[est31]

Yup. It's their business model. The "users want relevant ads" is just a convenient lie that they can tell... with much less data you can do ads that are still highly relevant. But maybe you can't sell them any more, and maybe that's where Facebook is making a lot of money from. Of course, officially they claim to be not in the selling business, but that's a lie. They happily rent out their ad space to people who use the ads to collect those data.

[throwaway123mmm]

It's not a lie. You have to understand that the majority does not think like you and actually appreciates targetted ads (me included).

[asdff]

>the majority I really wonder if that is the case. Here are some numbers from popular adblockers on the chrome extension store:

"Adblocker for Chrome - NoAds" - 6,545,443 users "AdGuard AdBlocker" - 5,611,340 users "Adblocker Genesis Plus" - 236,373 users "Fair AdBlocker" - 1,922,094 users "Adblock Plus - free ad blocker" - 10,000,000+ users (Google stopped counting, apparently, but their page description boasts over 500m users) "Ublock origin" - 10,000,000+ users

These are all huge numbers of people who are going out of their way to install software to never see an ad on the internet. There are probably many more people who share the same disdain for ads but don't know about adblockers, and there is likely a chunk of users who might not care very much either way.

I think it's safe to say that the proportion of people who genuinely appreciate targeted advertising on the internet is pretty small.