If there are people who are (a) ok with personalized ads, providing they can be done sufficiently privately and (b) do not like FLoC, then I'd love to read what they have to say!
(Still speaking only for myself.)
I doubt many people object to ad networks and real time bidding; it's just that the user's personal information shouldn't be exposed in the process. Yes, that means the only signals you'd get are the current page, and maybe high-level OS/browser/device info.
(a) ok with personalized ads, providing they can be done sufficiently privately
My opinion, which I think is fairly common around here, is that what you're describing is fundamentally impossible. Much like the incessant government demands for encryption backdoors that don't compromise security.
> what you're describing is fundamentally impossible
I guess the question is what you would consider to be sufficiently private? For example, would it be sufficient for the advertiser to be completely unable to distinguish you from a sufficiently large group of people with similar behavior?
Why shouldn't personalized ads exist?
> advertisers would make just as much money without it if it were illegal
It depends very much on the advertiser. Advertisers with broad interest or close matches to specific publication types, sure, but that's not everyone. One way to think of this would be to imagine a world in which advertisers couldn't even choose where their ad appeared -- they would make less money then, without the ability to target contextually, right? There are many valuable transactions that only happen because the right information is given to the right person, and the less well-targeted ads are the more of those you lose.
The story is even worse for publishers. There are major kinds of publishing with negligible commercial tie-in. Historically, the expense of producing a newspaper or magazine meant that you were never holding a single article, and it could be treated essentially as one unit for advertising purposes. But now it is very common for articles to be shared in isolation, which means this cross-subsidy disappears.
