> The person being advertised to rarely (if ever) benefits.

Instagram has gotten so good at targeting me that I probably click on at least 1/2 the ads because I find them interesting. I've purchased things because of those clicks too, and have enjoyed the purchases. Things I would have never known about were it not for the ads.

I benefit if Youtube shows me advertisements for desk chairs and lathes instead of beauty products and kids toys. Targeted advertisements help me discover new products and product categories, while untargeted advertising just wastes my time. This is in essence no different than companies buying advertising time in specific TV shows with a known audience.

Of course the abuses are also plentiful and dangerous. We probably do need a lot of regulation. But in general targeted advertisement is a useful thing to have.

The equivalent of buying advertising time in specific TV shows with a known audience is... buying adverts on specific Youtube channels with a known audience. Funnily, a lot of Youtubers now perform advertising of this sort - I'm sure you've seen the VPN ads.

This, like TV, doesn't require tracking of individual people who haven't consented to such.

> This, like TV, doesn't require tracking of individual people who haven't consented to such.

That's a stretch. How do you think they determine any information about the "known" audience? Obviously, they do all sorts of research to determine more about the audiences watching certain shows and channels, likely by sifting through social media, show reviews (IMDB, etc), and elsewhere to determine who's watching what shows, then looking into their profiles to determine their interests. Aggregate that data, find what they all have mostly in common, and cater to those interests. It's just a more generalized and difficult process of the same thing, and eventually it's going to become more narrowed and specific to individual targets.

The difference is that if I don’t want to let anyone know that I watch My Little Pony... I don’t have to! There’s no little black box connected to my TV that tells an advertiser that I’m watching it without asking me.

I can also have a discussion with my friends about My Little Pony and how amazing the last episode was without an algorithm picking that up, unless I publish it to the world or explicitly send it to the advertiser.

I understand your point, and I agree that it's easier to keep your television viewing habits hidden from your internet viewing habits, for obvious reasons, but I'm just pointing out that there are still ways to aggregate data to the point where they are able to determine, with significant accuracy, which ads are the most effective based on demographics, locality, cross-referencing social media, web traffic, consumer surveys, department store sales information, and probably tons of other details.

They benefit when they use valuable services for free, which is paid by targeted ads.