I came here to say this. I don't think that advertising is inherently unethical, but profit makes unethical behavior in advertising inevitable. The article talks about the scenario where I have a product that I think people will want but don't know about, so I'm giving them information about it. Win/win/win -- the site gets some money for the work they put into the content that they care about, I get (net positive) money from my customer, the customer gets a product that they wanted anyway, and access to the site they were interested in reading. But it's almost always more like I have some money and want more, and it's much more profitable to use shady means to manipulate people who don't really want my product that they do, so I will pay site owners to facilitate the manipulation, both by giving me user data and optimizing for their attention instead of the content that they care about (more manipulation), and the user/customer loses many times over, because they have a product that they didn't want, paid more for it than it was worth, had degraded browsing experience of the content they were interested in, and have sacrificed privacy in the process.
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