Tech Buzzwords

It's how traditional advertising works. Advertisers place ads based on audience-level profiles of users, not individual-level profiles of users.

The audience-level profiles either come from common sense ("I bet people commuting to midtown east have lots of disposable income to spend on vacations") or based on surveys ("audience research").

Contextual advertising is strictly less creepy than behavioral advertising. The ads will not be targeted based on any data about the person viewing the ads.

The business model of the internet search engine DuckDuckGo, which sells ads based on your search terms and not any other data about you.

Part of the business model of internet search engine Google, which continues to sell ads based on your search terms, but also stores your browsing history to power non-search behavioral ads across the entire internet.

“DuckDuckGo is very much a poster child for a future in which companies stand with their users and still make money,” said Gennie Gebhart, a researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on privacy and online rights. “They counter the assumption that we’ve all been socialized to accept: that it is normal to hand over all your information. DuckDuckGo shows that doesn’t have to be the way.” (source)