By doing something good, do you mean buying a pile of synthesizers and vintage computers and gardening tools? Asking for a friend :-)
But seriously, I think there's a big difference between ad-tech in the strict sense of pre-"social media" ad tech and ad-tech now. When I was doing it, behavioural targeting was just getting started. One of the startups I worked at was trying to get knee deep into it (pretty incompetently, IMHO), but overall it was still "here's a stream of mostly undifferentiated impressions/bid-requests/clicks" and that was that...
Overall, it was hard to make a strong moral judgement at that point. Ads paid for the Internet as we knew it and most publishers could not survive without it.
But after about the Facebook IPO, we're talking about a very different thing, one that gets more much more morally grey-area, and sometimes outright just evil.
If the thing you're working on ends up with pushing even just one teenage girl into an eating disorder... How do you feel now about it now, even if you dumped your earnings into charity?
But seriously, I think there's a big difference between ad-tech in the strict sense of pre-"social media" ad tech and ad-tech now. When I was doing it, behavioural targeting was just getting started. One of the startups I worked at was trying to get knee deep into it (pretty incompetently, IMHO), but overall it was still "here's a stream of mostly undifferentiated impressions/bid-requests/clicks" and that was that...
Overall, it was hard to make a strong moral judgement at that point. Ads paid for the Internet as we knew it and most publishers could not survive without it.
But after about the Facebook IPO, we're talking about a very different thing, one that gets more much more morally grey-area, and sometimes outright just evil.
If the thing you're working on ends up with pushing even just one teenage girl into an eating disorder... How do you feel now about it now, even if you dumped your earnings into charity?