enough demographic to have valuable ad space are more or less being entirely eaten alive by networks with incredibly wide demographics. The centralized networks have to resort to building a panopticon to replicate segmenting which used to be natural at the network layer and the niche sites have to resort to playing along because of how powerful that panopticon is.
