Personalised ads are beside the point. The issue is how they are personalised, namely by building a rich profile of user behaviour based on non-consensual tracking.
It isnt even clear that there's a meaningful sense of 'consent' to what modern ad companies (ie., google, facebook, amazon, increasingly microsoft, etc.) do. There is both an individual harm, but a massive collective arm, to the infrastructure of behavioural tracking that has been built by these companies.
This infrastructure should be, largely, illegal. The technology to end any form of privacy is presently deployed only for ads, but should not be deployed anywhere at all.
Could there be an issue in the future? Possibly. Are privacy laws like GDPR worth the economic and other harms? Probably not. The amount of wasted programmer hours alone has far overcome the negative impacts of big tech ad tracking.
Neither real life or the internet are anonymous. We live with other people. But Google and Meta in particular have an amazing 15 year track record of basically never leaking user data. Various national governments have been much worse in this regard.
Government risk from Meta and Google is meaningless in any case. The ISPs have all the same data and regularly share it with the government in response to warrants.
Also all the data is out there on me and you in a million databases. Just like in the 80s with the yellow books. Did you know you can buy a list of most Americans with an estimated credit score and income and other details? This is 50 year old tech.
On the other side, digital ads have a huge impact on the economy (Google and FB being some of the biggest companies in the world) because they provide a service of matching businesses with consumers interested in products. Targeted ads means they are much more enjoyable and effective at matching consumers to products they like. I've worked with dozens of small businesses that used targeted ads to survive and thrive.
It's not a good trade-off for the EU to ban targeted ads, in short.
One of the first results of a Google search: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3555102
> Also all the data is out there and me and my family in a million databases. Just like in the 80s with the yellow books. Did you know you can buy a list of almost every American with an estimate credit score and income and other details? This is 50 year old tech.
While one could argue that this is "old tech", the main issue is reach.
Back in the 80s, there could be a way to contact someone and make an educated guess, using their credit score, as of what kind of products they may be inclined to buy.
Nowadays, these databases may include data about diet, job situation, alcohol intake, or family issues, because those educated guesses are made upon information about your searches, your Facebook group memberships, your postings, etc.
You also seem to be making the argument that, since either this data is already out in the wild, or other companies may have access to it, why target big tech specifically?
And the counter to this couldn't be simpler: two wrongs don't make anything right.
Per your specific harm:
Thank you for actually responding with a real potential harm, the first time ever in 10 years of posting similar comments on HN!
Weight loss ads (along with teeth whitening ads) are much more common with non-targeted ads, by the way. When ad targeting is bad, the only profitable ads are low hanging fruit that applies to as many people as possible.
That said, I would totally support regulating weight loss ads to only things that are proven to work though. I think other categories like gambling are also under regulated.
And beyond that, of course there is potential for harm if data is collected for targeted ads. It might be increasing the price of your flight because you've been looking at the target country several times in the past weeks. It might be canceling your insurance because you googled for headache medicine. Or it might be marking you as a person to be deported into a "reeducation camp" because of your heritage or religion thanks to data that was involuntarily collection about you (originally without evil intent, even). Most of these already happened in reality.