[manigandham]

Most ads are not that targeted. That's a fallacy that seems to come up on HN but the reality is that most ads you see are generic large buys across very wide populations. Targeting costs more and the increased acquisition costs don't always pay off for every product. Also most ad systems will always fallback to show you an ad no matter how lacking the targeting is, because a filled ad slot is better than an empty one.

[mikeash]

It doesn’t much matter to me whether it’s badly targeted or untargeted. At the end of the day the result is the same: they pour all this effort into abusive tracking and then it doesn’t even achieve the result that’s supposed to be the reason they do it.

[manigandham]

It doesn't achieve it because it's not used. They cant control what advertisers do with their campaigns.