I would love to know from the rest here - isn’t a solution to the ad creep just… not buying things? Like going for second hand / refurbished, avoiding big brands for food and drink, and just not shopping online (ffs)? Or am I being naive? Enlighten me!
Of course working under the assumption that the government cannot (yet) admit to tracking us for more sinister purposes. That’s a problem for another day.
Buying second hand is only working up to a point is not sustainable if larger parts of the population did it. It also doesn’t magically solve issues with the items themselves, like smart TVs or cars (ffs?!?!) tracking you. I’m not sure how easy it is to find working, second hand dumb TVs nowadays.
There are two issues with ads: ad display (manipulation) and tracking (privacy invasion). You can easily get rid of the first problem, for the most part. The second one is to some degree also handled by ad blockers, but is to some degree very hard to completely escape. Not buying things new won’t automatically stop of tracking.
You don’t have to buy damp tvs. You just have to not connect smart tvs to the internet