Online advertising can be worth an awful lot. The ability to serve targeted ads is the engine of Google's financial juggernaut, and still responsible for almost all of its revenue. It's also what is driving Facebook's rumored IPO, which reports suggest see the company valued at $100 billion. Online ad spend in 2012 is expected to be $39.5 billion in the U.S. alone. I don't know about you, but that sounds like a big deal.
But targeted advertising is also, by and large, terrible. Just take a look at Google's recent attempt to be transparent by showing you its ad preference manager, which seems to think everybody who uses it is a middle-aged man working in the technology industry....
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