I hate how I recieve ads on my Iphone just seconds after an internet search or get an email from netflix suggesting a specific movie after watching somd flick outside my usual genre.
To screw up “their” database accuracy, I suggest all internet users diligently but randomly but multiple times visit at least 3 sites totally out of their demographic-age, race, religion, interests! HA! Just do you everytime you get in a bad or sad mood. Carhartic and a community service. If enough folks do this Random but dilgent sabotage could work! So today I’m a 60’s relic, college educated Orthodox Jew into monster trucks, old cars, french provincial furniture, push up bras, dwell magazine and hello kitty!
The idea in itself is good. I have seen discussions about these strategies a number of times on Hacker News. Polluting your profile data would decrease its value for advertising purposes.
But it requires a lot of discipline to keep it up, and would only be effective if done at a massive scale. Currently the big ad-tech companies, such as Google and Facebook do not really care about this. They will just put you in an Orthodox Jew targeting group and sell that to advertisers that are interested in that. The advertiser doesn’t really know you don’t belong there, and pays anyway. You’ll get to see the corresponding ads.
However, there is a growing discussion among marketeers about the effectiveness of the targeting products they buy with their marketing budgets. They are seeing that they may be fooled and their ads get very low conversion rates or click-throughs.
It is a shady market, with lotsa competition and trickery, new innovative ad-tech and marketeers looking for alternative marketing methods, that are then supported by new automated at-tech systems, etc.