Euro privacy watchdog calls for end of targeted advertising
I have the impression that google claims that personalized advertising somehow benefits users. I think I saw this kind of claims in some of their campaigns or somewhere. But is this really the case?Well I can see how personalized ads benefit advertisers. But users? I mean at first, it seems like it make sense because personalized ads are based on what I'm interested in. But more I think about it, I'm not really sure if it is actually beneficial to me.For example, if I want to buy a hard drive, the ads don't tell me what kinds of hard drives there are and what the pros and cons of each of them are. The ads are just what an arbitrary company X wants me to think of their product in order to change my behavior. They are rarely actually informative. Can someone give me an example why personalized ads are beneficial to users compared to non-personalized ads or no ads at all?Edit: I'm afraid I haven't elaborated enough. I'm not saying that non-personalized ads are better than personalized ads. I just think they don't add much informational value. If I want to buy something, information access is so trivial these days that I can easily look for products myself, and the information I find will likely be a lot more helpful than ads. So what I'm trying to say is that personalized and non-personalized ads don't look a lot different in terms of benefits they bring to the viewer.