system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Websites that "track" your browsing and viewing data and provide ad's in accordance to what you view don't hurt anyone, and the backlash against them are largely in part to people not understanding how they work.

Oh boy, so this is gonna a doozy. Let me try to explain this the best I can. 

Online ad's work in a variety of ways. The most common of which is understood by the general populous is that search engines like Google "pay attention" to what you browse and display ad's according to such. So if you spend lots of time browsing about cats, naturally you're going to get lots of ads about cats and cat related products. 

I've always failed to see why this is such a problem. Every website, including Reddit, does this, and it doesn't even have to be ad related. Anytime you go on to any website, it pays attention to what you're viewing. The goal of any website is to make revenue, that's how websites stay operating. 

The main two ways any website is going to generate revenue is by keeping lots of traffic, and by letting third party companies keep advertisements on their website. The more the ads appeal to you, the user, the more likely you'll be to check out whatever product it's trying to sell you. 

The way this typically works on a website like Google, is that some type of bot is paying attention to frequently visited sites and frequent key words searched. All it does after that is assign the ad it thinks has the best chance of getting you to click. 

It's not a person sifting through your data and spying on you. Do they access to it? Sure, but it's the same misconception that arises when talking about privacy in regards to something like the CIA or FBI. They have access to it, but what they do with it is largely blown out of proportion. 

At the end of the day, who cares? It doesn't effect me in any way that my online viewing habits are monitored by some program or neural network in order to gain more revenue. I genuinely just don't understand why people get so worked up over it, and really privacy in general and I'd like to see someone explain why there's this compulsive "need" to have 100% private online experience. Thanks.
gpt
It's less that ads are especially tailored to you, but the precedent that it sets that collecting your data is "just an okay thing to do".  
How would you feel if a camera in a supermarket tracks you, creates a profile for you and sends you coupons according to that? It doesn't help that "no real human will see your data", the mere fact that data is collected everywhere as a thing that just "happens" is worrysome in and of itself.  

I mean, maybe Google just uses it to present me ads, but just because there is not malicious use of the data today (asuming there isn't) doesn't mean that there won't be in the future. Allowing companies to collect data "just for this innocent purpose" also means that they have the data, no matter what they will end up doing with it.  
Giving it to Goverment agencies when requested? Happened before, will happen again. And maybe you have faith in the goverment and that it will not abuse its power that way (Which it already has, multiple times) but the "They are not doing anything harmful with it" argument doesn't really hold water. The question for allowing such a practice should never be "Are they doing something bad with it?" but always "What is the worst you can do with this?" and the answer for creating profiles that are build upon your entire online history (Which is basically everything for many people today) is that you can to a lot with this data.