Privacy Badger is a free browser extension made by EFF to stop spying

Contextual vs. Personalized Ads

• One side argues for “context-sensitive” ads tied to current content (e.g., car ads on car videos) as more logical, less creepy, and often more relevant than history-based targeting.
• Others say contextual signals alone are weak (e.g., watching TV-repair videos for entertainment), and that combining context with user profiles and past behavior yields higher ROI.
• Several commenters note that in many product categories, the best predictor of the next purchase is a recent related purchase or interest, so retargeting can be rational even if it feels dumb to individuals.

Do Personalized Ads Actually Work?

• Multiple participants with ad-tech experience insist behavioral ads are measurably more effective (higher conversion/ROI) and that huge budgets and constant A/B testing would quickly kill ineffective approaches.
• Skeptics cite academic work and structural incentives: metrics can be biased to make ad products look good; attribution is murky; and some spend may chiefly “move” sales timing or steal credit from organic discovery.
• There’s recognition that even if effect sizes are smaller than claimed, they are not zero, and this strengthens, rather than weakens, the privacy argument against tracking.

Economic and Social Costs of the Ad Ecosystem

• Example: in home-cleaning services, a large share of the fee goes to Google ads and intermediaries, not the worker; commenters call this a “Google tax” and part of a broader rent-extracting middleman economy.
• Debate over whether advertising primarily reallocates customers among similar providers or genuinely helps discovery, and whether high marketing costs crowd out local relationships and word-of-mouth.

Attitudes Toward Ads

• Many users object more to UX harms (interruptions, clutter, bandwidth, mobile misery) than to tracking per se.
• YouTube’s non-contextual, intrusive mid-rolls are a frequent complaint; some advocate Premium + tools like SponsorBlock, others reject paying due to broader platform issues.

Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, and Browser Features

• Privacy Badger is framed as a tracker detector/learner (per-host allow / cookie-only / block), complementary to list-based blockers like uBlock Origin.
• Some see it as redundant on hardened Firefox + uBO setups; others value unique features (automatic learning, link rewriting, click-to-activate widgets, upcoming cookie-banner auto-reject).
• There’s a side debate about whether additional extensions increase fingerprintability versus clearly improving privacy from third-party trackers.