https://www.bloomberg.com/businessweekDissect how such systems work, and it’s easy to be outraged. When you load a website, it sends a series of requests to other web domains to auction your eyeballs to the highest bidders. The number of intermediaries involved changes with every page load, but on a recent visit, the homepage for one popular U.S.-based news site sent 20 requests to 10 ad exchanges, each of which likely offered the space to hundreds of advertisers. It also set 47 cookies with unique tracking IDs, many of which log user data such as location, gender, age, and likes and dislikes based on browsing behavior. These data give advertisers a sense of how valuable you might be as a customer, and therefore how much to bid to show you an ad. When one of the advertisers wins the auction, an ad appears on your screen. The whole process takes less than a tenth of a second
Don't know about you, but I think it's very important to combat this silent erosion of privacy and human dignity. One weapon is ad blockers; maybe there are other things as well. Tech gurus: tell me about ad blockers and other protective tech, how they work, and which ones are the best ones for fighting back.