Targeting

 Not a year has passed since my last post, and here I am again, dear 0 readers!

Anyway:

I must be living under the rock, because I just today learned about Google's plans for a more privacy-preserving replacement for cookies. (If you share my cluelessness, here is a brief article in New Scientist I learned about it from.)

I am of a kind of two minds about this whole privacy thing. Naturally, I would like for strangers to know about me only what I choose to share (like here). OTOH, now that most content worth one's time (and all that isn't) is ad-supported, I would prefer being shown relevant ads, perhaps even remotely useful.

But let's take a look at the current state of "they know everything about you" affairs:

• Google knows where I have been, which stores, restaurants and cafes I frequent, and whatnot, because I have many of their apps on my phone, use Google maps and Waze regularly, and have allowed collection of my position data. I even often comment on, say, a restaurant I visited when Google prompts me to.
  My choice. Now, if I disabled this tracking, I have no way to know would Google actually cease data collection, or just hide it. Ah, well...
• I usually use Chrome (a choice I am reconsidering, because it has become a real resource hog; then again, it might have something to do with the fact that a kitchen sink is the only extension I failed to install.
  I do use Edge now and then, though. It shows, by default, a "home page" with, umm, let's call them generously "news". Of course, articles are intermixed with ads. However, almost all "infomercials" are about mortgage and other loan refinancing and various "spectacular" credit cards, all, of course, American. How "deep demographic information" is needed to figure out that, as a European, I have zero interest in those and will very positively never click on them?!?
  Or adds worded like "<Product XYZ> is taking Croatia (or Zagreb, or some village near Zagreb that geolocation service mistook for my address) by a storm!". If it is for something I find mildly interesting, like a small drone, I might actually click, only to find out that the product is not available here. How difficult is it to compare the location you insert into your ad with the list of territories you have actual presence ?!?
• When I visit some webshop for the first time and actually buy something, I am bombarded for the next week or so with ads for that same store! People, I have just been there; I formed my opinion, favorable or not, and probably, if the experience was good, have even bookmarked you. You will not drive further sales by bugging me; your ad money is wasted this way.
  I can recall exactly one occasion where I got targeted with ads for some other store selling similar goods, which does make sense.

So, in conclusion, either the data collected on us is far less comprehensive than popular press and privacy advocates would have us believe, or, more probably, the users of that information, at least visible ones, are totally clueless. 

The question remains what are other possible users, those that keep low profile, doing with all they know about us.