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.
> We use the combination of your Facebook and LinkedIn data plus your About Me and Photos to ensure we are building a balanced, high-achieving and diverse community. Our screening algorithm looks at indicators like social influence, education, profession, industry, friends in The League, number of referrals you've made to your network, as well as supplemental data like what groups you belong to, events you've attended, interests you list, and preferences.
Absolutely terrifying.
I'm fairly certain that if a person is highly active on social media such a system could produce a better diagnosis than most people get when they see a professional, if only because the quality of psychodiagnosis is poor since it is often seen as a scam to satisfy insurance bureaucrats, common conditions are never diagnosed, there are fads for certain rare conditions, etc.
1. "could" produce a better diagnosis. Not guaranteed. And better than what? How likely is it to really deliver a better result than appropriately trained specialists? 2. "scam to satisfy insurance bureaucrats". And you doing it digitally won't find its way to unintended recipients?
The undercurrent of this thread - and the original post - is growing awareness of the dystopian disaster that has grown out of "free" social media. So it's not surprising - to me, at any rate - that the general sentiment here is to be suspicious of any adjacent use.