zlacker

Problem is not the "personalized advertising" alone, it is more dangerous when also combined with "bidding". When those two combined, you are most likely to see ads with bigger profit margins than small profit margins.

Let's say you are looking for a notebook, you are assigned to "notebook seeking" cohort. You will see "notebook ads". But the ads you will see will be the ones most profitable for your cohort.

For simplicity, let's say cohort is 100 people; if there is a one person in this cohort that is the target of an overpriced, low quality, drop shipped product, with huge margin, rest of the 99 people will be bombarded with that ad.