"Personalized" ads can actually be kind of nice. I like seeing ads that are for things I care about, instead of for things that "people who visit this site" care about.
There's hazards, it's true, but I feel like I have seen the future where ads are helpful and don't feel like ads as we have come to know them, and I like it.
Personalised ads show what I just bought or viewed and never will buy as I bought something else. Non-personalized ads shouldn't show things what other people bought but it should show me things about the current page content or or the site topic. Show me pictures with links to amazon books about the programming language the article is about, etc.
I know a lot of (startup) companies are in that market and try to be helpful by big data grinding. But neither Google ads, nor any other personalised ads were useful at all to me. Ads that follow me around just because I visited a site two times is just very creepy and "forces" users to investigate how to block ads in the first place. If you work on a ads network please pivot to a "better ads" that allow website owners to install the ads service on their website - this is the only solution that will work despite an adblocker! So write an ad network in Go/Rust, be it a single executable, and website owners can simply add it to their website.
Only the information on Amazon.com below the product page that shows what other people who bought this product also bought works.
Like the Amazon suggestions system that after buying one bicycle pump tries to sell me more of the same because obviously collecting bicycle pumps is a hobby of mine. Exchange bicycle pump with vibrator for an even less welcome example.
Even worse: the social graph mining derived suggestion systems that recommend wares based on the bad taste of my friends instead of my bad taste.
There's hazards, it's true, but I feel like I have seen the future where ads are helpful and don't feel like ads as we have come to know them, and I like it.