[jraph]

Actually, I seem to remember that these ads were contextual at first, not related to any profile they would have built for you but only related to the content of the page.

Which is entirely different. Ads are still manipulative (by design), but at least purely contextual ads don't track you.

[exporectomy]

Oh that's right. With gmail, people assumed they would be based on your email contents but sure if Google actually ever did that.

[jraph]

They did. They actually stopped not long ago (2017): https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-email...