[fenwick67]

IMO advertising systems that have this intimate of knowledge about you are immoral because they undermine a consumer's agency well beyond traditional demographic-level or local advertising.

Google didn't just look at the fact that you were searching for tents online to serve you that ad. They looked at how old you are, what time of day you are most susceptible to clicking on ads, who your friends are and what they like, your address, your preferred colors and letters... It's possible that they figured out you just broke up with your SO and use shopping as a coping skill, so it was time to pull out the big guns. Google probably doesn't even understand exactly why they served that to you. And that's a problem.

> Doesn't sound too unethical to me especially because it is all one big opt-in.

Google serves me ads and tracks my behavior even if I never use a Google product. And there's no way for a user to decide whether or not they're okay with this on the web at large (unless you install an ad blocker). That doesn't sound opt-in to me.

[soared]

> Google didn't just look at the fact that you were searching for tents online to serve you that ad. They looked at how old you are, what time of day you are most susceptible to clicking on ads, who your friends are and what they like, your address, your preferred colors and letters... It's possible that they figured out you just broke up with your SO and use shopping as a coping skill, so it was time to pull out the big guns. Google probably doesn't even understand exactly why they served that to you. And that's a problem.

These things are not true. Your point is true, but google doesn't do things like look at your specific address, preferred colors, etc. You can't be mad at them when you don't really know what they do, and embellish what actually happens.

> Google serves me ads and tracks my behavior even if I never use a Google product

You can opt out of all behavior based advertiser very easily: http://optout.networkadvertising.org and http://optout.aboutads.info/#!/

[fenwick67]

> google doesn't do things like look at your specific address, preferred colors, etc

Who are you to say they don't try and figure out your favorite color based on all of their input data? If Google shared exactly how their secret sauce advertising algorithms work, they'd be out of business.

> You can opt out of all behavior based advertiser very easily: http://optout.networkadvertising.org and http://optout.aboutads.info/#!/

If these companies wanted to respect users' wishes in a frictionless way, they'd just look at my DNT header. This is bread and circus.

[ovao]

Is trying to derive a person’s preferences from tangentially-related data immoral, or does it only become immoral when it’s done in an attempt to sell a product?

[fenwick67]

Deriving preferences is not inherently bad. It's immoral to undermine people's will for profit. This is the same reason the gambling industry is immoral, and making manipulative free-to-play mobile games is immoral. You're basically hacking people's subconscious for your own gain at their loss.

[soared]

DNT headers broke when microsoft decided to enable it by default, so they became meaningless.