Comment by Intralexical

Stalking is bad. Lying and manipulating is bad.

If you look at old ads for random products from e.g. the turn of the (last) century, they seem to often give this slight "wall of text" impression. Image of the product, surrounded by prices and descriptions of what it was and what it (purportedly) did. The motivating belief seemed to be that if a company communicated the benefits of buying from them, they would attract customers.

It seems like at some point the focus shifted away from expressing factual information, and to creating vague associations and implications. I think that's still fine on its own, and in fact quite fun and the source of a lot of creativity, but it also created the opportunity to mislead in new ways. E.G. most famously harmfully maybe, the very mid-20th century idea that cigarettes are "cool". In modern times this seems to have gone even further towards exploiting basic quirks in human psychology— A dancing bear, chocolate man, or screaming celebrity has nothing to do with selling a product, but it's bizarre and surprising and therefore memorable, so by making an ad around it you're cluttering the viewer's brain with useless information designed to redirect mindshare to your capital-B "Brand".

So at that point it becomes dishonest and manipulative. But at least it's still broadcasted, e.g. on radio, TV, in newspapers and magazines. It's predatory, but everyone gets the same thing. You can still sorta avoid or ignore it. It doesn't single anyone out.

That's changed now with the Internet. The mass collection of location and personality data, identifiable to individual profiles and paired with tools allowing those individuals to be targetted with a combination of terrifying granularity and omnipresent scale— That adds an entire new dimension to "advertising", and it would still be wrong, because it would still comprise many violations of privacy and basic decency, even if it weren't being actively exploited for commercial gain. If any one individual knew as much about you and had as many tools for trying to influence you as Facebook and Google have built on an industrial scale, they would be either a stalker deserving of a restraining order, or some kind of a (probably malevolent TBH) supernatural spirit.

So "advertising", in terms of "informing the market of a product" and "connecting customers to businesses in mutually beneficial transactions", is fine I guess. Good, even. Stalking, lying, manipulating, and rent-seeking through dominance are wrong.

And with technology centralizing power in the hands of a few organizations, the modern practice of "advertising" seems to be less about "informing people" these days and more about dominating the information space in order to manipulate human behaviour with neither the consent nor the knowledge of your targets. No wonder it's apparently being abused by law enforcement.

...To be clear, I use the word "you" only as an indefinite pronoun here. Small businesses that use ad networks aren't the ones to blame for a large system having messy incentives and malicious central actors.