I came over this one today: https://signal.org/blog/the-instagram-ads-you-will-never-see/
Screendump from the link presented
To be short: they tried putting ads out on Facebook-owned Instagram, giving people personally tailored ads highlighting how much data Facebook have on their users (with the intent that users should use Signal rather than Facebook for communication purposes).
Now, that's a cheeky, clever idea ... but of course, Facebook would have none of it, so the account used for creating the ad campaign was deactivated rather quickly.
One of the things highlighted in the post is that the current social network business model (well, Google business model as well) probably wouldn't survive transparency. People would probably be quite concerned if they knew how much data the tech giants have on us.
I'm curious how much they know about me. I'm still a bit happy every time I see that Google knows less than me about myself. For instance, if I buy a moisture meter, they seem to think that I need more of it, so right now I'm getting a lot of ads about moisture meters. Including ads for exactly the same model as I bought, from exactly the same shop. Actually, I have done a purchase recently due to internet ads - I bought some teak caulking glue from the marine supplier Watski, that resulted in ads from Watski showing me specialized tools for doing the caulking, one of them for removing old caulk. I bought it and will give a review of it here as soon as it stops raining :-)
I've considered that I should delete all my cookies from time to time, or perhaps block everything related to google/facebook ads in the firewall - but it's fairly far down on my list of priorities, and I'm concerned I would be logged out of quite some sites I've forgotten the password for if I delete all my cookies. And anyway I believe they use other indicators than only cookies to track me.
What do you think of all this? Please use the comments section below :-)