We have been arguing about political advertising on social media ad nauseam recently. Should it be regulated? Is Twitter right to ban political ads from its platform? Is Facebook wrong to refuse to factcheck political messaging? Is it possible to have free and fair elections when social media allows for the mass dissemination of misleading information and the micro-targeting of propaganda?

Such discussions are obviously necessary. But we should not miss the wood for the trees. It isn’t just highly targeted political advertising that is threatening our democracy, it’s highly targeted advertising full stop. As David Heinemeier Hansson, the founder of programming language Ruby on Rails, recently tweeted: “The debate over targeted political advertisement [sic] keeps dancing tantalisingly close to the eventual conclusion: NO ADVERTISEMENT SHOULD BE TARGETED ON PERSONAL INFORMATION!”

Hear, hear! The advertising industry (in which I have worked for many years) takes it for granted that the more an ad is targeted the better. It’s better for the consumer because, instead of seeing irrelevant products, they get something they are interested in – backpacks not hatchbacks. It’s better for the brand because it optimises its media spend. This is gospel. If you tried to argue that you should ignore the wealth of personal data at your fingertips and go back to simple context-centric targeting – putting ads for cars, for example, on car-related websites rather than targeting individual car enthusiasts – you would be laughed out of the building.

But personalised adverts are not better for anyone. They have turned the internet into a surveillance nightmare. The fact that marketers are able to serve me ads for yoga mats the moment after I’ve booked a yoga class is not worth trading my privacy for. It’s not worth being stalked online by a yoga mat I once clicked on. It’s not worth having my every move analysed by a million activity trackers. It’s not worth having my phone battery drained by the data-guzzling ads that render many parts of the internet borderline unnavigable.

We need to crack down on the use of personal information for all targeted advertising

And it’s unclear how effective personalised ads are. The digital advertising ecosystem is riddled with fraud and there is very little transparency around where online ad revenue goes. Facebook is reportedly about to pay millions in a settlement after inflating its video viewership metrics. And Comscore, one of the main firms responsible for measuring digital advertising success, was recently charged with falsely reporting its revenue and misreporting customer numbers. It did not admit any wrongdoing but settled the case for $5m (£3.8m). Last year, Procter & Gamble cut its digital advertising spend by more than $200m after finding much of it had been a waste. The New York Times found that when it stopped behavioural targeting in Europe (a move prompted by the introduction of GDPR privacy regulation), there was no drop in its advertising revenue. Our privacy has been traded away, it would seem, for a lot of hype.

I’ll tell you what’s not hype or exaggeration, however. The fact that targeted advertising, along with the digital economy’s reliance on advertising-based business models, is one of the most destructive trends in the modern world. It has led to a proliferation of fake news and clickbait. It has fuelled surveillance capitalism and normalised pervasive tracking and data-mining. If we want to do something about the proliferation of misinformation and erosion of trust in traditional institutions, it is not enough to regulate or factcheck political adverts. We need to crack down on the use of personal information for all targeted advertising. Otherwise democracy will continue to erode, one highly optimised click at a time.