Unfortunately, the United Corporations of America loves milking kids for money because they hope and bank on kids annoying the shit out of their parents to spend money on whatever is being marketed towards them
Seriously, I'd rather just ban overt advertisement. Labels on buildings and stylings? Sure, what ever, peacock your actual location all you want. Have tons of info and material available for people? Definitely. Have catalogs for people to look through where you layout your stuff and make it look nice? Sure. Search engines? Duh. But straight up ads? Nah. Such a waste of time. Let peoples' interest drive the views again.
The most basic argument for ads that I've heard is that they can inform consumers of options they would not otherwise be aware of. Not unreasonable, competition can only exist if people are aware that alternatives exist.
But that's not how ads are used or the psychology and research put behind them. And the modern incarnation of capitalism as infintiely growing profits above literally all else puts too much skin in the game for companies to make "purely informative" ads. Ugh. Fuck ads.
Not to defend Meta, but monetizing doesn't imply selling. Factories monetize their equipment, for example, but they don't sell it if they want to stay in business.
My guy, what do you think an ad network uses people's data for? This is not even a hypothetical situation. They will absolutely sell anything they can to some dogshit corporation, for targeted adverts
Sure. I'm just taking issue with the ridiculously common claim that advertising companies sell your data. It's false and doesn't even make sense.
It also matters because I'd much rather a few big companies have my data than a bunch of Russian and Chinese data brokers. Even if you think they're no worse individually, there are a lot more of them.