But her distaste goes well beyond a convoluted chart; at heart, she believes that, for all of the privacy invading and data-sucking, the advertising technology isn’t all that good at doing what it’s supposed to do: help companies understand their customers.

“As marketers we now have access to our customers in every nook and cranny of their lives. But with more layers of technology between us, we have less insight on what makes them tick,” she said. “Algorithms cobble together ads based on "optimization," instead of creative teams dreaming them up based on human insight. We're told that all that data is making ads "more relevant" but consumers find our ads annoying and their use of ad blockers is at an all-time high.”

I’ve argued that we’re in the early stages of a broader privacy reckoning and I think Macpherson’s story gets at an underlying frustration when it comes to online ads, platforms and privacy: It all feels deeply unhuman.

Macpherson argues that human behavior is complex and that data mining is, despite its insights, still a brute-force tactic. “Desire and motivation are influenced by many factors that require context and conversation in order to decode,” she told me. “The data shows what people do (and even what they will do), but not why they do it.”

It’s a powerful notion, and I think it’s behind our dissatisfaction with so much of the technology we use. Even those of us who’re willing to make the trade-off of our personal information for more tailored, targeted services can take offense at the way in which we’re being algorithmically nudged toward outcomes and then brazenly told it’s what we want.