[marketforlemmas]

I don't think the issue is whether ads should prompt them to lose weight, or they shouldn't. I think the crux of the issue is that we (humans) are ceding this judgment (which have political and societal ramifications) to the ad matching algorithm. Some people (myself included) find that bothersome.

Of course not every example of a targeted ad is going to be controversial (like advertising merchandise of a sports team that I like versus the one that is just popular in my area) but its problematic that we don't have any sort of machinery in place to control/modify the examples that are politically/societally important.

At least if that machinery were in place, then we could transfer the agency of decisions to the humans that run google, rather than the algorithms that are just running in the background.