Again the type of people who probably visit communities like this know that. If the profile is accurate and they know that these people are more resistant to these kinds of tactics. Isn’t just a waste of money to bid on showing that person an ad in the first place. I personally don’t even connect my tv to the internet and I run linux, so I doubt either of said devices are talking to anything. Ads outside that someone play your favorite song would need to build a profile on you on your digital devices and then somehow correlate that to you the individual when you go into stores.

I know you said you don’t think are all the way there, but without getting facial recognition involved. I don’t see how they would correlate the two in the first place. Even then there are still holes, but that is besides the point. My main point is that someone whom meets the criteria that I described in my first comment seems like a waste on money to advertise to if you are one of the advertisers who are bidding on these spots.

Why is it that if they have this information and build these supposedly accurate profiles about you that they would still be willing to show ads at all to the kind of people who are likely to frequent this community? For example, if someone who runs linux, adblockers, firefox with strict profile, etc, etc is being broadcast to these advertisers. Why would they want to bid for advertising space for that person at all?

• Phone numbers
• social security numbers

Stop making personal information into digital ids because when it inevitably ends up in some kind of data breach. These companies all throw their hands up saying sucks to be you.

Honestly, I don’t even believe these articles. At some point it just starts to sound like they are making things up.