As much as I hate to defend adtech, I think it's unfair to generalize a whole industry.
A company I worked for was more in the business of improving targeting. Of course people will argue if targeting demographics is bad per se, or better or worse than other parts, but I personally don't care if I get generic ads or ones tailored to me. So for one of our main product, we were reselling and integrating some data for a bigger player, as in, we were 1 of many data points determining if the ad would be interesting for the person who would see the ad or if they'd give them another one.
Yes, it kind of gets into this angle of privacy and user tracking... but I'm ok with the scope we did it in and I thought hard about if I can accept this without a guilty conscience - but for example I'd never knowingly work on trying to bombard the user with even more ads, or popups, or whatever - but just saying "ads shouldn't exist" is maybe aspirational but sadly I don't see it as a valid version of reality in the foreseeable future.
A company I worked for was more in the business of improving targeting. Of course people will argue if targeting demographics is bad per se, or better or worse than other parts, but I personally don't care if I get generic ads or ones tailored to me. So for one of our main product, we were reselling and integrating some data for a bigger player, as in, we were 1 of many data points determining if the ad would be interesting for the person who would see the ad or if they'd give them another one.
Yes, it kind of gets into this angle of privacy and user tracking... but I'm ok with the scope we did it in and I thought hard about if I can accept this without a guilty conscience - but for example I'd never knowingly work on trying to bombard the user with even more ads, or popups, or whatever - but just saying "ads shouldn't exist" is maybe aspirational but sadly I don't see it as a valid version of reality in the foreseeable future.