And as the Sinclair adage goes, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
There are plenty of people online playing devil's advocate because one day they too could be rich and they don't want the harsh yoke of government regulation holding them back.
On HN, part of the audience is in closer proximity to that kind of wealth, and their arguments in favour of that status quo reflect this.
As a general best practice, if you are convinced something is true, ask yourself "what evidence would someone have to show me to convince me this is not true" - if you can't think of something, there's a problem.
1. targeted ad buys are mostly a scam. Research shows that they are barely more effective than old-fashioned contextual ads.
2. Contextual ads, aka "dumb" ads, the kind that show ads based on the content they are displayed with, are fine.
3. adtech companies depend on advertisers not understanding (1) and publishers chasing dollars by signing up with ad targeting networks.
The ones that are actually making money are the ad networks, and it is in their interest to spread FUD about (1) and not offer (2), as they make their money as a percentage of every ad sale (auction) transaction, and the CPM is higher on targeted ads because of ignorance of (1)
Actually, the view that they have to either do unethical things like tracking or perish is one of the greatest fallacies and a sign of lazy thinking.
Almost everyone wants privacy limits, they just don't agree on the current measures (or their previous ones, or the ones before that, or doubling down on continued failed policy approaches in the future).
