> where massive dossiers are built on you automatically and you're tracked all over the internet by ad companies
...that still utterly fail to provide relevant ads. This is my pet peeve - I periodically disable adblocker and - suprise, no surprise - 100% of ads I see are irrelevant to me. I can even see how they're trying to target me, but they're totally missing what I really want or interested in. "Personalized" news feeds are sensationalist click-bait crapfests with accidentally useful local news (just by the virtue of local news being more relevant, in general). Book recommendations only work in "more from the same author I've read and liked" category. Summing it up, those massive dossiers aren't seem to be worth shit.
Either the industry needs to drastically ramp up their models' complexity (and maybe something will start to happen - although I wonder about the economy of this) or maybe someday they will have to admit all those profile data hoards were the new tulips.
The Internets of old at least hadn't pretended that ads were "useful" or "relevant". There typically was no positive quality to them, except for honest "this shit brings site owner (or host) some money".
