[chillage]

This is off topic, I was responding to OP's statement that online ads are always useless

You may well find that any societal usefulness is offset by your own principles, whether that's privacy or aversion to tech or aversion to capitalism or aversion to marketing or aversion to small businesses or what have you. Can't argue with principles, and I won't try. The topic though is whether there is any societal usefulness or not.

[jjulius]

In a thread that is broadly about giving users the choice in how their personal data is tracked, analyzed, and utilized for the sake of ads, how is my comment off-topic? I mean, OP posited that perhaps we're better off without companies whose goods rely on targeted/invasive advertising, you provided the perspective of someone who might really rely on that sort of advertising, and I suggested that my right to privacy should not be superseded by someone's "need" (though I think "desire" would be more apt there) to get the word out about their product.

Privacy is incredibly useful to society, as is advertising I suppose, so I'm not quite sure how you can have a conversation about targeted advertising's societal usefulness without also talking about the impact it has to other things that are useful to society, eg privacy, that that advertising depends on.

[chillage]

Fair enough, it was relevant to the topic of the thread, albeit not my comment. Apologies

[gbear605]

Societal usefulness is not defined in a vacuum - it’s fundamentally based on the principles of everyone in the society. And judging by the people who chose not to share data with Facebook, society is better off without the targeted ads.