There is a form of advertising that doesn't invade your privacy and doesn't need metrics. It is called "context sensitive" advertising.
This is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising related to pets. It's reasonable to assume you have an interest in pets; otherwise, you probably wouldn't be there. No metrics required.
"Personalized advertising" is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising for automobiles because you did some searching 3 weeks ago. What the "metrics" don't tell the advertiser is that he is wasting your time and his money because you already bought a car last week.
"Personalized advertising" is just plain dumb. It is a way to waste your time and advertiser's money with a false sense of confidence that this is not the case.
This explains why more than half the users on the internet are now taking active measures to block this annoying stupidity. And Google is actively trying to counter this trend.
The only question left to answer is at what point will advertisers wake up and smell the coffee and realize a different, more privacy respecting approach might be just as effective for the same or maybe even less money?
Personalized advertisements exist because all-sites exist.
Facebook isn’t a pets/cars/vexillology site, it’s an all-site; it and its kin are designed to contain almost all of humanity’s interests. It stands to reason that all manner of ads would fit in there, and in order to make these ads useful you need to filter or target them. If you see the history of targeted advertising, a case could be made that Facebook invented it as we know it today. No diss meant to Google and Googlers that might read this, I’m sure they played a big role as well.
All-sites still have a context in which their ads appear. You are looking at some content on their site, so thy can advertise in the context of that content.
Personalized advertising has one key property that is very useful to this generation of Internet companies: it moves the ad dollars away from websites selling ads (aka "publishers") and to the networks (Google/Facebook).
If you're, say, the NYT, you can sell ads, of course. But anyone who wants to buy ads on NYT can instead buy ads on other websites that only target NYT readers. Which are much cheaper.
This is why news organizations all went paywall a decade ago. When you had to buy ads on a website to advertise to that website's audience, news was rolling in money. That's why they gave everything away for free, it'd be really dumb not to. But then Google and Facebook pirated[0] their audience, meaning all that free website traffic from the search engines is completely meaningless and provides no revenue.
[0] Piracy as in "stole our lunch money", not piracy as in copyright infringement. We're making a moral judgment, not a legal one.
Are they? According to whom and compared to what --- the ad networks themselves? They control everything about this game.
It's possible for someone with deep pockets to build an ad network that operates in a similar manner and offers pretty much everything Google and Facebook do minus the privacy invasion crap.
The only essential difference being how the ads are targeted. Instead of targeting individuals, the web content they are looking at would become the target --- based on the blatantly obvious "metric" that the individual must have at least some interest in what they're looking at.
This should actually be easier/cheaper to implement and maintain (no personalized metrics) and thus the ads should be less expensive. The main reason this doesn't exist in a more popular form --- Google/Facebook have sold advertisers a big load of their own marketing hype and used this to effectively monopolize the market.
This is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising related to pets. It's reasonable to assume you have an interest in pets; otherwise, you probably wouldn't be there. No metrics required.
"Personalized advertising" is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising for automobiles because you did some searching 3 weeks ago. What the "metrics" don't tell the advertiser is that he is wasting your time and his money because you already bought a car last week.
"Personalized advertising" is just plain dumb. It is a way to waste your time and advertiser's money with a false sense of confidence that this is not the case.
This explains why more than half the users on the internet are now taking active measures to block this annoying stupidity. And Google is actively trying to counter this trend.
The only question left to answer is at what point will advertisers wake up and smell the coffee and realize a different, more privacy respecting approach might be just as effective for the same or maybe even less money?